Playing Catch Up, Big Surf This Fall

The world keeps turning and time keeps carrying us all along whether we want to go or not. Time is the bus we all ride together. We're about to push into November. We've had a very good Fall surf season so far, marked by two huge northeast swells. Each was driven to our beaches by pressure gradients---high pressure systems tracking offshore north of us and low pressure systems rolling along their usual route right over us and into the ocean where both rub against each other, while spinning toward each other and working together to fire off a blistering northeast wind and huge swells.

The first of these swells we covered on the September 25th blog entry. The second occurred last weekend. The surfed was carved into clean lines by a soft westerly wind by last Tuesday morning. It offered hulking, A-frame peaks, double overhead with lots of lefts. There was happiness throughout the land as all Dare County's surf subjects played joyfully together on her coast.

By this morning the water temperature at many of the piers, the Duck Research Pier, Avalon Pier, Nags Head Pier and the Hatteras Island Pier all reported water in the low to mid sixties. That wouldn't be significant if this were late Summer or early Fall, but at this point it portends an unstoppable trend toward the painfully cold water of Winter. So we cling to every moment we get in a lesser wetsuit. We savor the flexibility and lightness of what we wear now in contrast to what we soon must wear to ride waves in the coming months.

Such is the changing of the seasons here. It's not in the leaves or even so much in the air. It's felt mostly by what you must wear in the water, and what a hot shower means to blood circulation and the euphoria we feel after a session, especially in an outside shower at home. There's nothing like it. It's our Outer Banks spa.

A Classic Fall Uncelebrated Swell

Chest to shoulder high, glassy bowls wrapped around the head of a riptide offering lefts and rights to good friends who don't know each other's names. This evening I savored these conditions between 5 and 6:30 p.m. mostly with other surfers I didn't even know.

The sun slowly descended behind some wood framed, multi-story, time share type buildings thankfully in silhouette. It was an eternity between sets, maybe even 15+ minutes. This time given let me notice the many colors on the ocean's surface---of course shades of gray, but yellows and greens with a boiling riptide perking wavelets through a wavy, mirrored surface.

I felt cradled in this atmosphere highlighted by the smiles of happy strangers now showing up in wetsuits. How truly wealthy can one soul be to have all this---clean, rideable waves in clean water with others under the same spell of wonder?