Flying

So, the alarm goes off at 4:15 am. I get up, take the dog for a walk up the street to let her go to the bathroom. I come back, feed her, make coffee and breakfast, then take my surfboard and strap it to the top of my car, parked across the street. I start it up and drive to the 101. It's now 5:15 am.

I cruise in the light to nil traffic through downtown on the 110, then south towards the 105, which I take west towards LAX. I continue past LAX on the Imperial Highway until I stop at the ocean south of Playa Vista. I turn left and drive to El Porto. I reach the parking lot waaaayyy early, at 5:35, and have to wait for the Manhattan Beach maintenance man to unlock the gate at 6:10. I snooze, watch the locals surfing on the nice, slightly scary lined up waves and listen to Howard Stern.

I park close to the bathrooms and put on my springsuit. It's a bit cold in the air, and cloudy, which means that the water is probably pretty cold. Many guys are putting on their fullsuits, which I did not bring, so oh well. I put on some sunscreen anyway, put my car key in the pocket inside the suit, grab my funshape with the new leash I had to get last week and jog across the sand to the hazy spray coming from the head high waves crashing all along the beach.

The paddle out is not easy, but I make it OK. The water felt cold at first, but now it's warmed up with all the paddling. Now the waves are coming in strong and FAST. Big ones, breaking all over the place, so you have to watch yourself and make sure you're not caught inside and have to take one on the head. The waves are big enough that when one passes you, you look back and it blocks your vision, you cannot see the beach and the houses behind you until it breaks.

It's not as crowded as it normally gets, but it will get that way fairly quickly, so we want to catch as many as we can right away. I paddle for a few but they fly by me. I'm sitting about 10 yards farther out than the others, due to the fact that my board is longer and more buoyant than the shortboards that everyone else has (aside from a few longboarders bobbing up and down beside me). I do this because my board allows me to catch waves earlier, before they're completely formed and ready to break. It gives me more time on the face, but I'm not quite as fast as shortboarders. That's why I have a funshape, which is a mix of a longboard and a shortboard. My board is a LOT faster than a normal longboard.

I'm sitting on a right shoulder (this means that when the wave forms and breaks, I'm sitting on one edge of it, and I won't go down with the lip immediately. A little hard to explain completely without a picture diagram). I paddle into a moderate size, head high wave, and catch it. By the time I'm standing the wave has jacked up to 2-3 feet over my head, and the sheer speed has made my board buckle- telling me that I need to move it the hell along or I am going to go flying off and down the face. I shoot along the face to the right, my body facing the face of the wave, and I carve up and down the side, but just barely. I'm moving so fast that I can barely believe it, it feels like I'm flying, the whole time I'm focused on the end of the wave forming in front of me, whether it's going to close out or keep forming this fantastic shape for me to ride. The closer we get to the shore, I move up to the top and use my board as a springboard to jump over the top of the wave and land in water behind it.

I come up completely exhilarated and shaking with adrenaline. I've surfed El Porto at least once a week for the past 6 months and I've never gone so fast or ridden a wave with such power. I'm hooting and hollering as I paddle back out, ready to catch another one.

I end up catching two more lefts, and hurt my shins dropping down a steep face when the lip knocks me off my board. I'm OK, but my shins hurt. Still excited about the waves I've caught today. Ready for more.