Up at 5:15 and it’s 1.6 miles to the beach.
Parking lot opens at 0600. You do this 100’s
of days every year. Feels like I’ve done it
1-million times. Rain, shine, fog, wind, there’s
really only 2 seasons; suit, no suit. 1-foot slop,
clean 5-foot shoulders, mean 10-foot grinders and
15-foot monster faces, it’s all numbers.
Today, wind slightly onshore at about 3 knots. Mid-tide
and dropping to a 1.0 low still 3 hours away, water,
54° . There are already 3 guys out, 8 more suiting-up.
A 1013-millibar eddy is circulating 300 nautical
miles SW generating the buoy stats… a 6-foot
NW swell with a period of 11 seconds. Malibu, Huntington?,
do the math. When it crawls into El Porto, it’s
a 3-foot wave, 3 wave sets, sets 11 minutes apart…
the numbers.
Surfing is all about the numbers. If you put in
the time, the days, the miles, the dollars, the
hours, it adds up… you get waves. We’re
4 weeks into spring doldrum slop as the winter north’s
peter out and the south’s start to build.
Surfing is a lot of homework in less than optimal
conditions, waiting for the moment when the equation
tips things your way. The time when traffic in the
line-up drops to zero, tide synchs with swell, the
math adds up positive and the stats say you’re
due.
I dropped in on a folding little face that surprised
me by turning into a nice speedy cover up. Very
unexpected, fully snaked a bro doin’ it. Yea,
well, negative numbers!
Paddled out, got snake-ragged, grabbed another.
No cover, but a left that rolled out a lot longer
than I thought it would. I kicked off, standing
waist deep on the inside, a hoot makes me look up.
The guy I snaked, is already tucked low and tight,
in what is very close to being a 3 foot wave…
and he’s completely covered up. You can't
say barreled, ‘barreled’ means size,
speed and power. This wave was just a clean, pushing,
crouch low and keep your trim, cover up. Hard to
believe because it really wasn't the day or the
swell for it. But there he was, trimmed out low
on a 9-foot board tucked inside this 3-foot cylinder...
covered up tight, no floor, no wall, no ceiling
space to spare.
By the numbers, the space available is p x the board
width2 x board length and he was using it all. From
where I stand I have the behind-home-plate view,
looking right down the pipe so it was up to me to
keep the scorecard. 1-thousand-1, no mistaking the
cover up or the count, I was doing the math out
loud… 1-thousand-2… 1-thousand-3. He
was locked in, a down-the-line stare, calculating
the trim, acing the math. Each pitch of the lip
adding up… 1-thousand-4… still inside
and… 1-thousand-5! He pulls out, unkinks and
there’s enough wave left to pump on the shoulder
once, twice, kick out and acknowledge complements
from others in the line up. Positive numbers.
A witness can be a good thing. Sometimes the unexpected
is hard to reconstruct afterwards and harder to
convince others that it really happened. This could
be a lie, considering I'd snaked this guy a few
waves before and I need to payback so he doesn’t
drop in on me for the next 3 years. Or, just face
it… the day you were chasing a south swell
at Malibu or Huntington, a few locals did the math,
got some nice micro-lefts, a little cylinder time
and got to see a great ride from a guy who added
a 9-foot board to a 3-foot wave and got 5+dry one
… verified. It’s all in the numbers.
