SURF REPORT 3107

25 August 2009


South swell moving up all day. Towards four piled into Otter’s van with DocterDave and Pisser. Greg’s pissed-really heartbroken, because yesterday he drove away from C Street without tying down his beloved Robert August soft top and when he pulled onto the 33 he realized that somewhere between the lot and freeway it had sailed off. He never found it.

Rode flat on my back next to the boards watching backwards as the hot Eucalyptus branches waved in the wind with my head next to Dave’s knee while Pisser and Dave made homojokes on my behalf. I was glazed and tired. Phaneuf installed windows somewhere in the harbor all day and would meet us at the point, which held a low tide and head high to overhead sets when we arrived. CDIP was 4.1 at 14 from the 195.

Wolfpacked a peak at Stables. Everyone gave the Silverbacks elbow room with all our bigboard yooha bravado. We were catching all the waves in that zone so the crowd cleared nicely. Consistent surf rolling through. I nearly sent Pisser to the dentist with an errant footslip on a takeoff. He said he had thoughtlessly paused to admire the view when the Rusty suddenly came hurtling beakwards. The lefts were happening. Otter got a lot of long rights. Dave struggled doggedly.

As we made an exit I began to pick my way over the rocks toward shore and noted a woman combing her hair, appraising me as I tiptoed through the sand and boulders. Every time I took my eyes off the rocks she was still looking. I waited for Otter a minute then started back up the slippery stones. She cast further admiring looks while braiding her hair as she sat on the hood of her beefy black SUV and I rock stepped up to the embankment. As I stood up on the shelf I observed that it was the same woman who had snaked me two days previously.

“ What now?” I said to myself. “ She likes me?”

It was impossible to not give her a little wave when she kept beaming at me, though I felt like meat. “ What the hell?”

I caught Pisser by the elbow and told him about the woman. He gives a gander.

“ Hey, she’s cute,” he says.

Yellow police tape was strewn across the frontage road. Pisser said a guy had told him a woman had been struck in the road and killed. Her dog still lay dead on the pavement with the orange evening sun warming its lifeless fur. The woman was one of the homeless folks that wander up from the river bottom and hang around the bathroom. A wind-blown, scraggly couple sat clutching one another on the opposite sidewalk. They seemed too young to be bums, but I know age is no bar to poverty. There must have been nine cops leaning on their doors or milling about, staring at the spot where the dead woman had once lay.

26 August

Picked the CSA load early. Francisco and I had picked beans and squash the previous day, so gathering the vegetables was fairly easy. Had a good crew picking. Picked some nice melons and ate a bunch in the field. Ditched the FORAGER newsletter and rode down with Phaneuf to Knuckles. CDIP is going 3.0 from the 170 at 14 seconds from the south. Knuckies can probably be better but every element coalesced into satisfaction just short of perfection. Windless conditions on a rising tide near high with head high sets. Nailed a legitimate barrel going left- which was generally the only shoulder you could count on making. Phaneuf rode his little yellow flash. Crowd was minimal, with school back in session and summer on the wane.

Surfed again at Mondos in the afternoon on a lowering tide. Grace Buetti had been texting me about Mondos earlier, during the low tide. Said it was BIG! Grace was there with Belle, on Belle’s last day before going back to Colorado. Such earnestly dear young girls they are. Grace said she had misgivings about going out earlier. I said there was no need to prove anything.

Pisser showed up with Emilie. I wanted to run up to John and Mary’s to see if the waves I rode there in 1985 with Lee Gearhart were still breaking. Maybe Gearheart will still be up there on his little white diamond tail, scooting through on those hissing green walls from New Zealand. John and Greg decided to surf the Mondo’s shorebreak. Mondos reef looks like a scene from the Ventura County Fair: everyone’s here but the kids from Santa Paula with their show hogs.

There were waist high walls visible up toward Pitas. It was a long walk-not really that long but the longest walk to get to a surfspot this side of Sands Beach. The trek is so long people don’t want to make it. It takes ten to fifteen minutes. I would walk a lot farther to ride an empty sand-bottom point breaking shoulder high with not another soul within fifty yards of me. I passed two guys on longboards sitting on a clean little peak a hundred yards up from Mondos. They were barebacking it. When I got up to the Tudor House I paddled out. I was by myself . Gearheart had already gone in-twenty four years ago. He says he’s never surfed since he moved to New Mexico. He said the ocean was too crowded, too polluted. He was a good surfer. But there is no one out at John and Mary’s but me and there is ten to fifteen foot visibility in a lively sea with fish jumping and pelicans diving on them. The waves came at me and peaks broke here and then there, and closed out where earlier it had machined down the line. I took off into a weird looping bowl, made the drop, turned into a barrel and got hit in the head by the lip of the wave. As I tumbled backwards I began to remember that mussely rocks punctuate the Pitas bottom. I had seen none of them, so knew where none of them were. Perhaps I just missed getting a big mussel gash through the base of my skull. Rule Number Five: always land flat and protect your head from the rocks you can’t see.

I got five waves that all closed too quickly before me. If it had been beachbreak I would have been stoked to just get buried or make the takeoff, but it was the sand bottom of Pitas that can be on many days be so wonderfully walled and hollow, so the frustration was magnified by possibilities unattained merely because the swell was hitting straight from the south. The sun was going down. Instead of cruising down to Mondos I walked it. Pisser was going on about how he broke his board with his dick. There was no gyst to it until I saw he had delaminated the nose of the board he had borrowed from Otter. Greg had hit the rail with his pelvis just as both made contact with the sand on a Mondos sand whomper. He sat spread-legged in the sand, a pained but game look on his Jack of Spades face.

“ Not a good week for boards, man.”

“ No, but what hurts worse?”

“ Losing the Robert August, probably. Yeah, sure.”




27 August

Surfed. 105 degrees by one PM in the valley. Watered the nursery and motored to the coast, with John and Seed. Mondos was mushed but wet. I went out to the far reef and anchored in the eelgrass. A girl was surfing up there so I gave her all the room and waves she desired. There were few of them anyway. A ruddy guy in a handlebar mustache, maybe my age, which is 59, moves up on a long board and, observing the nose of the Rusty “ The World’s Longest Short Board” at 8’10”, he says: “ You’re not gonna catch anything on that thing.”

“ I guess I’ll do OK.” I reply. Thus challenged, by a man I can call Clancy O’Bannon, I scratch for every feeble comber that crawls my way and catch them all. I move left, go back to the right peak, looking for what’s not there. The best wave is a left. Phaneuf has called it quits early, and I am cooled off and ready to leave, so I ride one inside and then sit on the last bar, waiting. Clancy paddled up with a smug grin:

“ What’s the matter? Ya outta gas?”

In these circumstances I am never prepared to deal as dealt. Fonteyn or Phaneuf can reply so devastatingly to such insults so readily that they seem pre-primed. I suppose I had been forewarned by Clancy’s bucanneerist banter but I was so surprised at ridicule from an anonymous corner I was ill prepared. All I could say was “ Do you surf here all the time?’ Which obliquely might imply that Clancy was a bit of a buoy.

“ Yeah, this is my break. Where do you surf?” A fair question, since I had never seen Clumsy before. It allowed me enough time to discover some wit, even if subtle:

“ I guess I surf anywhere I want.”



28 August

Surfed. Swell surprisingly back up. Ojai was in full broil. Otterbein broke his board at Knuckleheads. Split the glass in the front third really, on one of those late drops. When I looked at it later it seemed like the foam was in tact, but a major deforming surgery would be required in order to re- launch. Otter has never cottoned to the Knuckle. You can tell from his tone of voice when we are making the where decision. I don’t think he even wants to go look at it because it will put Knuckleheads in play, but if the tide is high then its really the only call when the swell is small. And now his reluctance has borne out.

30 August

Did not surf the mysto swell. Picked over 2000 pounds of melons for the market and sundry boxes of beans and cucumbers on Saturday then got the store ready for Phaneuf’s birthday party. Delerium from the heat gave way to method. Watered up my beds of fall vegetables.

I knew the surf had to be something special because a 283 showed up and went 7.5. A northwest swell had been forecast, but not waves going nearly double overhead. Still, my inner Calvinist shouldered the mighty wheel of commerce. I spray the deck down to get rid of the food debris prior to the dinner rush, then head home to wash dust off myself.

Phaneuf shows up with pie plate eyeballs. He went to with nobody out and surfed til he could not paddle any more. There was also a 3.5 out of the south still but that 283 was the headline from Rincon to Oxnard Shores. Da-umn! Olivia made some really good birthday cakes. Francisco came to the party a little ripped. Sus Corez played with her band. Phaneuf diligently kept himself from bawling on about how tremendous the surf had been, but he gave himself away, walking around with a face like a puffer fish, holding something very, very big in check.

1 September 2009

Drove late with Pisser to low tide Knuckles breaking mostly from a west windswell and played tag with a truly Knucked-up crowd, including a huge, fries-eating specimen in a Fu Manchu who was probably an all-league down-lineman for the Nordhoff Rangers Championship team of 2003. He’s cruising around in the impact zone with swimfins and a boogie. I call him Nick Knuckles. He sort of sticks to me like an overly curious seal. Later his brother, Nobby, paddled out, all lobsterized and looking a bit beered up. I begin to slowly churn up the coast, chasing Pisser, who is now riding a nice big Huerta I bought from a neighbor for $250 a few years back, just to have a stash. Now he is enamored of the cruising power of the Huerta and the loss of his Robert August stings not so much.

Phaneuf shows, but he stays on the beach pitching the ball for Seed. He caught the swell earlier down at when things were perfect, so he doesn’t want to tarnish the tidy chunk of stoke he’s scored.

A bodysurfer bobbing near us keeps yelling at his two youngsters to:
WATCH OUT FOR THE SURFERS, BOYS!

But he’s facing us while howling out a warning. The kids are in the white water inside, blissing around. So he is effectively telling US to WATCH OUT FOR THE KIDS INSIDE!

I paddle on towards Trader Joes. I take Pisser’s heap home so he and John may continue dialoguing. I need to fire my sprinklers up. Its been another bake-off in Mira Monte. Hodge says it was 109 at his house.

2 September

Swell mighty diminished but I bring my gear to Oxnard anyway while I am picking up boxes at Calpine. I want to put all my onions and shallots in good storage for the fall. Phaneuf is going to head for a paddle in the harbor, but has nothing else going so we convene at Shores to observe a very nice day to go water skiing in the Santa Barbara Channel.

He is sure that will have waves. We arrive and there are waves. There is one guy out and its good enough for forty. It’s the first time I have ever surfed and it’s a daunting. The breaks at are sort of a steroidal Knuckleheads. The waves come right out of deep water, then leap on a bar and pitch. I whet my buds on a few small crashers, then go for the blue, and get pounded. Memo: need a shorter board for some of this daring-do. Ever the Mayor, Phaneuf chats up more of his many acquaintances. He used to live here, for 11 years, 37 steps to the edge of the water. Phaneuf is very conscious of his food intakes. He cannot qualify as a true food freak, ala ortholexia standards. He merely eats fruits and vegetables. A rather silent semi-vegan. Many of his friends, like Ed, who paddles out for a little late wall chasing, are also becoming more food conscious. John and Ed talk about nuts in smoothies and such, and when John mentions to Ed that I own a health food store, Ed takes notice. If Ed only knew I had wolfed half a Subway Italian special on the way over, and generally have very little control over my own ortho, he may not have had such a genuflective reaction.

3 September 2009
I have four full days left before I go to Hawaii so I gotta make the time count. Every procrastination is an immediacy. The list in my head is longer than any list I can write. We make short work of he CSA boxes, casually grind and then I retreat to do accounting chores at my desk. I have sworn an oath to not let the ocean tempt me. I won’t even look at CDIP, so firm is my resolve.

There’s a text bugle. I don’t know if I want to look at it, but I have to. It’s Phaneuf. “ Take a look at the cam,” he says. I look. C Street is running shoulder high on glass with plenty of waves from the steep south. Looks as delicious as a big slice of cold watermelon. CDIP does not confirm anything but a steep angled swell at nine seconds from the 155. Jimena’s last little gyration just west of Cape Vizcaino has spun a swell at us. It’s out of my hands now. We are going to Pitas. Its 97 degrees again, as for an alibi. John paddled Pitas the day before and ran into waist high sets on the Tudor Bar. Some teenage bikini girls were frolicking in an all time go-out. He even rode it on his paddle racer. My gear is elsewhere. I don’t even know where my wetsuit box is. Olivia walks in coincidentally with an old spring suit she found on a shelf outside. An omen for good. I probably left it there four years ago. Phaneuf swings by my house to pick up the Yater.

Mondos is still, bright and hot. “ One bad thing about your box is that we don’t have any sunblock.”

I know I will toast. “ Maybe one of these kind souls can share some of theirs.”

No one would deny Phaneuf a favor. Its like they know intuitively that The Mayor will repay them, or send a deputy to do so. A nice little surf family has a big bottle of the good stuff, and we get our squeezes. Their little boy says that Seed is a good dog and runs his little hands through his hot fur. He’s right about that. And crazy to fetch.

The tide at Pitas is dropping. We run into Rich McGrath on the beach; he’ll come out later on his ski. He says he’s been watching it all day. Pisser is coming too. He doesn’t need much prodding. Ojai is still on a spit. Little lines are sweeping in from the Tudor bar. It’s not more than waist high, but it’s ineffably satisfying: spud high walls in clear green water over golden sand. Phaneuf gets a 20 second ride and decides we better start recording the fifteen-second or better rides. I get a twelve. He rides far down the beach on a perfect wall until he’s a speck. It’s like a thirty.

Pisser shows up on Phaneuf’s stand up paddler. We share this and that and pull a three way for over fifteen seconds. We don’t mind a little lull. Then with rebel yells and goal line cheerleading the sets show again. McGrath is up at John and Mary’s pulling little spinners when he takes off. Pisser’s says he’s tired, but I won’t complain about nothing.