February 11, 2008 Monday

Bolinas	Straight out from the ramp
9:00 am to 10:30 am	3’ left curls, sets to 4’
Low tide, just turned at 8:00am (1.1 ft)	Wind
Warm, clear and sunny	Fun session

This morning I gathered two water samples from Bay Front Park in Mill Valley for the first time. The Southern Marin Sewage Agency had two recent sewage spills: January 25^th of 2.45 million gallons and January 31^st of 2.7 million gallons. That’s more than 5 million gallons of partially treated sewage dumped into Richardson Bay. Both spills are the result of capacity problems due to the runoff from rainstorms and operator inattentiveness in activating auxiliary pumps. You can imagine the political “stuff hitting the fan” from the ecology sensitive Marin populace. Bay Front Park sits on the edge of Richardson Bay in front of the treatment plant that had the problem. Surfrider Foundation of Marin of which I am the Secretary/Treasurer has a water-testing program in partnership with the Branson School. The program tests water at the popular surf locations for sewage related contamination such as e-coli and enterococcus. We quickly expanded the program to include Richardson Bay near this problematic sewage plant. This morning I took our first bay water samples to Branson for testing.

Next I stopped at Stinson to gather another water sample and to check the surf. There was a swell but the tide was too low, thus onto Bolinas. When I arrived, Mary and Marty were there chatting with surfboards still in their vehicles. They had been there for a half an hour waiting for the tide to turn. Professor Steve came up the ramp from his morning exercise. He thanked me for the photo I had given him last week. He said he had it on his desk. Robert the Larkspur carpenter arrived. We all watched the waves for awhile and concluded that with the tide change wave conditions were improving, so decided to go out front of the ramp. 

What a good move. Straight out from the ramp was a peak that was breaking in both directions with the lefts being faster and longer than the rights. As the tide came in the waves got better. They were a fairly consistent three feet with sets at four feet. The waves were a combination of a wind swell on top of strong ground swell. The wind portion would peak, crest and break by sliding from the top while the ground swell formed into steep breaking wave with some force. The trick to riding them was to catch the wind portion as it was first sliding down the swell and then drop into the stronger ground swell portion of the wave. It took all of us awhile to get the hang of catching these waves. But after a half-hour we all were catching several waves. I managed to catch five great high in the curl long fast breaking lefts. 

Marty, Mary and I sat out there and admired the beauty that surrounded us. It was warm, sunny, and clear and the waves were fun. It was a great day.