I pulled up alongside the ocean, driving eyes easing right.
The sky cracking open for business. This purple swathe of watercolors, yawning out of the black pencil line of horizon.
So good to see John Brown again.
Mid-life men like kids on Christmas morning. Except the anticipation of unwrapping the ocean comes too with a crinkled tinge of fear…
We peered over the roadside dunes together and saw a neat and glassed march of aquamarine swell lines.
Dark blue humps spitting into the feathered white horsetails of a lurching wave. All in a peeling symmetry. The sacred shape that surfers call ‘A-frame’.
Niggles of nerves light up in my stomach. And an adrenaline-filled ten minutes later, we’re at the waters edge.
The cold Northern Californian shore-break is icing my bare feet and siphoning up the warm neoprene wrap of my wetsuit legs.
Ocean Beach in San Francisco is best handled with a zig-zagging paddle to get out beyond the break line.
What would be a straight paddle anywhere else leaves you feeling like a rolling marble at Ocean Beach, as the shifting peaks shunt the surface water in different directions.
My lips carry a delicious smidgeon of salt water.
My eyes are taking in the purple-blue wash of color in the sky and the oily and ruffled purple-green canvas of the ocean, shifting as the day’s light starts to play on the water’s surface.
In a pause from the endless gruel of paddling, I noticed how my senses were taking in more than my brain could process, this smiling sense of overwhelm.
Color, sound, the smell of the ocean, the fear in my stomach.
A flock of pelicans gliding low and tight, tracing over a rising swell line. Me and them. For a split-second, paused in connection and stare, two species acknowledging each other in the elite member’s club of dawn.
I felt like a sommelier sipping a good wine at its first pour — eyes closed, savouring the momentary bomb of sensations.
A momentary lip-twitch in a droplet of salt water landing. Ears — ear-plugged with silicon putty — are buried in the acoustic of your own heartbeat and heaving breaths.
In my fingers, feeling cycles from the oppression of cold water on warm blood, to the tickle of tiny mini-currents feathering between each finger, as each hand pulls and treads through the water.
It was a fine session too. Overcoming the frustration of two unprovoked spills from perfect positioning under the peak, to landing gliding runs on the rail.
Dropping into a wave, there is no greater relief than the wave-side edge of your board holding a line into this inhaling arc of ocean.
A steepening little hill that rears its head to a standing wall of water to cling to. My left hand stroking the skin of the wave’s face, respectfully.
The physics keeping it all together as water sucks upward, and bodyweight and board glide downward, in perfect counterweight.
Man and nature, hanging onto each other.
A moment in the session took me back to St. Ouen’s beach in the English island of Jersey, in June 1998. When the compulsion began.
It’s been a couple of decades now. So so many, many, many…many hours. So much frustration, so many falls. Tens of thousands of spills, it feels, that don’t matter. Tens of thousands of spills that don’t matter, in this cherished thread in my life.
And moments of fear. One or two instances of real, deep fear over all those years. The pit-of-your-stomach fear, that you’ve got yourself into a tricky situation, when the size of the ocean’s chaos lurches up a notch while you’re out there.
Surfing awards you some kind of heightened state again and again, feeling the nature all around you.
And it brings kindred spirits and friendships that become deep bonds.
The drives, the trips and sessions when nature and the ocean is not as you hoped. And, so often you drag yourself home with hardly a decent wave caught.
But too, you drive yourself home not even caring about that, however hard it is to explain to the rest of the world.
For me, it’s been 23 years of captivation and grit, though hardly a talent. Surfing is a ‘sport’, but an art too.
In so many moments out there for us surfers, we’re absorbed like a painter at the canvas, and what we paint is not the point.
