March 6, 2008 Thursday

Bolinas	Straight out from the ramp
8:50 am to 10:40 am	Consistent 3’ to 4’, sets head high
High tide – 6 ft at 10:00 am	Offshore breeze
Warm bright sunshine, turned to high clouds	Good session. Somewhat frustrating.

What a beautiful peak. This is straight out front from the ramp at Bolinas. I took this picture from the seawall at the end of the ramp. I had stopped at Stinson where the waves were four to six feet and rideable, glassy, easy paddle out and only two guys out. I was tempted, but the above peak looked perfect to me. Clean lines coming in, the bottom pushing them into a perfect “A” frame peaks, sunny, glassy, and an offshore breeze gently holding up the curls. I’m going here. I took several pictures, some captured riders locked into picturesque emerald curls, but the above shot best depicts the overall “look and feel” of the peak. 

The tide was already high and there was another hour to full high tide. The discussion from the others on the seawall was that the incoming tide would knock the waves down. I figured I would go out here first and when the waves stop breaking I would drift down to the Groin to get those fast right curls I caught on Monday. I thought that I would enter the water at the bottom of the ramp and pleasantly cruise out to the peak. When I did entered the water I had to duck under a sizable wave breaking at the base of the ramp. Damn, got my hair wet before making it to the peak. Then a set approached and I found myself ducking under white water of four outside waves before reaching the takeoff point.

To my surprise the waves were bigger than they looked from shore and certainly more powerful. By now the high tide was causing a sizable backwash that reflected off of the seawalls on both sides of the ramp. The waves were difficult to catch and difficult to ride. I could see the lines coming in from a long distance, when they got near the impact zone the swells would jump up and break, causing me to take off too late on my first few rights. By the time I got to my feet the wave had already broken several yards in front of me. Going down the face in front of the white water was a thrill because of the backwash adding a sizable bounce to the rides. I figured I couldn’t take off late; I have to catch the wave while it is still flat before it jumps up. Easier said than done. I needed the steepness of the jump to get into the waves. I would drop down the face and once at the bottom all momentum and speed died. As it turned out, the waves were steep at the top and flat on the bottom. They would jump up break half way down the wave, meanwhile of bottom of the wave had not formed at all. Once you reached the bottom of the wave, the ride was over because the white water from the top quickly caught up with you and overwhelmed the board and your speed and within a second or two the first of several backwash bumps would hit, further challenging your ability to stay in the wave. 

I figured the strategy was to catch the top of the waves when they jumped up and then stay at the top of them as long as possible. This meant paddling fast, jumping up fast and turning as soon as possible to hang at the top of the wave. I managed to do this on one great left wave. It was a set wave with a definite left shape to it. I paddled hard and at an angle to the left, I was already angling left when I got to my feet, the wave was head high and feathering several feet in front of me, I hung at the top to gain some speed, the wave broke in front of me, I dropped just below the white water to push back into the swell. I didn’t quite make it. I went a long ways with the curl breaking on the nose of my board and me leaning into the wave to force myself back into the swell, which I finally did when the wave died in the deep water close to shore and all the while bouncing through the backwash. 

After an hour in the water I managed to catch two good long right waves back to back. Meanwhile the backwash was getting more pronounced and the waves were getting more difficult to catch. Our fear of the high tide knocking down the waves never occurred. In fact it was just the opposite, the waves were gaining in size and becoming more walled up. 

I suggested to Doug that we should move down to the Groin and try riding the rights. What a mistake. By now the tide had turned and the current was flowing at a rapid pace out of the lagoon. The channel still flowed up against the Groin wall and then made a hard right turn to flow along the shore of the beach. On the other side of the current the waves were peeling to the right. We paddled across a deep channel to arrive at a very shallow shore to quickly discover that the waves were breaking too fast and in too shallow of water. The bottom has become completely flat causing the north swells to wall up and break to the right but too fast to ride. Doug and I caught one wave there and paddled across the current to come in. It was time to call it quits. We were exhausted and had gotten some good waves at the first peak. 

When I was taking pictures from the seawall I had a good chat with “Bio-Diesel” Dan, a regular at Bolinas. Dan is a big man who drives a big bio-diesel pickup truck and makes his own boards. In our discussion I asked him how he could surf on a Thursday morning. He told me that he owns his own business and after taking care of initial assignments for the morning he could get a couple of hours to surf. I inquired about type of business. “Paper recycling,” he stated. He buys used paper from businesses and at his warehouse in Oakland, his crew separates the paper and bails it for shipping on trucks or cargo containers to paper pulp plants. “It’s now cheaper to ship paper to China in containers than it is to truck it to the pulp plants in Oregon.” Per Dan, the big shipping companies have lots of empty containers going back to China, thus they are very aggressive with discounts to get anything moving in the other direction. These days demand in China for paper boxes is very high. They are needed for packing all of those toys and electric stuff they ship to America. He also mentioned that 90% of all boxes in the United States are used for packing fruits and vegetables. Nowadays it only takes eight days for a container ship to travel to China and five days to truck something across the states at twice the cost. Interesting business I’m sure has a great future. 

All in all it was just another great morning in Northern California.