Disclaimer: The following blog entry is a month old...
I woke up this morning with my right eye crusted shut. I didn’t bother prying it open, but instead squinted at the clock with my left, noticed it was only 7:30, and opted for a little more shut-eye (no pun intended). It had been a fun weekend.
As I milked a little more sleep from the morning, I rewound through the previous two days, which can only be described as an exclamation point at the end of the phrase, "Your wife is out of town for two weeks!"
Last night Gee and I ate four-dollar steaks at The Acropolis, having returned from our beach weekend hungry. There were some sad Sunday night strippers there, but the real attraction was the beef - farm grown by the owner of the joint and bleeding medium rare on my plate.
We were in the mood for red meat because we had been driving around all day looking for surf. O.S. was back in town from Amsterdam, and having been skunked the previous trip, we were determined to at least get wet. And we did, although Gee's knee kept him out of the water like a fantasy football player on injured reserve. Unlike Priest Holmes, I think he'll be back this season.
We hit the water at Shorties at the end of the day. The waves looked like big beer suds, but better than anything we had seen in our explorations all day. No surfers were out, but there were two kids splashing in the foam of the extreme high tide - wearing only their shorts. I was happy to have on my hooded 5mm wetsuit and booties when O.S. and I started making our way to where the waves seemed to have shoulders. They were bigger and more powerful than they looked from the shore. This was exaggerated by the fact that I wasn't really in the best shape for a surf: hangover, atrophy arms from lack of paddling, sleep deprivation, dehydration.
I almost made it outside, exhausted and not ready for the waves that were rearing up and smashing ahead of me. When I emerged from a duckdive, my right eye stung like hell as if a piece of sharp debris got wedged under the eyelid. I turned around and saw that O.S. had drifted 100 yards to the north and he hadn't made it past the first impact zone. I decided to stick with our original plan of attack and "stay together," bellying a wave toward where he was.
Despite taking wave after wave over his noggin, O.S. was having a blast. The excersize was doing us both some good, so we hung out in the reform area. Miraculously, a ridable wave approached and we both paddled for it. I grabbed it and got a short ride on the shoulder before the thing shut down. We flailed around until our arms gave up and we cruised in and changed in the dark.
It must be noted that we did some very interesting spot checking earlier that day. The most amazing find was a rivermouth we'd often heard about but had never seen working (we'll call it Drifty's). It was working that day and we wondered if we should paddle out alone on an outgoing tide, with the fresh water pushing out to sea and toward the troughy chaos at a rapid clip. We threw a piece of driftwood in the water and watched it cruise out to sea. We'd wait to go out with surfers who have been there before...
The previous day, we hunkered down at the Pelican in Pacific City, watching college football and playing drinking games with red wine. Oregon won. USC won. We lost. No surf. Eight hours and two meals later, we were tipsy. We went from the Pelican to a little night spot called The Sportsman, loaded up the jukebox and kicked ass at pool. We followed that with a trip to the Tide Water. I sang "Wanted Dead or Alive" and O.S. sang "A Boy Named Sue" on karaoke. A drunk redneck told a racist joke over the mic and we split.
Drove back to Oceanside and avoided dashing deer along the way...
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - "Devil's Waitin'"
Special thanks to Gee for the photos!
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