September 24, 2008 Wednesday

Manhattan Beach	38th Street
9:00 am to 10:30 am	2' to 3', occasional 4'
High tide	Slight onshore breeze
Fog, hazy sunshine, warm	So - So session

Fog! Pea soup London fog greeted me this morning when I awoke in Palos Verdes. I hadn’t seen thick fog like this since I was a little kid. While driving to Manhattan Beach to meet my friend Brad, my mind flashed back to elementary school at Valmonte on foggy days like this. We used to kick kick-balls straight up in the air. They would disappear in the fog and then suddenly reappear a few feet above our heads. It was great sport with twenty kids milling around trying to catch the balls descending out of the fog.

Brad was outside waiting for me at his daughter’s house. We strapped his board on top of the car and headed for El Porto, which is the north end of Manhattan Beach. The surf was small but there were plenty of people in the water. We drove to the south end of the parking lot to avoid the crowd. Bunches of surfers, five to ten, were grouped along various peaks. There didn’t appear to be any difference in the quality of the waves. So why the bunches? Was it herd instinct or locals who truly knew where the peaks were?

We went out in front of the lifeguard tower at 38th Street, a couple of blocks north of Rosecrans Ave because no one was there. The fog was lifting, the surface was glassy and the waves were two to three foot walls. I was surprised on my first wave I caught a good, fast, long left. The waves were more makeable than they looked. Brad too got a good right curl right away. Now we were into it, catching small walls one after another, with occasional long lulls between sets.

We discussed the economic meltdown out in the water. The Secretary of the Treasury had proposed a $700 billion bailout and Congress was debating the issue. Brad and I agreed that the crisis was due to years of risky loans by mortgage brokers and that the house of cards of millions of bad loans was collapsing before our eyes. What to do? Both of us were impacted, worried and agreed that the best course of action was to hang tight. Don’t do anything, neither buy nor sell, let things stabilize first. Brad emphasized that my wife should keep working for at least another five years. I had heard a comparison between today’s crisis and the economic meltdown in Japan in the early nineties. Both involved massive bad real estate loans. The commentator stated that after fifteen years Japan’s economy has finally rid itself of all the bad debt, and it may take that long for the US economy also.

Heady talk, lousy waves, the onshore wind had picked up, the waves became mushy, and we knew we had seen the best of it. “Brad, remember when we were kids, the onshore wind always came in at 10:00 am. Well it’s 10 o’clock and the wind is here.” After an hour and a half we played the “one more wave” game and went in.

We carried on our discussion through breakfast at the Kettle restaurant in downtown Manhattan Beach.

“How are the Indian casinos doing?” I asked Brad. “One would think with this economy, less disposable income and the high price of gas that the casinos would be hurting.” Brad lives in New Mexico and knows a great deal about this charade of the “sovereign nations.”

“They are doing great. You don’t know human nature,” Brad replied. “In tough times people are more apt to take a chance on the dream that will instantly solve their problems. The casinos are booming.” The tribe near him in Los Alamos had just opened a second casino, a big $280 million palace. This is a tribe of two hundred members and you don’t see any Indians working there.

“I once asked one of the employees, a collage age white kid, for something and he didn’t speak English,” Brad continued. “I later found out most of the help were Lithuanians on some sort of temporary work visas. So much for providing jobs for the local economy. These kids save their money and take it with them when they go home. Nobody talks about this aspect of the business.”

We then got onto immigration, another one of my favorite topics. But all in all we had fun in the surf, a good breakfast and a stimulating conversation. We planned to do it again tomorrow.