December Atlantic

I surfed last Thursday, December 3rd at Martin Street with 3 young teachers I work with at First Flight High School. In the water at 4:30 p.m. after battling a torrent of distractions and then hurriedly fighting my way into my wetsuit---a full 3-2 O'Neill Psycho with boots and gloves. The fighting only seems to occur when I'm in a rush---this time racing a falling sun. Water and air about the same at 57 degrees. I saw an extremely south head-high swell with fierce angle and long open lines of brown water when I topped the dune boardwalk. This is the sand bottom stirred up to the surface. It has that winter water look we know so well here. Right-hand tubes peeled and spit out a sideways spike of spray vapor maybe 15 feet as waves rolled over themselves, paced up over a shallow bar.

I tapped a few nice rights on my old (1982) 7'2" Sunset single fin---so fine. I hadn't felt this kind of ride in 26 years. The current was ripping from south to north at 7 or 8 knots. It felt like a conveyor belt grinding up the coast, riding it from sandbar to bar until the next set came through. All aboard! Ride a long right back to the beach, trudge back up on the beach out of the wash and stroll south. Paddle out again and repeat.

I left the water at last when I could no longer make out the contours of the wave face. I knew this when I took off on a big right closeout and had to pull out, straighten up, and bag it all.

Three of us, including one female art teacher who knows how to ride a wave, walked together up the sloped, soft sand beach back over the dune to our vehicles. I left the water that evening having caught only a few waves. I was content. The sun finally fell into a pool of rouge and maize.

I realized it doesn't take as much for me to reach satisfaction as it used to when I first rode this surfboard so long ago. My appetite for waves was insatiable then. But the measure of stoke now is just the same with far fewer waves caught. The joy in it must never have been in the quantity like so many things in this world. Or have my expectations only adjusted to my age and physical limitations? I really don't care what the answer is. I had these questions to consider nonetheless. You can't let them go unnoticed. Surfing does that to you. It makes you consider its joyful pursuit, its fleeting nature, your inability to own it as only yours. Yet it can give itself to you so completely or, crush and spit you out sending you home master of nothing. But we still go back over and again.

Thanks for reading. Get waves...on whatever you like to ride.