The Wet Mandala of Melor

SURF REPORT

15 October 2009


I started watching the swell event from a week out. Surfline was calling for a 10 foot swell out of the 250 a week ago. The NEPA animation filled out the sector with storm. Then the Weather Service began to get excited about rain. Typhoon Melor, recurving out of the northwest Pacific after maiming Luzon and bashing Japan, moved east into the Gulf of Alaska as an extra-tropical low. Hurricanes in the Atlantic do that occasionally as well, circling from the Antilles to Ireland.

So, for five or six days, the grand expectation of a future event seemed to put the present into slow motion. Like when you are five and the Christmas Tree is so big it fills up half the living room and the pile of presents gets about chest high and the house is filled with the scent of Douglas fir. You sit and watch the fog linger outside the front window on the crummy ivy sprawled on the edge of the asphalt, wishing Santa would get the lead out of his britches. I had stuff to do in advance, like take five tons of butternut squash out of the field before it got soaked, and I wished some cloddy fields could have been planted beforehand. But its not like I have major slack going.

Every time I was near a computer I would sit and watch the wet mandala of Melor cranking slowly southeastward toward Point Conception on the AVN at < http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/west/nepac/loop-avn.html> I would pick out particularly loaded blue and gold swirls of moisture and try to time which one might strike my farm. Sometimes you know that its going to be a dry blow the minute a low does a little bump to the north and your favorite package of squalls heads into someplace like Corvallis, which does not need the rain, because over time it will usually get more than it can handle. The weather poets at NOAA kept chanting about the significant early season event, warning equally of high seas and flash flood warnings for the burn areas, so I was double jolly about the imminent chaos impending out of the west.

The fact that swell was aimed at us reinforced the likelihood of rain. The downside is that rain-runoff into the sea from populated areas usually spikes the coliform and enteroccoci values in the intertidal zone, particularly the first heavy rain of the season. You know how the weather girls warn you about how greasy the road will be during the first drizzle? When the bar breaks on the Ventura River mouth on the first event of the season, most surfers are happy to sit and watch the latte-colored walls crash shoreward, knowing that they are filled with what makes the ears ache, the skin itch and the chest fill with vile thick green emulsions.

We got the orographic drazzlers first, as forecast, on Monday afternoon, then all day Tuesday the rain fell beautifully, into the night, with no more than four tenths falling in a given hour. We picked on Wednesday in a good rain because by the time I got to the farm Francisco had already filled up a few boxes with sweet corn so we grabbed some kale and collards out of the soggy beds anyway. Four and a half inches fell on Ojai. Nine or so up in the Matilija, and the NWS hydrology map recorded seventeen inches on some mountain in Big Sur. The swell came in behind the rain. CDIP displayed some crazy images, like nine feet of swell from 250 degrees west at 11 seconds. Then it went 12 from the 295 at fourteen seconds on Thursday as things dried out.

Phaneuf got off early and started wandering the coast at low tide. He started texting around two, like a fisherman cutting up pieces of barracuda in the bow of his boat before putting hooks on the seabed for halibut. “ 6-8 foot at the pier…( later)…At Faria. Looks fun….Just saw someone get a long one…”

Pisser came in the office to sell some Meyer lemons.

I let him read Phaneuf’s memos. “ You want to go?”

He wrinkled his nose. “ Naw, I just got over being sick”



Now, a word about that nose-wrinkle, because my question begged an appropriate response and Pisser nailed it. We know too much about pollution in the Ocean for our own good. Basically, we are in denial, because we know its flat-out loaded with the nasty. Rain just exacerbates the pollution times ten or fifteen zillion. The poop of 15,000 dogs is headed your way, and countless cats. Not to forget the homeless crapping free in the riverbottom for love of God.

There is nothing more definitive than the surfer nose-wrinkle when surfing after rain is suggested. This is generally because the wrinkler’s nose has smelt some bad ocean in the past. The notion of submerging within it is more than repulsive. When Greg Prinz does the wrinkle, his version is a whole face wrinkle. His wrinkle spreads across his face like he had just been forced to eat five pounds of unripe Hachiya persimmons. Nothing could have been more emphatic unless he had given me a double no-way bullfighter push off with both wrists spinning at the same time.

“ Ok. I think I am going to Pitas.”

“ You let me know…”

The idea that Pitas was good, and fairly free of run-off, had incited a severe case of surfalgia dridokitis. Its almost as bad as being in love. You can get pretty spun. I had not been in the water since San Clemente, which was years ( two weeks) ago. There had been no surf, or there had been but the wind got it before I could pull away from my shackle. Now the storm had come, gone and, abnormally, not been followed by the big blow storm-trailer out of the west. There was some wind, but not howling Victory At Sea white-capping madness.

By the time I got to Pitas it was actually a little offshore. We walked up to the Tudor Takeoff and paddled out there because there was still some sand for Seed to hang out on while we were surfing The water seemed fine and smelled of nothing. The waves were green and backlit with gold. Three or four guys paddled in as we went out, leaving a total of seven surfers with lots of head to shoulder high waves. A flashback to 1977 in other words. We got some good ones, even though it was mostly a semi-windswell, and closing out here and there. There was one section that was tubing. Phaneuf got a real long ride staying high in the pocket on his little yellow flash. I stayed inside mostly and rode waist-high grinders on the bar on the Yater. Danny’s brother Keith was out, sweeping around on his mighty cutbacks. Another, pleasant, older guy I have seen forever on this coast paddled by and said:.

“ Great way to pass a Thursday afternoon!” he hollered to me as he went out to the main lineup.

Sure was.

This afternoon I started to crum out, but its probably this upper respiratory deal all the kids are hacking on. I sent one home yesterday and another today. Its definitely not el crudo. I am eating ginseng and drinking Echinacea so I can go out tomorrow after I pick for the farmers market. There is going to be a firm south coming up, and I can kick this shit before it kicks me. The little Ginseng Man is already dancing inside me, warding off the evil intruder.