February 2, 2009 Monday

Manhattan Beach	El Porto - 42nd Ave
10:00 am to 11:30 am	2' to 3', occasional 4'
Low outgoing tide	Slight offshore breeze
Sunny and warm, Santana condition	Fun session

El Porto presented perfect, old man long board waves, knee high curls, my kind of waves. Gentle, well-formed peaks where the inside curls held up. On my first wave I coasted into a three foot wall that I thought would close out. I swung left, climbed high in the curl, saw it was breaking, leaned into the curl, shot through a breaking section into clear swell, stalled for a second to let the wave build and sailed through another section right up to the shore break. I had traveled a long ways for a beach break. Right then I knew I was in for a good session. Next wave, same thing, a long in the curl left, then I caught a similar wave going right. I knew this morning there might be some small fun waves.

Kevin, Allison and I had driven to Palos Verdes for my family’s annual Superbowl party. My brothers and I meet at my mother’s house to watch the game. The highlight is the football pool. We randomly draw ten numbers, 0 through 9, and throw in ten dollars for each number. The units digit of the sum of both team’s score determines the winner. So the fun is rooting for teams to score to hit your number. Which team wins is insignificant, and the higher scoring the game the more opportunity for each number to come up. We have to hang in there to the end no matter how one-sided the score because a fluke touchdown changes the winner of the pool. My dad started this tradition years ago, and we have kept it going after he passed away in 1997. This year the Superbowl was a great game, close, with Pittsburgh defeating the Arizona Cardinals 27 to 23 in the last minute of the game. Kevin, who had the number zero, won the pool.

Years ago my brother Carl and I started running in the Redondo Beach Superbowl Sunday 10K Race, which is held at 8:00 am every Superbowl Sunday. Thus our tradition is to run the race in the morning and watch the game with the family in the afternoon. Carl has since stopped running it due to bad knees but Kevin and Allison have joined in. Kevin has run it for the past three years and Allison for the last two.

We drove down with the hope of getting in some waves. Friday afternoon we loaded up my car, strapped two surfboards on top and headed off. When we reached Carpenteria at 10:00 pm we pulled into Motel 6 to spend the night. Carpenteria is south of Santa Barbara and just north of Rincon.

Surf forecasts for this weekend were not good when we left, no swells of any significance. Saturday morning we drove to Rincon Point. Only two cars were in the parking lot when we arrived. That means it was flat. Rincon is the best point break on the California Coast. If anything were breaking there would be thirty people in the water, especially on a Saturday. We walked down to the beach, one guy was in the water, two others were chatting on the shore and perfect six-inch curls were peeling over the jagged rocks. We then traveled south to Surfers’ Point in Ventura, which was also flat. Four surfers were out in front of the parking lot going for barely rideable one-foot ripples. At the north point, ten people were fighting over flat two-foot waves. At that point Kevin and I concluded that surfing this trip just wasn’t going to happen.

Sunday morning Kevin, Allison, 5000 others and I participated in the 10K race. I was out of shape and Kevin was nursing a cold thus we planned to walk the race. One half mile into it we began to “shuffle”, which we kept up until mile four. Kevin and Allison continued on and I dropped back. Shuffling along the Esplanade, which runs along the top of the small bluff above the beach, I watched several long boarders catching well-formed two to three footers. “If it’s like this tomorrow morning, I’m going surfing,” I said to myself.

Kevin and Allison flew back to San Francisco late Sunday night and I started driving home Monday morning. Just as I had thought, the small, fun, glassy peaks were at El Porto, the north end of Manhattan Beach. It was sunny and warm with a slight offshore breeze, heat wave Santana conditions.

“Sploosh,” a pelican dove for a fish fifteen feet from me as I sat outside waiting for the next set. “What a beautiful day,” I thought. I looked around. It was clear, the offshore breeze had stopped and the surface was tabletop smooth. I watched the pelican pick at his feathers, beat his wings on the water and then lift off. Beneath me a large school of small fish passed under me. The water was crystal clear; I could see the contours the sand formed on the bottom. Every five minutes a good three-foot set would come through, and I would connect with another knee-high curl. For thirty minutes I had a good left peak all to myself. I drifted south to the next peak, which looked better and had five guys there. The crowd was mellow and there were plenty of waves. I caught wave after wave. At the end, I connected on a series of four good right peelers. After an hour and a half I had to go in, not because I was exhausted. No, the time on the parking meter was about to expire. In Manhattan Beach, a quarter buys only ten minutes of beach parking.

Afterwards I went to the Kettle, one of my favorite restaurants, for a late breakfast and then stopped at Becker’s Surf Shop in Hermosa Beach to purchase tee shirts and a hat.

I’m writing this sitting on a bench at Leo Carrillo State Park. For you old-timers, this is Secas, the beach where they filmed the movie Gidget. There is no surf, nada, completely flat. On the big rock where the surf usually breaks sits twenty birds: cormorants, which occupy the top, and pelicans, which stick to the leeward side, just another picturesque scene of the California coast.