September 29, 2010 Wednesday

Bolinas	Patch
10:00 am to 11:30 am	3' to 4', sets to 5'
Low upcoming tide	No wind to slight onshore breeze
Low on-the-deck fog to high fog	Good session

Coming back up the ramp after checking out the surf I saw Barry the management team builder sitting in the driver’s seat of his truck in his trunks.

“Barry how was it?”

“I got clobbered.” I could see he was pain.

“What happened?”

“I was paddling out and some surfer took off where he should never be taking off. He came right at me and hit me.” He pointed to a three-inch gash in his pectoral muscle. The nose of the other surfer’s board hit him with full force. Keep in mind Barry was wearing a 4mm wetsuit and through this the impact left this ugly abrasion.

“I can’t lift my arm.”

“Are you going to have someone look at it?” His wound looked serious to me.

“No. I don’t have any insurance.”

“Barry there’s insurance and there is health. If you need help, get it.”

“I do have a policy with a $5000 deductible. I have to be dying before I go to a doctor.”

“You should have this X-rayed. You may have broken a bone.”

“Nothing is broken. It’s just the muscle. I’m off to ice it down.” With that he started his truck and drove off.

Barry’s incident proved that the waves were pumping. Internet predictions for surf were good: six to eight foot NW swells at 16 seconds for the next five days. This morning the buoys read 8 ft swells at 14 seconds from the west at 280 degrees, meaning they would be coming directly into Bolinas. The entire Northern California surf community had read these predictions. The parking lot was full when I arrived; it was mid-week, a normal work day, the schools were in session and Bolinas was jammed.

Check out the above photo. The fog was thick; on-the-deck fog shrouded the entire Stinson-Bolinas Bay. Martha informed me to forget taking any pictures this morning due to fog. She had just walked down to the Patch and couldn’t see anyone in the water but she knew people were out there. She planned to hang around until the fog lifted. I walked down to the Groin. Through the fog I could barely see a gaggle of twenty surfers bunched together at one peak. The waves were glassy three to four foot fast breaking lefts. Every wave had at least two people on it, and nobody was making them. Twenty surfers tightly packed into one peak going for close out waves did not look appealing.

I walked down to the Patch to check it out. Don my surf buddy from the Kahuna Kapuna surf contest was stretching on the beach about to go out. If a good surfer like Don has selected the Patch, who am I to argue? Walking back up the ramp I met Jack the Dave Sweet Team rider. He was suited up, board in hand, heading to the beach and announced that he was going to the Patch because there are too many surfers at the Groin. Two of the best surfers I know chose the Patch over the Groin, thus the Patch was the call this morning.

I paddled out to join Martha, Don and Jack at the inside right peak. In came a sizeable wall, I thought it was going to break, but it didn’t, it just kept coming in and building. Don calmly stroked into it as it was cresting. He smoothly drifted towards the peak, swung around right as a four-foot wall formed in front of him; he stepped to the center of the board, crouched down and cruised across a perfectly formed section. Paddling on his knees, Jack stroked into a five-foot peak, calmly dropped down the face, then cruised across a right peeling line, cut-back, turned into the shore break and hummed across a fast inside section.

The inside rights were the call today. A bigger crowd sat way outside and north of us, but the four of us dominated the inside peak and had a great time. The swell was strong, the sets were consistent and the bigger waves would stretch across the entire impact zone and would form into fast, long right peeling curls. The sets looked like they were going to break way outside, but they didn’t. They just kept pushing forward and they always broke to the right. Don had it figured out. He would take off late on walls that looked like they were going to collapse in a fifty-foot sheet of water. But they didn’t, they held up and time and time again he screamed across steep inside sections. These conditions lasted all morning. Don picked off the biggest waves of each set, Martha was right behind him and I got my share.

“Don, why did you decide to come to Bolinas this morning?” I asked back at the cars after our session. Don is an expert surfer thus I expected some sort of analysis, a studying of conditions of the Internet then the selection of the break with the best conditions. He lives in Oakland thus he has to decide where to head when he walks out the door. From Oakland the time to Santa Cruz and Bolinas are about the same and it’s less for him to go to Linda Mar in Pacifica. Don gave me a non-analytical answer:

“I wanted to take my dog.”

A tired but happy dog sat in the back of his Vanagon. His answer was logical. He wanted to run his dog on the beach and the best and only surf spot where dogs can run free is Bolinas. Because of his dog he came to Bolinas. He had no idea what the surf conditions were and he was surprised by the good waves and the amount of people in the water.