Surfing in July

On any given Sunday in July, Florida's North East Coast can expect ninety degree weather, an afternoon rain shower, and an Atlantic Ocean that resembles a quiet mountain lake. The surfing establishment in St. Augustine organized some sort of contest to be held on one such day. Volcom, a national, surfing and skateboard apparel manufacturer was sponsoring the Volcom Sea Cow Surfing Contest. I was going to enter, sea cow that I am, but I learned that some surfing skill was required so I just watched for a little while as these young surfers performed amazing ariel maneuvers off the tops of some great looking waves.

Against all odds, something was creating waves on this hot Sunday in Florida. I hiked back to my house, grabbed my nine-foot longboard and headed back out to the beach. Upon arrival, the lifeguards, who don't normally patrol this part of Anastasia State Park, were out in force, deploying a Jet Ski and making announcements over truck speakers. It turns out that during the course of the day, at least four people were rescued from a particularly nasty rip tide that had developed as a side effect from the 2 to 4 foot surf. A surfer who seemed to be in his late forties staggered in from the water right as I stepped on to the sand. He was clutching his left ear and blood was flowing down from his scalp right above his hand. He was yelling to his wife that the lifeguard on the Jet Ski had run over him.

Numerous paramedics and lifeguards attended the bloody victim. Swimmers were being ordered out of the water as the Jet Ski returned from its mission towing a beaten young swimmer in the rescue vehicle's floating life basket. The normal summer weekend beach crowd had something new to look at so they huddled around the rocks off the sand, trying to guess who would be the next victim. Perfect. Blood in the water and panic on the shore. I waxed my board, put on my leash and paddled out.

The waves were breaking in two places. The break closest to the beach was really the re-form of already broken waves that had hit the outer sandbars and begun to build back up again before fully expending their thousand mile energies on the final slope of seabed right up to the beach. The re-form of the waves is fairly common, occurring when the waves are stronger than usual coming from deep out at sea. The challenge on this particular day was to get out past this first set of breakers then have something left to proceed out past the second set of waves. The ultimate goal is to get out beyond the lines of waves breaking on the outer sandbars, ride one and then do it all over again. Doesn't make that much sense as I write it here.

I pushed through the re-form and then entered the second outside impact zone. A couple of times I was tossed back thirty or forty feet. Last time out, a couple of weeks ago, I flipped completely over backward, board and all. Sinuses cleaned for free. I figured I was lucky not to have hit bottom or my board would have surely broken. This time I was reasonably successful and made it to the outside without serious incident.

Outside was about two or three hundred odd feet from shore at the current tide. This means that you have made it on the ocean side of the sandbar furthest from the beach. The water is deeper on the sea side and shallower towards the beach, sounds logical, but this dynamic is what creates waves that break. Waves that might be ridden. It is always recommended that you turn toward the beach for a minute and take a bearing on a palm tree, building or some other object that you can use as a marker for keeping track of your relative position in the water. This procedure helps in both noting where the waves are breaking best as well as keeping track of your own drifting in the water.

When I arrived at this point in my paddling, I realized that I wasn't alone out there. At least fifteen guys on various wave-riding vehicles had been hidden from view by the swells. Usually at this particular surf spot there are three or five people out at any given time spread out across the waves. Today, a dozen or so people were chatting it up between paddling to maintain favorable position waiting to ride the next wave. There exists a formal protocol as to who gets to attempt which wave in the water. I won't go into the rules here, but a breach in etiquette has been known to result in name calling, shouting or worse. This seemed to be a pretty mellow crowd, mostly older guys, no hot headed agro kids. Know and respect the rules and you will get along with anybody on any break on Earth.

It seemed over time that we were getting pretty bunched up with only a couple of feet separating three or four of us at any given moment. Usually you stay as far away as practical from each other. Mistakes are made and a nine-foot long chunk of fiberglass flying off the backside of a wave can ruin your entire day. Another rule to note is that you maintain one eye on the ocean at all times. Surprises, especially in the form of large masses of water rising up in time to land on your head should be avoided at all costs.

Unbeknownst to me at the time was that the whole lineup was being sucked south towards the city pier at about fifteen knots. So that's what the lifeguards kept shouting about from the beach. There was no relative measure of distance since we were all looking seaward towards the horizon and we were all moving at the same speed. We weren't really bunching up; we were mostly static, and simply picking up more members as they tired or as we tired of keeping position. Like some giant seaborne amoeba, we were growing in mass, members added as time passed. We were all sitting, drifting, lying down to paddle, and trying to maintain position in the lineup. It was, in hindsight, a losing battle and we all ended up all piled up together facing a beach which was no longer sandy, but had become a pike of broken concrete, the remains of somebody's bad idea of a boat ramp that accessed the open Atlantic.

I was sitting on my board next to a white guy with long Rasta Braids and plenty of tribal ink on his shoulders and back. He was talking to another guy with short hair and an earring. They were planning to travel to Panama next summer and hitch to Venezuela, surfing the entire way. What do these people do for a living? Why can't I do that?

Suddenly, a fin rose right in front of us, over a foot at the base from front to back, it just appeared from the depths, gray and pointed, from the crumbly wave about ten feet in front of us. I didn't even breathe. The fin's owner had to be eight feet, at least, maybe twenty in my mind's eye. Nobody moved. The fin paralleled the beach, disappearing slowly into the dark, foamy water. I gripped my board with the inside of my knees, not moving my feet, holding position in the rough water. A second or two passed when, about five feet from where we saw it first, it came up again, a little further away, but this time pointing at the three of us. I am trying to calculate the distance to shore without looking away from the beast. Still no one moved. Without further warning the rest of its head surfaced and blew a big gush of air out of its blowhole. I think it was laughing. This time the big gray-blue porpoise; it had to be every bit of eight feet long, it rolled and proceeded on its way.

The Rasta spoke first, boldly telling of other encounters with sharks of similar size. Yeah, I didn't hear him sounding off when the fin first showed up. In most places it is bad mojo to discuss sharks while entering the water. I'll go one step better; I try not to even think of the things when I am out there. Surfing etiquette be damned, hoping to miss the rocks, I paddled for the next wave. I was very careful not to fall off.