Baptism, Part 2

(Editor's Note: Part 1 was published on this blog yesterday, Dec. 8th)

It was almost first light---Steve and me, fall 1970, "Road's End", Buxton, North Carolina---one eight of a mile south of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse. "Road's End" was our name for a parking lot behind a huge oceanfront dune. A state highway sign had given us the name. It said: "Road Ends 3/10 mile".

This was one of our favorite spots featuring a great sandbar. The sandbar was fed by the erosion of the huge dune before it during the winter. You got there by turning left off Route 12 at the entrance to the National Seashore at Cape Point. You followed the road around a lily pad-covered freshwater pond to an intersection of two-lane paved roads: left went to the lighthouse and keeper's quarters, right to the campground, straight led to Road's End.

There was a slow-moving tropical storm several hundred miles offshore---an east coast wave machine. We thought it would be pretty big so we wanted to get there and get out before everybody else. We had no idea what was waiting over the dune.

It could be heard long before it could be seen. We climbed over the dune and looked at it, spread before us, vast and deafening. It was huge by anyone's standards---even the surf flicks. We felt small. We were eighteen years apiece. One guy was already out, a mere dot on the outside, maybe three sandbars out or more. Sunlight was fingering through the clouds lying heavy on the horizon. These were the biggest real waves we had ever seen. Nothing before was even close.

We waxed our boards. My heart beats were so close and fast it felt like there was a humming motor in my chest. The rich, pungent smell of salt air and sea life alive and formerly living laid heavy in the mist sprayed into the air by the surf. It gave us some comfort as it always did. We were already trained to associate that smell with the pure joy of wave riding.

There was no hesitation whether to go out. Our moment was here. We did have to time our sprints through the shorebreak (the waves breaking right on the beach) in order to get off the beach. It was quite large, 5-7 feet, thick overhead, and seemed to suck all the water off the beach as it reeled back and up before slamming the wet sand before it. I watched and waited and watched and waited some more. Then in an instant went straight out from where we were. Steve walked about 200 yards to the south where he thought he could paddle out faster in a rip (riptide). I always admired his independent way of taking on a good challenge. Surely we had one now. I also always coveted Steve's longer arms for better paddling. Steve stood about 6'2" and 160 pounds. I was smaller, about 5'11" and 145 pounds.

Rips are out-flowing channels of water whose flow seaward from inside the surf near the beach often cause a kind of slot in the waves where the waves aren't breaking as large or often. They can be easier places to paddle out, but can be fickle and sometimes undependable. They can also be a swimmer's nightmare, but for a surfer trying to get over the sandbar to the lineup, a best friend. At this time we were surfing before the widespread use of the surf leash. So having no leashes, we were surfers until we lost our boards when it became necessary to be a swimmer. We kept our eyes on surface conditions so that we would know where the riptides were at all times.

Riptides are caused by large waves carrying lots of water across the sandbars at low tide. The extra large amount of water floods in against the beach, forms a current between the sandbar and the beach, and flows parallel to the beach until it finds a deeper cut or a gap in the sandbars which let it back out to sea. In the meantime, more large waves ram even more water over the bars behind it.

Sometimes waves will cross the bar and crash face-to-face against waves rebounding off the beach causing backwash. A real wildcard situation if you are riding a wave in and your wave collides with a backwash wave. Surfers usually go airborne when that happens. Most of the time it's great fun to get tossed up and off a wave face like this. You really must give yourself up to the circumstances, I suppose. The ocean's a good teacher that way.

My board was a 7-2 (7'2" long) scarlet red Harbour, 19" wide, shaped by Randy Rarick---and of course, a single fin. We had no surf leashes, as I noted earlier, and would count on our ability to swim or our buddy if we were separated from our boards and in trouble.

To paddle out through large waves with boards like these, when confronted with a wave about to break on you or a rolling wall of whitewater about 5 to 6 feet thick, you grab your board's rails tightly and roll over upside down. This was called "turning turtle" during this era. Your board would now be bottom up at or near the water's surface, you beneath it, underwater waiting (not long) for the impact. When your beating was over (we'll talk more about the beating later), you would roll over almost weightless in bubbling whitewater afterwash, dragging you back toward the beach, and continue paddling in a sprint over the sandbar where the waves are breaking---the "impact zone". If your timing is unlucky, you can be pinned down over the bar while being hammered repeatedly by all the waves in the set. At the end of this punishment you are often just outside the shorebreak where you began.

Waves or ground swells, coming from a far off source like a tropical depression, storm, or hurricane (the best wave makers on our coast), travel to the beach in sets of waves of 3-4-5 or more, each with a signature amount of time between waves, time between sets, and size. How close the tropical system is to the beach, how fast it is moving, how low its atmospheric pressure is, and which direction it is moving, influence the wave quality followed by local influences at the beach itself, for instance wind speed and direction and, of course, the tide.

East coast surfers, like all surfers. know there are a multitude of conditions which must align before the surf gets really good. The hardcore surfers are always watching the weather forecasts, especially the marine wind forecasts and tides, and checking the actual conditions at the beach regularly during the day they expect the swell to hit. The anticipation in the surf community with the approach of one of these storms offshore is difficult to accurately capture in print. Anyone with work obligations is killing themselves to get things in place so they can surf when the swell hits. The excitement explodes when swells line up, stacked to the horizon, pressing toward an offshore wind.

Okay. We're paddling out.

When paddling out in surf like this, there is usually a relatively calmer area between the shore break and the waves breaking over the first sandbar. The first real proof of close proximity to the impact zone are rolling walls of foaming whitewater which come one after the other almost appearing to be stacked up in layers. As you get into the thick of this you instinctively paddle harder and faster, arm muscles burning, shoulders, back, and down to your toes, all lit up. Paddle, paddle, turn turtle, flip back over---paddle, paddle, paddle, turn turtle, flip back over, again and again, and again until you reach the point of futility and total muscle exhaustion. You always hope to make it through the exact place where the monsters slam the surface water over the sandbar without taking direct hits. Sometimes you're unlucky. Direct hits are punishing to the body and psyche. They break surfboards. Most surfers who have surfed in fairly large waves or larger, have depressions in their boards where their fingertips have crushed into the fiberglass when gripping their boards tightly while paddling out.

Eventually we both made it outside to the relative safety just beyond the place where the most waves seemed to be breaking over the second or third sandbar out. We were hundreds of yards apart by the time we got outside. The other guy we had seen in the water alone was farther out than us. It wasn't clear why he was so far outside. We three were the only ones out.

When the surf is this big, 15-foot wave faces and up, it is especially eerie to the average surfer to sit alone outside picking and choosing the right wave to ride. We didn't think so at the time, but we were average surfers I suppose. It's the sport itself that has a way of making you feel special as athletes and sportsmen.

It's extra difficult to position yourself near the breaking peak of a large wave (the optimum place to take off) when it breaks over a sand bottom because the bottom gets so stirred up as to become semi-liquid a few feet or more from the bottom, with huge quantities of sand suspended in the ocean water. This often makes the shape of the breaking waves less defined and consistent, and more or less uniform than the preceding wave. The peak shifts along the wave face until the wave breaks, unlike waves breaking over rock or reef in other parts of the world. Here waves break a lot closer to the same place time and again.

We were nervous. There were few waves breaking consistently and ridable. The ocean was steel gray seeming to cast a sinister snarl, threatening these boys now in its grip. Steve had broken his nose after turning turtle under a huge wave and getting smacked by his board.

We could see a number of people gathered on the beach. A few were park rangers we discovered later. We didn't know it at the time, but a newlywed couple from Pennsylvania had drowned earlier at the lighthouse and the rangers weren't letting anyone else into the water, including other surfers. I guess they were mostly watching us and we weren't much to watch because we were already plotting our escape back to the beach.

Steve took off on his first big wave, a huge right. It was about 7-9 feet overhead and nasty as I watched him disappear out of sight as he dropped in. He made the drop, rode to the wave shoulder, kicked out, turned quickly around and paddled for his life back out of the impact zone over the sandbar. I picked out another big right, made a big drop in a crouch, made a conservative bottom turn, streaked down the line, and kicked up, up the wave face and out. The speed of it all was incomprehensible. I wasn't sure whether I was going to make it back out unpunished, but was just brushed by the whitewater of a few large ones on the way back outside.

We looked at each other and it was clear that the joy wasn't with us in these conditions. This swell was out of control. Many waves were unmake-able, meaning you really couldn't ride the wave face without having it break on you or ahead of you. In either case, the ride was shortened in these conditions and the risk of a catastrophic wipeout and swim to the beach were great. Surfers call these "closeout" conditions. The looming question now became: how are we going to get back to the beach through the shorebreak?

Now, paddling to the beach through the shorebreak racing to the beach from behind you is even more tricky than charging out through it from the beach. Sometimes, most of the time when it's big, you must sit just outside the breaking waves and wait for enough of a lull to get far enough toward the beach to get your feet down on the sand. You lift your board up above the water, shoulder high at your side, and slog/sprint to dry sand.

We did make it safely back to the beach. We met at the base of the big dune where we had begun, laid our boards down, and looked back at what we had just left behind. As I remember, there wasn't much heroic proclaiming or verbalizing about what this meant for us in terms of our surfing resumes.

I'm sure every surfer has a feeling of gratification at having faced his first huge swell, and answered the call. This first big swell had left its stamp on us. It was our baptism. I knew I had come closer than ever to realizing my physical limits. I suppose that is what some young men must need to know about themselves. I was one I now knew.