SURF REPORT

S U R F R E P O R T


By STEVE SPRINKEL


SURF REPORT # 1 (26 July09)

Surfed out, and backbad, courtesy of extreme headfirst bailout on a Nucklehead wall on Sunday. The Swell of the Summer’s swan song, but it was still energetic. On the bail, just after plunging into the sucking trough, the wave folded over and whipped my hips around in a quick el-snappo. Over the falls went I for further humiliation. I knew the gravity of my error shortly thereafter. Memo: If you want to surf some more of the easier combers when you are 61, lay off the suicide beachbreak drops on your 9’6” when its dredging. Just because the young (45s) crowd wants to charge it on their skateboards, tis no challenge for the formerly crippled to take up at such a late date.

Planted 2200 corn plants with Francisco. Forgot to bring long pants. 11 rows 200 feet long. After knee-crawling like a Virgin of Guacamole penitent on the clods, knees could bleed. Remembering the ancient turquoise longjohn Chris Engle gave me, I cut it up with a dull knife and made some swift neoprene kneepads. I pigsweat in the pads, which filled with mud, but my ego was nearly as pleased as my knees with the invention. We laid the drip in short order and were mighty gratified.


SURF REPORT # 2 ( 28July09):

No surf. Actually little to no surfing. We are on the road to San Francisco. Flat from San Diego to Santa Cruz, modest sneaker south on the western exposure, hitting creekmouths and sandbars above Davenport to Half Moon Bay. Remember Waddel. We’d ride it. An itty crew out near Montara.

SURF REPORT #3 ( 29JULY09)

Common data reveals little to no surf available. In San Francisco, doing lip glances off the hills from Cole Valley to Hays Valley, paddling back out through thick latte. Though they got some peaks here, these valleys should be called coves because of their modest dimensions. But calling a place Noe Valley is sort of smart and romantic, as if this place needs any more of both. Back at the shack in Ashbery Heights. I can see the straights through the fog from the Purcell’s west window. No whitewater gargling on the far rocks of Marin.

SURF REPORT #4 (1 August 09)

A man on SF Craigslist in Pacifica has a balsa longboard he is selling for $500. We trade info. It’s a hollow-type Balsa Flite from Skip Kozminski in Ecuador. I decide its not going to be my new board because my surf budget is dedicated to a new 4/3 for the winter. I call as a courtesy. He is not there, hopefully out surfing. The Georgia O’Keefe exhibit at the museum downtown rewrites her stature in the pantheon. She is showing with some Ansel Adams photos and a bit of same-period referential work by others. Afterward we cruise the Richard Avedon show ( Rogues Gallery of an evil time) and the permanent collection. Memo: Stop buying the Rauchenbergs and the Warhols. Those ideas are not worth the paint.

SURF REPORT#5 ( 2 August 09)

Driving down from SF, from Ocean Beach to Santa Cruz. We were looking for Auntie Trish’s rental deep in the Avenues and ran buy Mollusc, the fabled surfshop where Jeff and Tyler Manson once slept in the tower. O ran into inquire about Jeff. I drove around the neighborhood looking for parking. After ten minutes I came back to get her and hear her report. No Jeff, just some kids folding new Ts for sale. She told me breathlessly about the book she was reading in there about Bunker Spreckles. I knew Bunky when he was a mere grem, which usage should date that acquaintance properly. Bunker was my roommate at Webb Camp School in the San Juan Islands until he got kicked out for smoking cigarettes and mysteriously coming up with wine in his possession. The nearest store was half an hour away by car. We were fifteen. Bill Webb tried to deport Bunky, but his mom, Kay, was incognito in the South of France. Could not be reached. Traveling. So Buffalo Bill pitched a large Army tent out in a far field in order to sequester the miscreant millionaire. Bunky had figured that such brazen action would land him on a jet to Maui or La Jolla, but he had not figured his mom, who was as famous as most celebrities, could ditch him and go missing.

Just after Bunker started living in his tent I got caught up in a free-for-all and got one of my testicals smashed. The thing got as big as a grapefruit and eventually I moved out to the infirmary so the nurse could monitor my swelling and give me painkillers, which were adamantly required. The infirmary was the last building onsite, and just across the meadow from Camp Spreckles. In the evening, I remember reading The Old Man and The Sea and watching the shadows of various visitors painted on the walls of Bunker’s tent from across the meadow. Buffalo Bill’s punishment had backfired on him and he done built Bunky a den of iniquity.

Bunker had heard I was laid up and he snuck over one afternoon and talked with me through the screen. He was raring to be set free. Bunker made me show him my swollen ball, and he was really impressed. On my last day in the infirmary I hobbled bowlegged out to the tent to check on him. I felt sorry for him, marooned out there in the field. He was smoking a cigarette with another camper, who clumsily tried to hide his smoke. Bunker told him not to worry. I was cool.

I don’t believe I had ever been cool before. I had wanted to be cool, as most people yearn to be. But now that I had been defined by Bunky, who was entertaining and bore coolness in his sunburnt peeled nose, sunbleached hair, effecting beachy lingo, effortless cigarette huffing, I found my coolness repulsive. Bunky was already a sad case, a loser, adrift on a sea of money without the security of real affection.

I had some other coincidental moments with Bunker. I saw him on Ehukai Beach around the time he died. He overdosed, of course. He looked like a bloated barfly and was ranting like a stevedore, tossing his blonde mane around for full cinematic effect. His voice was unrecognizable from the 25 years that had intervened since our youth. I stepped up the beach as if to greet him, then turned and walked toward the parking lot. I had nothing to say. I had just gotten out of the water and did not want to dirty any part of me up.

Sometimes I say Sprinkel and people think they hear Spreckles. Sometimes I tell a story, sometimes I just say I am glad I am not.

Stunning conditions all the way down to Cruz. Not much swell, but a few sets especially at Montara and San Gregorio. Sunlit Tunitas is so charming but its normally blowing like hell, raining, or foggy with a sideshore piss wind. Waddel had some people out. Beaches curiously empty for such a beautiful Sunday afternoon.

SURF REPORT (3 August2009)

Barely breaking at Asilomar. The calm clarity of the day is revealed on satellite by the dry cut-off low spinning a few hundred miles to the west, keeping the fogbank in check.

Dallied at the Deer Haven Inn on Sinex, reading, writing. Wanted a Peete’s real bad, then ducked that chain-store for the East Village Café (498 Washington) which produces a fine cup o’chino. Tired pastry, but we are spoiled. Got another chino to go!

Up the 68 toward Salinas.Worked the Spreckles cutoff to 101, past the best farmland in the region. Yo, Bunky, you might have commanded all this farm instead of pissing it away with Dora at Impossibles. Its all the same, though, bro, I guess its all the same.

Spreckles, CA, 93962. California and Hawaii sugar ( C and H on the bag and box). Pioneered with sugar beets, now producing Tanimura’s lettuce and broccoli. We ran down through the Salinas Valley in full production. Huge teams of people harvesting into automated packing systems, probably twelve to fifteen people on a line. Promised ourselves to take the Jolon Road to Big Sur. Last Accomplished in 1971.

Pulled in at the Cal Poly SLO Organic Farm as they were just putting together their CSA. Chatted with Anastasia while she dandled her infant. They have done well and expanded.

Eating well in San Luis Obispo though is still untenable. We rummage our histories of medoicrity in the place and seize on a trip to provision at New Frontier aiming to picnic with Cesar in Pismo. We snare two heads of Romaine, a lemon, garlic, Parmesan, and some artisan organic bread named Provincio from Minneapolis. We were about to bag the old conventional standby from La Brea when O found the Provincio. $7.59 is an above average cost for superior value.

We are going with the price upgrades, and done with the fearful attitudes and cranky tone. Raise all the boats, and ignore the beurgeoise insistence to be cheap, aka affordable. Cheap benefits the mass producer. And this cheapness is draining the middle class down, as if they drink their own blood.

Rolling south past Avila, we spied a little beach access north of Pismo, in Shell beach and made our salad with anchovies from Boulets Larder with the impeccable Spanish Merola olive oil using the All Star organic smoked salt, all from the SaturdayFerry Farmers Market. We lazed on a comforter under the cypress and drank cold Per Bacco Pinot Grigio from De Palo’s store, ate the last of Golam’s dried persimmons from last fall and watched a southwest swell hit the little reef below while a personal water craft marred the silence with its querulous whine.

Everything south of there was flat until we got to Solimar. Justin and his friend were suiting up at Nuckles as we drove past.

We arrive at the Farmer and The Cook to discover further evidence of our drear un-professionalism. Its really too much to expect something like this to function because it is all done without design. Its like perpindicular sets of wheels on the same vehicle. One end thinks it making a turn, the other is still in the parking lot.