February 20, 2013

Bolinas	Patch
9:20 am to 10:00 am	2’ to 3’, sets to 4’
Mid outgoing tide	North offshore breeze
Overcast to bright sunshine and cold	Fun session

“Help me out with today’s blog, what would you say about this morning’s session?” I put this question to Hank and Marty during our after session breakfast at the Parkside Café in Stinson Beach.

“What got me was how cold it was when we arrived,” Hank said after thinking about it for a second. “There was no sun and the wind was freezing cold. The temperature was in the thirties.” Hank’s car has a thermometer that gives the outside temperature. Hank and Marty arrived around 7:30 and were in the water at 8 am. “The sun was behind a cloud cover and it was still dark. The wind blew down Brighton Ave, but it was not on the beach and the sun came out as we entered the water. Five people were out at the Patch and the waves were bigger earlier. It wasn’t that cold out in the water. But you sure felt the cold when you came up the ramp and hit that cold wind again.”

It was a cold morning. I had to pull out my Wisconsin badger ice scraper that my son gave me ten years ago when he was a grad student at the University of Wisconsin that I keep in the front door pocket of my car to scrape ice off my windshield in Mill Valley. Kate warned me to watch out for black ice on the road driving over the mountain. When I hit the top of the ridge above Mill Valley, at Four Corners, the sun was out, the air was much warmer and the road was dry.

Last week the three of us planned to have an after surf meal at the Parkside, thus I didn’t want to hold up the show. Shortly after I enter the water, Hank went in and Marty followed him in a few minutes later. So I had a short session, but given the cold air and my weak arms, forty minutes was plenty. But I had a good session. In that brief time I caught six waves, popped up on three of them, rode two on my knees and the last one lying down to work it all the way to shore.

The waves were good. The swell had come up from Monday. Per Stormsurf, a gale in Japan had set off a sizeable swell that arrived on Monday, peaked on Tuesday and was declining today. The SF buoy read 8 ft swells at 14 seconds. The waves at the Patch were a consistent three feet with occasional sets to four feet. On one wave I connected on a good inside right. I took off late, popped up, cut right, and hung high in the curl as the wave broke in front of me. I hung in there, maneuvered under the white water, climbed back into the swell and continued a long ways until the wave died near shore. For a brief second I felt like my old self, my spirits were up and I was looking forward to my next session.