January 24, 2011 Monday

Bolinas	Patch
8:30 am to 10:30 am	3' to 4', sets to 5'
Low upcoming tide	No wind
Bright sun with high clouds	Good session

Ideal conditions reigned this morning and the elements improved as we moved through the morning. Marty and I walked down to the Groin wall to get a close look at the surf. For the first time in a week we could walk in front of the retaining wall of the house on the south side of the ramp. Last week extreme high tides in the morning pushed three feet of water up against the wall preventing us to pass. The surf this morning was closing out due to the low tide. Three surfers were there; David who rides the Becker board was one of them. Remnants of last week’s big swell were still coming in (7 ft NW swell at 15 seconds). With no wind the surface was smooth and the waves were clean, but they were breaking too fast, closing out and at times sucking out onto the sand. We watched David fly down a couple of fast walls that exploded in front of him. That’s him in the above photo.

To us the Patch looked more inviting. Mary, Jaime the starving artist cartoonist, Kathy the biology teacher and Cathy from the Russian River area were way, way out at the Patch connecting on these long, slow rides. The no-fear-factor prevailed at the Patch, thus Marty and I decided to head out there. Paddling out I watched Kathy cruise down a long left wall. “The lefts are breaking,” I said to myself, “I’ll go for those.” On my first wave I caught the white water sliding down the face of a four-foot wall. It picked me up and I sped along aiming to climb back into the swell. The white water disappeared as the wave reformed and I was now back into the swell crouched down mid-board shooting through a four-foot section. I cut back into the breaking part of the wave, let the swell build up again, and swung left into another fast section. On and on I went until the wave died in the shallow water of the Patch reef. What a great start to my session. I now had the strategy: catch the white water sliding down a sizeable peak and maneuver it into swell of a reforming wave. I did that at least six times, all of them great rides.

I noticed that David had joined us, confirming that Marty and I had made the right decision. David prefers the faster waves of the Groin, but if it is not happening, he doesn’t hesitate to make the long paddle to the Patch to connect with better waves.

Marty caught a good one and nearly killed me. I was making the long paddle back out to the line-up, I came over the crest of a small wave and there was Marty taking off on a well-formed set wave. “Oh on, he is heading right for me,” I said to myself. Instead of confusing him by paddling one direction or another, I froze and just sat there. He kept coming and was picking up speed as the wave stood up and starting breaking. On he came and I didn’t move. Marty cut in front of me, missing me by one foot (yes he was within inches of me), spending spray onto my board and he continued on. He told me later that was his best ride of the morning. It held up, kept reforming and on and on he went. He didn’t say a word about nearly clobbering me.

Julie, the Bolinas local who works for the Public Works department of Mill Valley, paddled out to join us. She’s an excellent surfer and knows the Patch well. She caught a couple of waves with the rest of us and then headed north and further out. I joked that she was on a tsunami watch waiting for that legendary rogue wave. Well it finally came and she connected. It was a beautiful sight, she was 200 yards north and 100 yards further out than the rest of us. The set wave peaked and she stroked into it. She skillfully angled left with her back to the wave and casually cruised down a wall of water that was a foot over her head. She paddled way out there again to wait for another big one. Her wait was long but I saw her connect on two more of them this morning.

“Jeff, did you surf Dillon Beach during last week’s big swell? Dillon had to be closing out.” Jeff the Lawson’s Landing boat mechanic had joined us.

“Saturday, Dillon was twelve feet with big barrels, which I didn’t get near to, and yesterday it was ten feet and gnarly. So I came here today to get some mellow waves.”

And mellow it was. Hank paddled out on his big red ten-footer sporting a baseball cap. As the morning progressed, the sun warmed things up, the wind stopped, the surface glassed off and the waves became more consistent. All of us, Marty, David, Jeff, Hank, Julie and I connected on several good long rides. What an ideal morning: warm sunny weather, glassy conditions, mellow crowd and consistent three to five-foot waves coming through.

As Marty and I walked back to the ramp after our session we spotted Cathy on the seawall cutting down the brush with her tree-branch saw. You know the kind, a long pole with a curved saw blade on top. Cathy is a landscaper and carries her equipment in her pickup truck along with her surf gear. She was clearing the brush and tree branches away from the path on the north side of the seawall. Here the concrete top ends and we have to carefully step over the boulders that form the foundation of the wall to get to the beach. The local foliage had been encroaching out onto the path making it difficult to climb over the boulders. Cathy took matters into her own hands and chopped away one ton of shrubs to clear the path. She parked her truck at the top of the ramp, dragged all her cuttings up the ramp, loaded up the truck and drove them to the Bolinas dump, which was not far away. I’m sure the owner of the property never noticed the change, but we aging surfers appreciated Cathy’s efforts.