The days have been like what people who dream the dream of The Surfing Life envision while they sleep: a ocean tied-dyed with blues and greens under a sapphire sky, all manner of surfers on all manner of surfcraft, noserides and tailslides.
Glorious.
My shoulder is nagging at me, can we take the day off, but no. Surfers are an obsessive lot and I've become obsessive. My little 6' 4" contains secrets that I've yet to be told and I'm trying to force them out of it, an interrogation by means of hours of paddling, duckdives, dropping in, repeat. More often than not I end up going ass over teakettle. But I keep going.
The obsession with riding waves is born of hidden knowledge. What you see in the magazines and in the videos is a fiction. Those moments - standing up in the barrel, ten toes over on a glassy peeling left, grabbing the rail while soaring ten feet over a thundering closeout - are as obtainable to most of us as a ride into space. What we're given is the real life of the ocean - onshore winds that level the surf, currents that create mixed-up slop, and the occasional storm-spawned giants that keep us on the beach, staring in awe and more than a little fear. Most of the time, surfing is waiting. Those cover shot moments - snapshots of perfection - probably won't happen to us.
But they might. And so we keep going.
