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| Blue Crush of the South Bay |
Loc: 32nd
Street
Crew: Randy
Time:
0745-1015
Conditions:
1-3 FT, glassy, peaky, consistent, chicks.
I’m late. Work this weekend has me tired.
I’m supposed to have picked up Randy by now. Groggy, I drive down to my garage
and load up our gear. If it was just my gear, this would be faster, but I have
to load my brother’s stuff, too. Normally, this wouldn’t be an issue, but today
it’s painstaking.
“You seem tired,” says Randy, when I pick
him up.
I yawn. I tell him about weekend duty, how
I had slept on a cot. It sucked. It’s a morning that I could have easily slept
in, but I’m on surf auto pilot.
There should be parking for a Monday, but
we’re late. Maybe the joggers, the Manhattan MILFS, the guys who do weird
exercises in the park or on The Strand, those who are part of the early morning
masses have already taken over.
When I find free parking, Randy says, “Oh,
you know where to look.”
Funny how this is something that locals
take for granted. Am I a local? I don’t know, but I sure as shit know where to
look for free parking.
Without expecting much swell, and since the
forecast has everything at one-to-three feet anyway, we whip out the funboards,
El Zippi and the NSP.
Walking down 32nd Street to get
to the water, we see a lightly sprinkled lineup. 26th has some
heads, but even Rosecrans looks scarce to our north. Three chicks are
longboarding, two SUP guys hover around them like flies on shit. Yeah. No
surprise.
However, it’s a pristine morning. No wind.
No texture on the water. The ocean’s like sheet glass, and the peaks, barely at
three feet, stick up and out of the water, well defined, like small hollow
lines.
Riding the Zippi is like cheating. It’s
just too easy to get into waves on this thing. The water’s warm, so popping up
in my wetsuit jacket and shorts, I’m flying down the face of a two-foot wave.
Again, like days past, guys are on
shortboards, the wrong boards, unable to rack up much of a wave count. Then
Randy gets in the water and starts clowning me on the NSP. Not only is he
getting backhand snaps on it, but I watch him step up the nose, hunker down,
and pull into small barrels. He doesn’t make it out, but . . . no one here
rides funboards like that. No one.
The sausages leave the chicks, and they’re
over at the next peak exchanging waves. One hoots the other into a wave, and
she’s standing on the tail of her board, coasting on a sluggish one footer, yet
yelling, “Woohooh!” They catch more waves. All morning long, “Woohooh!”
One gets in my brother’s way, I hear her
apologize in her high-pitch giddy voice. How could you get mad at girl power,
especially on a two-foot day?
A couple other chicks paddle out, longboard
and scantily clad in tiny bikinis. I had no idea that 32nd Street is
the Blue Crush zone of the South Bay.
Even with the rising tide, waves are still
breaking but not standing up as much. Luckily, our boards keep us in the game.
At 0945, my arms are tired. I look at
Randy. He’s sitting twenty feet away from me. Something’s changed in him. He’s
not the restless charger that he used to be, the guy who’d sneer at two-foot
surf. Nah . . . he’s like Gandhi, sitting on the 6’8 NSP, pondering at the
horizon. About what? I don’t know.
“A couple more?” I say.
He squints his eyes and twitches his head,
the wet bunches of his hair pointy as a porcupine. “Really?” he says.
Ha. And that’s when it hits me. He doesn’t
wanna leave.
We surf for another half hour, still
trading off on waves. We both move around a lot. I guess that’s one minor
aspect of how our surfing is similar; we don’t have to sit next to each other
the whole time. Towards the end, we end up feet away. The surf turns
inconsistent, so we call it.
“It’s another nice day,” he says.
The late-morning sun’s blazing over the
beige sand, making it bright. The strand, the Manhattan homes, the pier, the
leaves on the trees are still. Everything is in place, right where it belongs.
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