Good Surfternoon…01/09/2012

Good Surfternoon…01/09/2012 It’s been blowing southerly and south-easterly all week with thunder, lightning, rain and just generally poor conditions. I’ve just kicked my heels at home instead of going out and getting wet which has left both my wife and myself a bit stressed to say the least so of course with the sun shining and a shift in the wind direction – though still strong – I had to check out the beach after getting in just after eight. I’d promised my youngest a Star Wars day; we’d watch Episode 1, play with the toys and have a fight with the lightsabers and just generally do nothing of any importance. She was well excited and had been for days. Me? I felt like going and seeing if I could get the remastered DVD’s of the original trilogy and episode 1 on disc instead of tape from town as she has got so into it lately and this would give us the ideal opportunity to check out the sea while going for a blast on the bikes while my wife delivered our eldest to her best friend’s for the day. Wow! Highwater and the sea was pumping. Really pumping. I’ve not seen it like this since last May and I’ve been itching to get the RRRapido wet properly. Running in long, unbroken lines that made it over the sandbanks without being broken up, one after the other and going 4-6ft with good spacing it looked like a superb session could be possible; indeed two surf kayaks launched as we went past. We upped the speed and stood for ten minutes as the bridge went up… The shop was closed. Damn. We came home and, while waiting for my wife to return and knowing that the water would start to drop soon and that’d be the end of it, we sat and watched the film. I was terrible at it, lasting half an hour or so before things caught up and I fell asleep. Candle well and truly burned this week. Still, I managed to rouse myself after a while, poured more coffee and watched some more. But where was my wife? It hit noon and I had to get lunch on. Chunked chicken breasts, floured and deep fried and a home-made sweet and sour sauce and we were away, my wife coming through the door just as I put the finishing touches to it. Green light; food down and I was off. Upstairs and my Psycho III gimp suit goes on. Mystik paddle is taken out and snapped together. ATC-9K is brought down, sealed up and mounted to the nose and my RRRapido is brought through the house from the garden. I’m out of here; see you two down the beach. Oh no! It’s dropped off a lot. The water is halfway down the beach now and the banks are absorbing a lot of the swell. It’s kicking up a bit further out but inshore it looks nothing on this morning. This morning looked nuts. Dangerous almost. Sick. There are a gaggle of surfers and paddle boarders hanging on the groyne too so the prime take-off is taken. Oh well. I look like a Power Ranger. Or a pervert. I wade in and paddle up the inside of the groyne letting the rip take me out past the boardies. I hang there, waiting and watching all these waves crash out before they get to me as the surfers take a few as they rear up by the structure…finally one comes through and I leave it for a paddle boarder, wait for the next and go for it. I’m just about to drop down when the paddle boarder comes through from my right; I pull up a few feet from impact and we miss. He’s not made the first, taken the second after all and I’ve not seen him while I’ve been concentrating on my take-off. My fault though, technically, as he was first on the wave. He forgives me. He should have left it though or not turned so sharply. It’s an age before I’m free to take another, dicking around with lesser ones that don’t get me shifting enough. I try a good bit further out on the banks themselves but there’s nothing but mess and the wind is screaming here. I get blown over at one point. I head back in and finally though I’m running and pull myself off the lip and down, down, into a turn and along, spinning up and over the top. Okay, good practice run; a couple more follow a while apart and then I grab a beauty; long, high, fast and beautifully shaped. I run along it, start to lose the height towards the end of the wave and pull round into a 180, lean forward and run in backwards until I lose depth and the tail buries and I go under. Brilliant! Another beauty arrives soon after and I run down it, pull round badly and go in sideways all the way to the shore; thumbs up from the girls who are now down the beach too, Abigail trying to use the bodyboard in waves a bit big for her; she jumps and splashes instead after a while. I hang around and start to catch some a bit more often and some are great. There’s nothing mediocre to be fair, it’s all or nothing but most of the time someone jumps on the wave before me; I nearly ram another late-entry boardie swinging in from the right. I get a few though and one is the best shaped wave I’ve seen down here. I finish playing after a couple of hours. It’s been so frustrating but wonderful when they’ve been available to me. If only I’d been free at high water though…