June 9, 2014 Monday

Bolinas	Groin
9:30 am to 10:40 am	2' to 3', sets to 4'
High tide	Onshore west breeze
Air temp: 65 degrees	Water temp: 54 degrees
Sunny and warm, fog on the horizon	Fun session

June gloom hit Marin with a vengeance. It arrived June 2nd and lasted through last Friday (June 6th) – every morning: fog, drizzle and wind that would not burn off until 3 to 4 pm in the afternoon. That and minus low tides and no swell wiped out any surfing. I came to Bolinas last Monday and there was no one here – no one, no cars and no bodies in the water. I went for an hour walk on the beach at Stinson for a little exercise. The gloom broke Saturday; Sunday was a spare-the-air, high fire danger heat-wave day, and this morning it had cooled off a little. But at 7 am it was already sunny and warm in Mill Valley when I took off for the beach.

David who used to ride the Becker Board had parked his car in his usual spot when I turned onto Brighton Ave. "David's here and he is in the water. There must be waves." I hadn't seen him for a long time. Word on the beach was that he had a bad shoulder and couldn't surf.

"Where's your Becker board?" David greeted me as I paddled out to the Groin on my 9' 2" Haut.

"This morning I got lazy and didn't want to strap my Becker onto the top of my car." My Haut barely fits into my Jeep Liberty, my Becker doesn't.

"The doctor says it's stretched tendons and that he cannot operate on them. So I had to come out here to insure that I can still do it. I'll go back in a couple of weeks to get a second opinion." Boy I didn't see any problems; David was his old self, constantly paddling all over the place and picking off several waves.

When checking out the waves I met Francine and DB the Safeway checker. Francine was recovering from a hip replacement and a bad back. DB was running her dog Viola on the beach. Since Francine lives in the City, they had planned on going to Ocean Beach, but it was terrible: small, windy, choppy, cold and nobody out in the water. So they came here to Bolinas. They suited up and went out on the Seadrift side of the Channel. I could see them in the distance. Francine claimed she had a great time – little by little it's coming back.

Conditions were not good – a 5 to 7-foot NW wind swell at 10 seconds with a stiff onshore breeze and a texture on the water. The Patch was flat and nobody was out there. The sand was in, the lower half of the ramp and all the rocks at the base were buried. On the south side of the Groin wall the currents had pushed tons of sand onto shore forming a steep beach with a deep hole in the water where the bottom consisted of rocks, not sand. Consistent 3 to 4-foot swells were coming in, but due to the high tide, the steep beach and deep hole, the waves piled up into thick peaks that slid from the top and smashed on the shore.

However, some good peaks did form and David was on them. If the swell peaked north of the wall, the "Malibo" peak formed and wave would break to the right. If the swell peaked south of the wall, nearer to the Channel, the wave would break to the left. Observing this I managed to connect on three good lefts and two long rights in the 70 minutes I was out there. The rest of the time I was paddling around missing the waves. After a couple attempts I learned to wait until the waves were breaking. They would curl at the top, slowly slide down the face while the swell continued to build as they approached the shore, where they would suck out in the shallow water and crash onto the steep beach. Five times I stroked into to top breaking curls and felt the waves beginning to push me along, I would stroke a couple more times to insure I was into the waves, jump up while still at the top of the swells, push into the building curls, hum down fast peeling faces and bail out when the waves began to suck out on shore.

After an hour David had gone in, the first surf camps of the season arrived, the fog rolled in and the wind picked up – time to go in.

I topped off this good morning by writing up this entry while having a late breakfast at the Bayview Cafe in Sausalito, one of my favorite spots.