Really enjoying the stories here…
https://www.swaylocks.com/forums/kammy-land-versus-sunset-hurricane-swell-10sept18
so I thought there must be a wider range of interesting stories about all the boards, waves and people that we’ve met along the way.
And it doesn’t need to be about heroics or epic fails or overly coherent, but if you’ve got a story ot two about shaping, surfing or the unique characters that frequent the surf, drop a line in here.
Call this:
Perseverance Furthers
Living in San Diego in late 1970’s. Big South swell coming so drove to Baja solo. Stopped at K55 for a look and getting out of the car stepped in big fresh pile of either human or very large dog growl. GAAAAA! No water, only a couple Kleenex in near empty box in car. Scrapped it off, scuffed foot in dirt, good enough. Swell was huge and clean and K55 closing out in the kelp. Figured I go on to San Miguel but just after leaving the parking area discovered I had a flat tire on my already canvass showing, lizard skin, dirt bag tires. Already up on the highway and tire so flat car sitting on the rim, I popped the trunk and pulled out my even more bald spare tire. And antique bumper jack. Oops! No base for the jack, just the 1” square vertical pole and the hookup. Crap. Go for it. Huge gasoline trucks roaring by at 70 mph laying on the horn. Wind making car rock even with all 4 still on the ground. Sketchiest tire change of my life. Quite terrifying trying to wrestle off the flat and put on the spare while making sure if the worst happened, it wouldn’t happen on me. SUCCESS!!!
Now what? Gamble on my super bald tires, no spare and press on? Go back? Going back was unthinkable. Then I remembered just a few miles back up the hwy I’d seen a scrap of rotted plywood propped up by a dirt drive that said “FIX A FLAT $2”. Definitely a shade tree job. He cut a strip of rubber off an old inner tube and used what amounted to a big steel crochet hook, to force several layers of it through the hole (after painting the rubber w/ glue of some sort). Slice the excess off w/ lanolium knife, put tire on, inflate, and good to go. Onward to San Miguel.
Turned out to be the #1, top, best surf I have ridden in my entire life. Smallest sets were 2X OH the bigger ones at least 3X maybe more. Just a slight hint of offshore breeze but basically glassy and super clean swell. Many set waves had plenty of room to ride past front of jetty and on into the way inside a very long way. Totally dry, stand up barrels w/ circle of blue sky out the end. But beware the ones where that blue circle suddenly turns black—that meant a bad choice and your wave was headed right to the fangs of the jetty.
Several near death, saved by “the hand of God” sort of moments. Surfed far beyond my usual ability and orders of magnitude beyond my usual courageous zone. Mental snap shots for the rocking chair at the old age home some day. Sometimes it pays to buck the omens and just go!
Circa; 1978-'79 or maybe a year or two later. I’m heading up to the Folk’s house for Thanksgiving dinner on the central coast of Ca. Left early before dawn to get a surf in on the way. I go to Pt. Sal to get an overview in the false dawn light. Standing on the bluff watching, when suddenly my dog (black lab) decides to go after a squirrel charges right down the cliff. How he made it to the bottom, I don’t know. And there is the predicament. He’s stuck on the beach without ability to get back up on his own. Screw it. I suit up and using some 7mm rope and board cord, lower myself and board to the bottom and sit for a few minutes when a set arrives. Holy shite! It is freight training. Head high to over and end up having one of the better sessions of my life. Finally, get hound and self back up to the truck and start driving back down the hill and get a flat tire. The spot is nine miles of dirt and pavement off Hwy 1. No spare. Having prepared for this (???) I break out a quickie patch kit. Why not just get a new spare? Can’t jack the truck because of the slope. I get to work and start plugging the tire. Using a bicycle hand pump, a young guy and his girlfriend come pulling up and ask if there is any surf. I tell him it is good and head high. He stokes on this and takes off with his girlfriend calling back; “Happy Thanksgiving”. No mention of the flat or relative remoteness. After a half hour of pumping I get enough air to get to Guadalupe and more air. Arrive late for dinner and catch hell for that. Then my brother bests me by saying he scored EPIC Steamer Lane coming down from the north and great breakfast grinds on the way. I’m sweaty dirty and hungry and he is fat dumb and happy. He would bring it up every year after.
ps. And the Postscript is, The place is fickle, creepy in a way, and sharky. That was a one time experience.
Fickle, creepy, sharky and the road after a rain is as sketchy as anything in Baja.
And How M’Ding! At best, the place is a fishing spot over on the Mussell Rock side.
Shaped myself an experimental inverted channel thing years ago. Finished it and waxed up ready for the dawn patrol.
Pristine early morning offshore, paddle out alone and sit for a while…I get to pick off the set wave, its overhead for me…
I catch it, pump down the line, set up the barrel and got too high, and over the falls and at some stage made contact with my board.
I come up to a bent board, ruined. Brand new board on its very first wave…all I could do was curse, and laugh at myself…and go make another one.
edit…overhead for me is about 2 foot!
First board, first wave. Sheesh Wildy, can’t get much worse. I made an egg for a close friend. He’s had a lot of boards made by me and I always make him be there to pitch in. He was familiar with the process. This one he hot coated and I machine sanded and he hand detailed and did the rails and fins. We go for the baptismal surf at a good point wave. I’m paddleing out, and he takes off on a wave in front of me. Right from the start, I watch the bottom layer of glass shear and peel right off the nose to 1/4 of the way down trailing behind him. Proud moment indeed.
The beginning of John John’s new edit “Space” has shoals of fish for about 2 minutes. https://www.surfer.com/videos/john-florence-space/?sf197554372=1
I remember surfing a spot down the south coast of south africa in the 80’s and the water went black as a shoal of sardines passed under with a few skipping over the top of the water. It was arms and legs up for a few minutes while watching down into the seething mass looking for big grey shapes. The sardines moved on leaving an oily residue. We reasoned that the sharks were well fed and carried on surfing.
Massive shoals of sardines are a regular occurence on that coast in winter. The annual sardine run one of the biggest feeding frenzies in the world. Usually the fish stay offshore, but sometimes current and predators push them into the break zone. We had a few encounters with shoals over the years but the epic surf and abundance of food seemed to make it worth sharing the water with apex predators.
Now I just kid myself by switching on the shark shield.
Red Boards, I have been pondering this for some time now. I have been out during unusually warm water periods due to the El Nino` effect here in Ca. US. Lots of baitfish in the water outside of the break. No sharks but sea lions hunting them. It seemed the anchovies realized if they stayed close to us, the sea lions would keep their distance. I watched this pattern develop several times during the go out. Do you suppose they have that level of intelligence to use us as decoys or protection from preditors? Could be, or survival instinct. That summer was the only time I experienced it and always wondered about it.
ps. There have got to be some classic tales here with the characters haunting this joint. Hope to hear more.
I had just finished polishing this 3-stringers longboard with a nice blue/green tint, wooden nose and tail blocks, no pinline as the cutlaps were near perfect (perfection, as you know, doesn’t exist), all the bells and whistles as you say. The guy comes to pick it up and he has no words kind enough about my work. That’s good for my ego; As he goes outside the shop with the board, still extatic about how it shines and all, I go back in to pick a fin or something.
When I get back outside, the guy is kneeling in front of his car, and he’s waxing the board right on the concrete alley, no board-bag or towels under it, the bottom of the board scratching in rythm with his waxing strokes against the concrete…
…I tell you Balsa; I am not a diplomatic guy when something like that occurs. Seems that they fuck on your work.
Happened to me that youngsters believe that the gloss is just a rattle can spray job…Something that some one can go to the hardware store apply and just that. I tried more than one time to explain it for them; in the end all say that they like a matte finish…
This is probably a 25 year old story. I have to think hard to remember it right.
A travel buddy of mine and I decided to travel to Baja but we didn’t know too much about the area and renting cars in CA and driving down was not going work. So we signed on with a couple of brothers who flew us down to Mag Bay. It was a lot of fun but a bit of an ordeal to get there. We flew from the east coast to San Diego, met the pilot, flew to some deserted airport and refueled with stock piled gas, then continued to a very small fishing town on the coast, took a boat across the bay, then took a truck along the beach to another boat across to the point. We stayed there three weeks and surfed with offshore winds every day. Tons of fun. But one strange thing happened. I was surfing within sight of the cliff over looking the break and guys on the cliff started jumping up and down and waving at us. I couldn’t hear them at the distance and finally ignored them. THey were trying to alert me to a huge rouge wave coming. They saw it from a long way off. Too late, I saw it coming and started paddling for the horizon. I remember that it was massive. Just a single wave. It washed us in for a long way and churned up a bunch of crud off the bottom. For an east coast boy, it was a really big wave. But just one. Horizon to horizon. The next day we left and I went for a quick surf before reversing the journey. There had been a lobster hatch over night and little spidery looking red lobsters about the size of a quarter were washing over my white board. And a sea lion came up and barked at me.
I’d love to go back there.
I swear I’ve had seals come past pointing at us going, “look they are big and slow - eat them instead.”
I think fish hang under floating stuff naturally.
I think I’ve told this one here before.
I was out at Tennis Courts during a large summer swell in 2003. It was dawn patrol with a handful of “famous” locals including Lynne Boyer. The sets were double overhead and breaking in the channel between Big Lefts and Courts. A lot of times the best waves are the ones that break out there but then back off and leave an intense barrelling right. I like to sit on that end and catch the waves that swing wide. I was sitting outside of everyone and score one of those set waves. As I try to stand up, my hand slips and I slide off the board because I forgot to bring wax. I end up body surfing down a double overhead bomb dragging my board by the leash. Half way down the pressure from the water pops the snaps on my trunks and they start sliding down my legs. I’m pretty sure my ass was showing and everyone was on the inside of me. Big time make ass. Then a short time later, I’m paddling behind a couple people and the bombs catch everyone. 2 people in front of me bail, and I have no choice but to toss my board and dive. I could feel the leash pull then release, when I come up there’s no board. I start swimming in with the leash still attached to my leg. I try to bodysurfing, but I just get tossed as the big waves close out. Some time later an off duty lifeguard surfing tells me I’m going in circles and if I was OK. I tell him, I’m OK and keep swimming. A little while later another off duty lifeguard paddles up to me and says the same thing. I give the same response. Finally, after swimming about 40 minutes, the second lifeguard comes back to me and asks if I’m sure I’m OK. I decide to tandem in to the inside then start looking for my board, which was actually my brother’s board. I swim towards the west and I can’t find the board. I was about 10 yards from the beach thinking about what to tell my brother about how I lost his board. Then I hear someone yelling from a distance, I found it, I found your board. It was the lifeguard, and she found it in the deep water channel next to magic island. I figured it went in the opposite direction, and I was pretty much on the opposite side of the beach park. It had a deep gash from a fin, so one the boards from the 2 people in front of me must had hit it. The string that attaches the leash to the board had come untied, so I tied it back up and paddled all the way back out just to get one wave before heading home.
Later, I learned that more than 600 hundred people were rescued that day. I think I was the first. I went back at lunchtime with a big plate lunch for the lifeguard.
I have not worn shorts that don’t have string to tie them up since.
This is an article about that day. https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/waikiki-roughwater-swim-lives-up-to-its-name-more-than-600-swimmers-are-rescued/
Drove down to Santa Barabara one day with cash in pocket and current girl friend in the rusty 63 VW Bug. Had it in mind to go over to Garden st. and buy a new Yater. Which I did . Picked a nice Lime Green tinted deck/Clear bottom rounded pin out of the rack. Single fin of course, 7’2 down rails and a beak. Paid the “pool guy” and strapped it onto my Aloha racks. A few days later in the Pismo Pier parking lot I had come in after a morning surf and laid the Yater on top of the rack while I sat in my yellow bug with black fenders and warmed up. I’m sitting there probably burning a roach when a gust of prevailing NW wind came up up and blew the Yater off the rack and bounced it a couple of times across the parking lot. Luckily no harm no foul. Was embarrassing more than anything.
I’ve had Hawaiian Monk Seals pop up within 5 feet of me. They scare the heck out of me because they are wide. A shark with that girth could easily bite me in half. They also stink, and will crap in the lineup.
We’ve had a lot of seals come ashore at popular beaches on Kauai and Oahu in the last decade. I was out at Keith Melville’s Makaha house recently and a large seal tried to come ashore just down the beach, but several tourists were bothering it so it never beached itself.
“So I tied it back up and paddled all the way back out just to get one wavebefore heading home”.
Classic stuff! A lot of folks wouldn’t get it.
Years later I would bounce another Yater out of the back of the pickup. Disappeared but later unexpectedly came back to me. But that’s another Flecky story.
I made a board for my brother several years ago. After I was done I wanted to get a few pics, so I stood it up against my house where I normally took pics of boards. For some strange reason the wind decided to gust just as I shot the photo and blew the board over. Luckily I had glassed it solid and it didn’t get messed up much. After that I put a string up to hold boards when I take pics, even then, one day a big gust blew through and pulled the board away and made a big ding.
First ever new surfboard at 13. I saved for almost a year to get a custom with a spray and rainbow fins. it was the 70’s.
Finally filled the custom form and paid a deposit and then waited to get a call that it’s ready.
Took it home still inside the cardboard wrapping, and laid it carefully on my bed and ran next door to tell my friend, we unwrapped it and he carefully picked it up admiring its pristine beauty.
He then said “Give us a look at those fins”
and hoisted the board upwards at great speed into the concrete ceiling.
He said he forgot he was indoors.
The nose was completely fucked and I had to take it back to the surf shop to get it professionally repaired.
Never looked the same as it did for those first few seconds.
i saw the board about 30 years later in the hands of a learner and the first thing I noticed was that damn smashed nose.