Sebastian Inlet Sunday: Good waves, board collision

Well, we hmmned and hawed Saturday night and opted for home turf instead of Daytona Beach Shores, and thank God we did.

The waves were almost perfect at Sebastian Inlet. High tide at the inlet moving to low in the afternoon, but a nice groundswell hip high to overhead on sets kept everyone entertained. The wind had died as well. It was foggy, making conditions at the inlet very nice. And for some reason the crowd stayed away. For the first two hours there were only ten or so of us out there.

We arrived with the whole family at just after 8:30 a.m. or so and didn't leave until 1:30 p.m. after Sean and I collided on a wave turning both of our boards into medical emergencies.

During the session my fat ass caught killer rights, with a couple of floaters. Imagine a 244 pound man on a 10.0 Walden carving down a six foot face right at you with no way to put the breaks on; hitting the top, and floating down the white water, sticking the landing and keepin on going.

It happened. Sean's ribbing may not have resulted in any weight loss on my part yet, but, my game at least has started to come alive, and maybe that's a start.

Sean tucked in near the jetty where the fisher people threatened with spoons and bluefish lures. The water was loaded with Spanish mack, whatever was chasing them, and the smell of marine banquet. Nervous? A little, but no worries. Just lift the legs at random every so often to put the odds in your favor, I tell him.

He blows me off on that. Also has callous disregard for how nasty some fisher people can be. There was one old clown looked like father time seemingly aiming his bluefish spoon at us. I seem to remember a guy just like him at Avon Pier North Carolina doing the same thing five summers ago. Did he follow us?

Sean's game has also come alive: three tubes, and he has learned to float on slightly heavier stuff. He sat inside the wedge for about an hour and surfed with some guy who really knew what he was doing. The guy kept going left toward the rocks, just because. It was a like a game, to see how many moves he could make before punching out. A couple of times the people on the pier could have reached right down and given him a high five.

Sean stuck to his rights, but, perhaps inspired by this nameless fellow, had no trouble dropping in on bigger, chunkier meaner looking waves and trying to make it out.

The worst came when I was just surfacing after a whipe out with my leash in my hand and Sean had committed to a wedge barrel. He didn't see my board and slammed right into it.

Thirty dollars in marine epoxy hardener, fiberglass cloth, sandpaper, gloves, and I am doing ding repair on both boards; my first ding repair since college. Also the Walden, for the time being, has become a single fin. His board hit mine right in the right, third fin, shattering it. The remains dug a dent in the bottom of his board.

I am rushing in an effort to have both boards ready by Wednesday morning, as the kids have a five day holiday weekend ahead of them. My head is full of fumes at the moment, and the boards are in the garage curing after my best efforts. I will sand tomorrow and see what we have wrought.

I had forgotten how messy working with fiber cloth is.

My daughter took a picture of me working on the boards but I didn't have my shirt on...and it's just too hideous. A man and his moobs, what will we do about that?

Lot of "self" work to do. But in this job market, all the time in the world.

Ponce, Longboard House, then Ocean Ave. Melbourne Beach

By the time we got out to Juan Ponce Beach Park, South Brevard, the wind had started to luff the American Flag beside the ceramic mural of Ponce De Leon. I am anxious. I know what this means in these parts and this time of year. You're lucky you get three waves before the wind does its thing and he's lollygagging on me something fierce.

Sean goes for his wetsuit and I am like "we have to get in the water, now!" Just before 8 a.m. and the water was in the upper 70s so, I'm not sure why he needs it, other than he has zero-percent body fat, that might have something to do with it.

Sure enough I paddled out only slightly ahead of him, take one semi-bumpy right, turn around and the wind was all but howling out of the north-north, then shifted out of the east, dead on shore.

The drift started and the tide got higher, and higher, and before you know it all you can catch are whitewater walls into the shorepound. But we still had some fun.

10:30 a.m. We decided to check Longboard House in Indialantic. This is what we do when, basically, there's nothing else to do. So much to look at. Superfish just to my liking, brand new, 7'6 is a little bit out of my price range. There is the SUP argument brewing in my head but after last weekend the former is the way I am leaning now. I can get a nice, large SUP sometime later. I need something I could conceiveably bring to Ireland with us, if luck hits and we get to go again soon.

Sean is looking at another Merrick 6'0". He wants to got a little more, box tail, or egg this time, and not the fish.

Just after 12:00 we head to Ocean Avenue. I call my wife, and make her dial up surfcam.net on the computer so she can see us waving to her on the dune walkover. Cool. We paddle out into the slop but something happens. It's more organized, and powerful. Three solid lefts and a couple of drops and I have done all I can do today on this wave.

Tomorrow we head north for a session in Volusia County.

Wednesday Surf Session Indialantic

Okay, I had to. I dropped all the kids off, Sean last and checked the surfcams, and yep, it was time for a go-out.
I checked the cam at Indialantic Boardwalk on Surfline, streaming video. Light breeze, and that swell from the weekend, which had been the result of Ida's wraparound into a Nor'easter, was still pulsing in!
Because I had spent nearly the entire weekend paddling for my life and duckdiving my board, today when I went out alone, it was all like butter.
I must have ridden 30 waist to shoulder high waves this morning and I feel great.
This will also be a test to see if Sean is reading this blog about him since he will be P.O.ed that I went out without him.
"Dad? Couldn't you have gotten me out of school?"
No. We all have to go to middle school, man. That's the deal.
Waves were semi-glassy, with still, a slight drift to the south. Every now and then a head high set would roll in.
Tide is making it deeper now, as I write and the wind has picked up out of the north, so, the magic is over, at least for now.
Dad's weight this morning? 244lbs. I think I can make a gym run before I have to pick everybody up.

Sunday Spessard Holland Session and Memories

Sunday the wind had calmed a bit in the morning and had a slight, off-shore component to it.

The waves were cleaner, and slightly smaller. So you know what that means, I got out to the very outside. It wasn't easy on a 10.0 Walden, but I did it. Got a beautiful left in a window of opportunity when the wind ceased nearly completely for about five minutes. All day long, one wave.

Drifts were still massively to the south. We chose Spessard Holland Beach Park North; the same place we had surfed during Hurricane Bill. The drifts were so bad early on, we ended up washing into the contest zone, at Spessard South and had to walk back.

This was also the same place I had taken Sean when he was ten, when he had been off surfing for a few months, and somehow, had developed a fear of the ocean all over again, where on a day with waves no bigger than a two feet, Sean had turned back for shore. He sat on the beach with tears in his eyes back then, "I'll never make it out there." I sat beside him and coaxed him to try again. He did, and we made it out.

He was riding a 7'0 gun I had bought from Jeff Crawford back in the early 1990s. A gun shaped for Mark Foo by Dennis Pang. A gun that Crawford said Foo had rejected and somehow Crawford ended up with it during a trip to Hawaii and he brought it back home to Florida with him. It was so narrow my buddy and I named it, "The Wave Needle". A historic surfboard, nevertheless that I bought in trade from Crawford with a sack full of fanny-packs made in Guatemala, along with a stack full of straw hats. I got these in Antigua, Guatemala, after my Peace Corps service. They were colorful, made by Mayans. Guatemalan print was popular back then. It must have been 1991, when this happened.

Jeff was getting ready to sell his shop at the intersection of A1A and Fifth Ave. in Indialantic. He was in some legal trouble then, and I still am not precisely sure what it had been about. He liked the fact I had been in the Peace Corps I suppose, and so we swapped. I think I got the better end of the deal. I know he didn't unload all those fanny packs, or the hats. Your average Quiche Indian has a much smaller waist-line and headband size. I think kids mostly bought them.

His shop later became Long Board House. Last year that surfboard ended up right back in that shop as a used classic. Sean and I used it as a downpayment on the board he now rides.

And now, Sean is the one who paddles out ahead of me, urging me on.

Late in the day Sunday, I had trouble getting back out again. Wind had switched to directly out of the north and the water looked precisely what it looked like on Saturday. Big swell, choppy conditions.

In the afternoon, Sean got out, I did not.

Soon I waved him in, and he was good and miffed.

"How can I learn to ride big waves if you won't let me stay out in it and surf? You're so affraid," he said.

The battle continues.

Dad's weight 244 lbs.

Some Days Ain't Easy: Especially Overhead Windblown Sets from a N'oreaster

I remember the terror of surfing Hurricane Gloria back in the 1980s, recall dropping into a twenty-foot bomb, must have been. My one wave that day.
I can still feel the horror of getting trapped on the inside afterwards, and watching guys who were trying to make it back out, get swirled up and back over the falls, a dance of arms and legs; akimbo meat puppets in a collosal, merciless washing machine.
I can still see the wall of whitewater coming to get me next, as I turned my single-fin Bunger surfboard, a sort of proto-gun from 1979 shaped in Maine. I can feel the gush of air trying to escape my lungs as a ten foot wall of white and spray hit me in the back. The second I spent like a rodeo rider trying to belly land in front of the white water and not pearl it seemed to go on forever.
That experience was not nearly as terrifying as what happened to me today.
I have been trapped outside on ten foot sets before I went all soft and to belly, that is, having to swim in after my leash snapped, and still I have never had so much fear running through me as I did today.
Today's waves were larger than Hurricane Bill's which Sean and I both had relatively little trouble with back in August.
Today, a line was drawn, definitely between what I am physically capable of anymore, and what my 13 year old son can seemingly do with little effort. And it absolutely scares the hell out of me.
Because, on a day like today, as it stands, I can't get to him, if something goes wrong. Things I know can go wrong because I have survived them. He hasn't, yet. But one day he will have to.
We had checked our favorite beach, Juan Ponce De Leon Park, but it was crowded with a surf competition. So we headed to choice number 2, Coconut Point Park about two miles north.
It looked deceptively do-able for both of us, but I was nervous. He suited up with his O'Neal wetsuit and his board, walked north about a hundred yards to account for drift, and began stretching.
Anatomy of a problem in the making: someone forgot the wax. Whether or not it is a physical problem, it is a psychological one which can break the first chink in your mental armor.
I have no need of a wetsuit, but my ritual, the wax-on, was absent, which left me feeling incomplete.
The paddle begins into the four foot sections of white-water rolling in. He begins paddling north to account for drift and crosses in front of me. I have to paddle more southerly to get my 10.0 Walden out of the clutches of this southward drift.
"If I get washed in, you follow me," I said. I didn't want him out here in this without a buddy. Some of the walls coming in, thundering over with whitewater and spray were more than 10 feet on the face. As I am watching him, more than I am looking out for what I should be doing, I paddled right into a Macker outside set with whitewater cresting.
I took my first wave, never having reached the outside, outside, the safe zone where I could have rested and regrouped. It was a decent wave, but it took me into the impact zone and I never made it back out.
He did make it, and he was knotted up with a group of surfers who had followed us out, and showed no signs of wanting to come back in.
I walked back to where my daughter Emily was sitting and put the board down, content to just watch him, then, and be ready if he needed my help.
Pretty soon, towering sets came in, removing all trace of him in lines of spray and whitewater.
The drift dragged those with him to the south. When I last saw him, Sean was three hundred yards or so out, paddling to the north very swiftly.
Ten minutes went by, and I could not see him. I walked to the top of the dune walkover, thirty feet above sea level but I still could not see him.
My daughter Emily and I were getting very nervous at this point. A true Bermuda Triangle moment if there ever was one. Swallowed by the sea. It seemed that he had absolutely vanished. We watched as other surfers took off, got creamed, bailed, or made their waves one by one, but none of them were Sean.
I took the board and paddled toward the knot of surfers he had last been with and began screaming for him. I envisioned him losing his board, unable to make it back to shore.
How to describe the terror?
I heard myself making sounds that only a wounded animal makes; chimpanzees in a zoo, grief striken with the loss of a mate or a baby. I was sure we had lost him. And I was reduced to an animal state, of grief and terror. A mama chimp, screaming. Astonished beachgoers looking.
A neighbor child died of a gymnastic accident when Sean was six. This boy was Sean's best friend in the world. We have never fully recovered from this trauma. We knew this child, Steven, very well. The unimaginable grief suffered by the parents haunts us from a distance, still.
Sean himself will admit feelings of grief, and a strange sort of kinship with death. He knows it's there, nearby. His attitude is, it could take any one of us, at any minute, so by all means, live, enjoy while you can. I never expected my Irish-American boy to have so much Spaniard in him.
This is not my attitude at all, regarding the dark stranger called death. I want my children to avoid that specter at all costs.
Six years ago another young boy of 13 was lost at sea on a day just like today. We didn't know him. He later was discovered north of Sebastian Inlet. He had met his match and drowned.The beach walkover at Atlantic Avenue, once a year, bears a wreathe and messages from his buddies, and his parents. This went through my mind as I was screaming for my boy. This surfer child passes through my mind at least once, every time we surf.
When he heard my hollering finally, he rose up on his board and took one giant wave in. He was fine. Not a scratch on him. He had been laying down on his board because everytime he sat up, another set came in and threatened to swamp him.
I collapsed on the beach, having aged perhaps three years in one surf session. Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes had elapsed.
"Dad, anyone can drown at any time," he said by way of explanation.
Again, Sean's familiarity with death coming through. His peculiar, precocious acceptance of this natural phenomenon.
Again he's angry at me for being such a worry-wart and killjoy. I try to explain to him that he'll understand how I feel when he teaches his own son to surf.
But I know, because I have heard him speak on it before, he's thinking that there really are no assurances from any universal force that he'll live to see his own children learn to surf. After all, look what happened to our neighbor, Steven.
I am angry at him for yelling at me, for being concerned for his safety, again. We head home. My choice. He should have come in when I did, and he didn't. I am still in charge of his safety.
He may be an excellent swimmer, and a great surfer in the making, I say, but he is not God. Not out there. If he had lost his leash, and gotten trapped outside, he would not have been able to swim in. I know because it happened to me once and at 18 I barely made it in on a day like today.
He's still pouting in the rear view mirror as we drive home.
After we were home for about an hour, Emily was on the couch crying. She said through tears " I thought he was dead." I comfort her. "I did too."
The time is 7:26 p.m. Sean walked up to me less than a hour ago and apologized for worrying me and explained why he wasn't sitting up on his board so I could see him. We talk a bit more. And straighten it out.
Sometimes it isn't about the surfing. It isn't about that at all.

Dad's weight 244 lbs

Veteran's Day Surf: Juan Ponce Park Melbourne Beach

Dad's post surf-session weight 242.5 lbs

Feeling stronger, thinner, more agile; even though the weight has not come off as expected but at least it is coming off.

Kids were off school, so, you know how it goes. Eldest daughter had soccer practice and I was the designated driver so we had to wait for the afternoon session, at high tide.

Our favorite spot is Juan Ponce De Leon Park, south Melbourne Beach a few miles north of Sebastian Inlet.

Wind was offshore, at times 10 to 15 miles per hour it seems, out of the southwest. We have this swell out there right now, sets are around six feet or so. With the offshore wind and the high tide, you get the picture.

There are nicely shaped waves, but, you've got to paddle your ass off to stay in them for the pop-up, and the drift is pretty heavy to the north.

Tired of watching him out-paddle me to the south and him mixing in with all the rippers, I walked up on the beach and watched for a moment with my longboard beside me.

Just to the south of the dune walkover, about 150 yards, I started to notice every ten to fifteen minutes a nice set would come in and start breaking on that outside bar.

I paddled around everyone then headed outside positioning myself between my two favorite phone poles on A1A. I noted where the foam made a nice runway from the last wave just feeling the bottom.

It wasn't long waiting for that overhead set to come rolling in. I dropped in late, carved down the face,leaned back on the Walden 10.0 and used the tail like a short board, snapped the top dropped back down into the wave walked all the way out to the nose got semi barrelled on the inside. The best wave of the day.

Even he couldn't pretend he didn't see it.

Veterans Day: when you're a veteran at this, sometimes you don't have to be a ripper to show your kid a thing or two.

What do I hope Sean learned from watching this demonstration: and it wasn't over, I was back out, posted up to that spot again, and I did it four more times.

I hope he learned to watch the water, not the crowd. Get in tune with and key off of it, not what everyone else is doing. Even a fat ass like me can look good on a wave every now and then.

Still considering a stand-up. I have to say with that breeze coming up the face today, it would have definitely been cool to have a SUP to capture the ubber outside.

The journey continues.

Bless all the men and women who have served to keep us free.

King of the Peak

Chundering chop chunks, wind, wind, wind and high tide shore poundage were the order of the day down at the Quiksilver, King of the Peak Surf Competition at Sebastian Inlet.

Yet still they managed to eek out a spray-throwing cutback, and aerial manuevre or seven, a tail slide, a...


Sean even paddled out into the increasingly big chocks of chunk. Below left.



A core group of surfers knotted themselves just outside the northern limits of the contest and at times I could swear they were trying to show up the competitors who each paid their $100 fee to have a go at the Quiksilver King of the Peak title. The more I think about it, I know they were trying to show them up and often did with the variable condition of the sea state at any one time.
Granted some, in this group, were in fact competitors keeping limber between their heats.


Out Sean paddles right into the mix and does a decent job getting four lefts and two rights. There's everything gratifying about watching your son go where, practically speaking you can no longer really go.


I dove in with a Boogie Board and a pair of fins since the longboard would not have been a good companion in all the foam, wind and slosh. The whole thing had me pining for the days when I rode a shortboard with a very pointy tip.


All in all, though, a successful week-end of surfing with Sean. I even lost a bit of weight.


Dad's weight now: 244 lbs, after lunch.