Loc:
Manhattan Beach
Time:
0645-0845
Conditions:
3 FT, high schoolers are back
Board:
Motorboat Too
The surf looked weak as I drove past the
Porto Smoke Stacks. Driving by my surf break, looking for parking, the waves
weren’t faring much better there either. I found free parking on Highland
Avenue, and by the time I made it half way down the hill with my Motorboat Too,
I realized that I brought the wrong board. A small but walled three-foot set
broke, the most size I’ve seen local in a while. Instead of swapping boards, I
convinced myself to just use my Motorboat. Doesn’t hurt to test your boards in
different conditions.
I was in a pretty good mood. I had been
surfing consistently, I was expecting a small pulse before the weekend swell,
and I was happy just to be alive and surfing, but that was before I saw the
high schoolers at the tower, a whole colony of them. It wasn’t just the surf
team either but fucking friends, parents, and just any adolescent teen with a
surfboard.
The 30th Street peak was
working, but there were already a bunch of heads on it. Once the kids paddled
out, everything from 26th Street was packed one tower over, north
and south. I’ve had luck at the brickhouse before, but I decided to paddle out
a little more south just before Marine Ave.
People were just fucking everywhere. I had
taken these empty weekday mornings for granted. What was I thinking, that these
kids wouldn’t be back? No, they were just waiting for the forecast to turn on a
little, and now they were out in full force.
Locals and noobs alike had to make way for
the invasion. Aside from the crowd, it’s hard to remember much else.—When I
used to work at Ralphs, when I was 17, the Produce Guy was hurting one day. He
was crouching behind his vegetable cart and just wincing and clinching his
eyes. He said he had hemorrhoids. I said to him, “Just get some paper towels,
drench them in cold water, put them between your butt cheeks, and just
SQUEEEEEEZE all the water out. When I came back the next day, I asked him if it
worked. He said no. “But it did feel good, didn’t it?” I said. He paused a
moment and said, “Yes. Yes, it was quite refreshing.”—Some of the waves had
slots, and I was pulling in just hoping that I could get one that would line up
and let me out, but I kept getting pinched.
When all the fucking kids left, the whole
break just opened up. Plenty of people had already left, anyway, to go to
fucking work (ill). Second-shifter locals paddled out. Horndog Mitch, Bruce,
Miles, Toru, and Twenty-Minute Toru. And then, the fucking surf just died.
Fuckin’ A. Those fucking high school kids. They literally came in, raped,
pillaged, and plundered, and left nothing for the rest of us.
I was desperate and looking for a last wave
in, and that’s when a random roguer popped up the back. I paddled hard for it.
Ross was on the shoulder, but when he saw I was paddling, he yelled for me to
go. The wave started off with a perfect shoulder but stood up and started to
break into an oncoming right that Jordan was trying to get into. When she saw me,
she pulled out. As the sections connected, I climbed the face at a pretty
critical point, got flung toward the flats, and stuck the landing.
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