May 4, 2011 Wednesday

Bolinas	Channel
10:15 am to 11:45 am	2' to 3', occasional 4'
Low upcoming tide	Slight onshore breeze
Bright sunny day	Fun session

The others had taken the first wave in the set. I paddled over it and was greeted by a four-foot well-formed peak that was about to break. I decided to go for it, turned around quickly, paddled at an angle, jumped up, stood on the tailblock, dropped down the face as the wave broke, climbed back up the face, set my inside rail under the lip of the curl, crouched down and cruised through a perfect curl. The wave kept building in front of me and I kept sailing along. On and on I went, three-quarters up on the board just standing there frozen in the curl. Finally the wave ran into deep water and died. What a great ride, my first and best wave of the day. Right after that I connected on two more similar waves.

The waves were much better than I expected. The buoys reported a mediocre swell: 8.4 ft at 12 seconds from 319 degrees, with a 1.5 ft south swell at 14 seconds. The north swell was too north and didn’t wrap into Bolinas or Stinson. Only the underlying south swell appeared at our beaches.

I stopped at Stinson this morning to take a water sample for the Surfrider water-testing program. Creighton walked up the beach shirtless, bare-foot and in trunks.

“You don’t have your board thus it must be lousy,” I greeted him.

“Look at the ripples! It’s flat. I went out and caught a few drops and I got out to go for a jog on the beach just to get some exercise. But I got more waves here than I would have at Bolinas.”

“You checked Bolinas?”

“Yes, there’s nothing there.”

What a dedicated surfer. Creighton was up before dawn, drove thirty minutes to Bolinas, then drove to Stinson, suited up and went out. He decided it wasn’t worth it and went for a jog instead, and all this before going to work.

At the parking lot in Bolinas Mary was getting into her car to leave. She had surfed for an hour and a half and reported that the weather and sunlight were so beautiful it was worth it. I noted that she didn’t mention anything about the quality of the waves.

Walt the photographer and I walked down to the Groin wall to check the surf. We met Marty who had just exited the water. Yesterday Marty had returned from a three-week trip to the Netherlands, and this being his first day back he was going out no matter what the conditions. Seven surfers were bunched together at the Channel, including David who rides the Becker board, Novato Pete, and Dexter the Bolinas local. The waves were small and the sets were infrequent.

While standing there with my camera in my hand I pumped Walt for some photography tips. Walt is a professional who is still adjusting to the impact of digital photography. I was taking a photo class and looked on this as an opportunity to learn from a real photographer. Walt was kind enough to give me some techniques for determining the correct aperture setting for shooting the water. He had just returned from a week shoot in South Carolina. A development company of a new high-end housing project hired Walt for some promotional shots.

“A week shoot! That’s a lot of time. How many shots did you take? Two hundred per day?”

“I took over five thousand frames.”

“Five thousand! Did you process all of them through Photoshop?”

“No, using Lightroom (another Adobe software package) I scan them and got it down to sixteen hundred. I gave them a disk with the raw files and JPEG equivalents, and if they want more post production work it will cost them.” Bottomline, Walt was ready to go out regardless of the conditions. Since the weather was so good, I decided to join him.

Jim the jazz guitarist pulled up as we were changing. Jim is another dedicated surfer. At 5:30 am this morning Doug picked Jim up and they drove to Dillon Beach. It was small and blown out. They then drove to Salmon Creek (not a short drive). It was blown out and huge. Doug kissed it off because he had an appointment to get his car fixed at noon. Back at home, Jim jumped in his car and headed for Bolinas. “There’s always something at Bolinas.”

The three of us entered the water together. The waves were small but conditions had improved as the tide came up. David sat on the north edge of the impact zone picking off some good inside left curls. David had already been out for three hours, thus I was sure that he had figured it out, so I paddled over to join him. Walt on his stand-up and Jim went over to the Seadrift side to go for the rights. From a distance I saw both of them glide down some well-formed walls.

A big guy on a stand-up board, who obviously was just beginning, was struggling. After he nearly ran me over, he mumbled to me that if he was on his normal board he would have made that wave. We clashed a couple of more times, and then a large set came through. He was in position so I backed off and paddled over it. The wave was cresting and he was frantically trying to turn his board around. The wave was going to break on him. At the last second, he lay down on his board, turned it around with his arms and stroked into the wave lying down. I looked back and this guy was up and streaking left down a nice head-high curl. It was his best ride of the morning.

Jim and I exited the water at the same time. We were feeling good about our sessions. Ideal conditions were in this morning: sunny heat-wave weather, crystal clear water, slight on-shore breeze, mellow crowd and gentle old-man waves.