East Side Surfblog

Big blog

I think it would be really cool if there is such a thing as Bigfoot. Because that would mean that there has to be more than one of them. I hope there’s a whole passel of Bigfoots. (Bigfeet? Bigfeets?) Anyway, I can see them all chinchilla chillin’ around the crusty campsite crib after a hard day of crunching through the woods, leaving big Bigfoot footprints in the muck. Roasting up a big ol’ buffalo or giraffe or whatever Bigfeets eat, belting back bevies of bosky Bigfootbräu and yukking it up about how big Bigfoot footprints freak out all those little hairless dudes running around the forests looking for them.

But then I read some scientist somewhere debunking the whole Bigfoot thing by saying that the human mind is hardwired to perceive human forms regardless of whether they really exist or not and that all the sightings have probably been bears walking on their hind legs or whatever and some sort of correlation to the instances of people seeing religious figures in pizza crusts and the like.

Which really bums me out on several levels, not the least of which being the realization that this scientist dude is being paid to think about why I think about Bigfeets. And all this time I’ve been doing it for free. What a rip-off. If only my guidance counselor in high school had sat me down and said, “Dude, forget all that other stuff. You can get paid to think about Bigfoot. And if you’re really good, you can make major bucks thinking about why other people think about it.”

I’d be set. Probably even have some time left over to squeeze in a surf or two.

Because, even without remuneration, I’m willing to see all kinds of things that aren’t really there — like waves. I’ve been looking at the IOP my whole life and have repeatedly seen surf when you know darn good and well there isn’t any. Take last Sunday, for instance. Was that surf or did we all just paddle out into some really frothy wind? I know Wiggs and Dano and all those boys had a time, but they’re kiteboarders and therefore already of questionable judgment. I hate the wind. It musses up my comb-over.

Monday after work was slightly better. The wind had a strange angle to it that almost made the troughs and the wave faces glassy. But man, was it still windy. I decided not to paddle against it for a while, looked at my watch and the rip took me down two blocks in less than five minutes. Yessiree, there’s nothing better than walking back down the beach for five blocks with a 30 mph wind blowing sand into your teeth. Plus, I forgot to wear my Doc’s Pro Plugs, and without them I feel like the cover of my favorite King Crimson album.

But I still think I saw waves.

Might as well get used to it, though. Because those SW slop chop sessions are about all we get, and it looks as though there is another one on the way for this weekend. And I’ll take that over flat any day. Plus it will keep the kite crew off the streets for another week. If those guys get bored, no telling what will happen.

And, on another bright note, Vinnie never goes walking in the woods; which is good, because the Bigfeet would probably capture him and make him their King. That would go completely to his head and he’d be lording it over us forever. Plus, poor Mrs. Vinnie would probably get stuck cleaning up all the broken furniture after the big Bigfoot coronation party.

Red Army blog

It’s been so flat that Andy hasn’t even bothered to update his daily surf report on the IOP Surf Cam for a couple of days. He’s basically just left the old report, which states that it is ankle-high and is leaving the current conditions for you to judge for yourself. And, looking at the camera this morning, I can assure you that it is ankle-high. So unless you just want to endure more punishment, save yourself the trouble and take my word for it.

So endless days of flat surf have robbed me of my endorphin fix and I have enlisted in the Soviet Red Army Choir and have been posted to sing backup in a Finnish art band.

I’m the guy with the shoes. Constant drilling, memorization of political slogans, gigging around Helsinki and trips to the hair stylist have pretty much kept my mind off the lack of surf.

But this time of year, I also begin thinking about Hatteras. One advantage of living here is that we are equidistant from Hatteras and Melbourne. Of course, the disadvantage is that you have to get in your car and drive for EIGHT HOURS to get any decent surf. At least the drive up to Hattie is more interesting than down to Melbourne. They don’t call it Melboring for nothing. And I-95 between here and there has to be the most monotonous stretch of road in the South. Of course, there’s a Waffle House at every exit, so there is that.

On the other hand, the pilgrimage up to Hattie is filled with all sorts of amusements. Like the infamous speed trap in Shallotte. Why was it that, even though we all knew it was there, somebody inevitably got snagged? Plus you get to drive through all kinds of towns with interesting names, like Bolivia. Although I do seem to recall a note I made to myself about never again taking a very pregnant woman who has a 2-year-old in hand on an eight-hour road trip with GE when chasing a hurricane swell. That was about 20 years ago, and I’m probably another 15 years or so away from being forgiven for that little adventure.

While I’m dreaming of Hatteras, I also have my eye on the surf forecasting sites, and things don’t look all that stellar for the home team this weekend. There’s a big ol’ glob of swell out in the North Atlantic, but it isn’t anywhere that will do us any good. It looks like we will get a big push of wind out of the SW on Sunday, so there will probably be some wind chop of a rideable size, depending on your level of desperation. But prepare to either paddle constantly against the rip or surrender to the inevitable and do a lot of walking back down the beach.

As for me, I’ll be donning my Red Army uniform and limbering up my vocal cords for another night of Lynyrd Skynyrd favorites.

Quick blog

There’s a little bit of surf today. I heard there was something to ride yesterday, and I’m thinking that there will be something again on Friday. Of course, the weekend will be junk. Somebody had to take a stand, so I’m going to take today and tomorrow off and see if I can get wet a couple of times instead of missing it and complaining. So this is a quick one between a dawn patrol and the deadline for Weekend!

It’s still disconcerting to roll up at my usual spot and see nothing recognizable. The gods of waste have harvested all the old houses. After 50 or so years of going to the beach down the same path, the homes had become like old friends.

Now I do tend to get sentimental about old houses. They just have more soul than the new things they are putting up to replace them. Plus, those new ones are monsters that hold two giant families and are intended for the rental market. Just what I needed, a nice big crowd. Wait ’til somebody learning to surf runs over the wrong kid. Parking meters and designated surfing areas, here we come. I give it less than a decade.

So kiddies, grab your boards and go surfing every chance you get. As a matter of fact, if you are reading this on Thursday, the call would be to head south today and catch a Friday and Saturday session down in central Florida. It should be twice as big there as here. We’ll be in the waist-high range, and they should see shoulder to head sets tomorrow.

Either way, go surf while you still can.

Tire blog

I didn’t go surfing last weekend, but I hung out in McKevlin’s parking lot all day Saturday. Does that count? Mrs. Blog and I attended the annual ESA swap meet and we had a pretty good time chillin’ and swappin’. I got a cool cut-away single-fin from Burbo, who got some sporty Doc Marten’s from Mrs. Blog. But not much surf though.

And there doesn’t look to be much surf on the horizon either. There’s supposed to be another ESA contest this weekend, but the chances for surf are so slim that the contest directors are thinking about canceling it. And if you’ve been around the ESA as long as I have, you’ll know that’s a bad sign. Because those dudes will hold a contest in anything.

So I’m thinking we’ll have to amuse ourselves in other ways this weekend. Hope you have a hobby. I’m thinking about laminating the Oldsmobile wagon with Hawaiian-print fabric and polyester resin.

When it’s surfless like this, about the only exercise I get is over at the health club gulag. I’ve written about it before in this column, so you’ll have to forgive me for being repetitive, but doing mindless repetitions of stuff gives me time to consider. And one of the things I have been considering is this giant tractor tire they now have in there. And what the brawnier people do is they grab it, and toss it over end for end, back and forth over the floor. Which is groovy by me, because it makes all kinds of weird noises and takes my mind off of clanging together whatever mediocre weight I can manage.

So what it has me considering is that there are probably a bunch of people doing this exact exercise except they are getting paid for it. It’s called working at a tire store. And yet, across the street are people who are actually paying someone else so that they can do it. And, to boot, most of the people I’ve seen doing this particular exercise are doing it with a personal trainer in tow. So they are actually paying the facility which houses the big tire, and paying someone to supervise them moving the big tire. And less than 100 yards away is a tire store, which also houses a big tire, where they are paying someone to supervise someone else they pay to move the big tire. It’s like a parallel universe.

I think I have discovered a rip in the fabric of the universe right here in Mount Pleasant. It’s somewhere between the health club and the tire store. I’m not sure, but it might lead to another dimension. I’m thinking if I stand in the right spot, I can pass through it into the “other” Mount Pleasant where they pay me to eat Skoogie dogs and drink cold Heinekens. Plus, I’ll bet there is killer surf every weekend — even when they hold ESA contests.

Relief blog

Oh, sweet relief. As you have probably noticed, there hasn’t been a lot of surfing going on in this blog for a while. I had resigned myself to being marooned tantalizingly close to a cold, flat ocean forever, where the absence of surf distills boredom into drifting insanity. Perhaps I would end up amusing myself by collecting jars of fingernail clippings or shaving the neighbor’s cat and using the fur to make a macrame flowerpot hanger.

Last week, I had my head down in the corporate weeds until Vinnie called and said it looked to him as if there would be a nice swell pushing its way down to those heathens in Florida — which I observed is a complete waste because they get all the surf anyway and don’t deserve it. So Vinnie volunteered to go Spanish House and at least get in the way, if not actually ride some himself. I haven’t heard from him since, so he may still be down there or was captured somewhere and held without bond.

I checked it a couple of times over the weekend and it was almost surfable. Using summer standards, it was definitely on the scale, but having to struggle in and out of wetsuits made it a definite maybe. But I really thought I screwed up late on Sunday. I had sort of written the day off as a no-go and moved on to other things. The temperature had finally gotten to the point where the poor, neglected Tiki Bar no longer needed to be neglected, so I was making up for lost time with a mai tai, Martin Denny and a nice piece of charred mammal flesh sputtering on the grill when I realized that the wind had switched. I live close enough to the beach to hear the surf when it’s big and the wind is blowing just right — which I realized I could right then. But I had already over-committed myself domestically, figured I was a complete dork for missing it and had to settle for the none-too-unpleasant sound of Tune from Rangoon and a second mai tai.

But if you scampered out after work on Monday, like I did, you found that the swell held throughout the day and was quite rideable in the waist to chest zone. Thank-yous to Burbo for the text and to daylight saving time. Of course, being a working stiff, I missed the best of it because the tide was maxed by the time I got there. The real hero stuff came as the tide was coming off low around lunchtime, and the news I heard over the coconut telegraph was that P.K., D-Wood, Dano F. and a few other intrepids paddled SUPs over the inlet with shortboards in tow and caught an epic session out on the third bar.

But I never really kick myself for not trying to run and catch a surf during lunch. For some reason I always get hungry around 12 o’clock. Maybe that’s why they call it lunchtime. So, unawares of any surfing going on, I rolled over to Skoogies (I can only hope Mrs. Blog doesn’t read this because she’ll have me on lettuce and the treadmill for a week) and am standing there trying not to pass out from hypoglycemia when I notice that the lady in front of me is keeping the line from moving by asking questions at the counter. Now, I never pay attention to what people are saying to each other. It is inevitably disappointing. But I do have some special radar that picks up insanity wherever it is and beams it directly into my head — for comparative purposes. So, like the John Candy character, Barf, in Spaceballs, my ear lifted up when I heard the next question.

Lady: “What comes on a slaw dog?”

Surfblogger doing Arnold Horshack: Ooh! Ooh! Mr. Kotter, I know! I know! It’s COLESLAW!!

Skoogie Guy being diplomatic: “We can put anything on it you like.”

Lady: “Well ... sound of sand in gears ... what do most people get?”

Surfblogger: Anchovies. Everybody knows that anchovies come on a slaw dog. Except, of course, in the Loire valley, where the French eschew anchovies in favor of mayonnaise and wild truffles hunted by specially trained pigs.

Skoogie Guy: “I have some customers who add onions and mustard.”

Surfblogger: Let’s forget the slaw and put chili on it. Then you can actually eat a chili dog, but tell everybody you had a slaw dog. It’ll be our naughty little secret.

Lady: “I don’t really like onions. Do you have any relish?”

Surfblogger: Good god, Madam! What kind of exotic condiments do you think this establishment purveys? They could lose one of their Michelin stars over this. Why, you’ll prod Skoogie himself out of the walk-in freezer and send him scouring the globe to procure such a delicacy. Relish, indeed!

Skoogie Guy: “Yes, ma’am. We have relish and sauerkraut, too.”

Surfblogger: A-ha! I knew the Germans would find their way into this. Those crafty Huns have just been waiting for such an excuse to invade South Carolina. What with their crappy weather and lust for real estate, we’ll have hordes of those pointy-helmeted devils trampling jack-booted over us in no time. Sound the alarm! Man the parapets! Boil some oil!

Lady: “Well ... I think I’ll have just a regular hot dog with ketchup and mustard. And could you put some coleslaw on it?”

The neighbor’s cat is getting used to skinning it and my fingernail collection is coming along just fine, thank you.

Pollen blog

03/25/10

It’s a vegetative conspiracy, and they have me pretty well watered and pollinated. I’m convinced that a couple of weeks ago all the trees and bushes in my yard got together when I wasn’t looking and decided to unload all the pollen they could produce and blow it in my direction. If I sit really still, I can hear them all sniggering. I fully expect to awaken one morning to find that breathing six pounds of evil pollen from space has turned me into some half-man half-tree being. Rooted to the spot, unable to move, old and gnarled, reduced to yelling ideological slogans. Sort of like being elected to Congress.

Honestly, I try to stay mellow and in the zone; concentrate on the important things, like working my way down to a smaller shortboard and hanging out in the Tiki Bar. But the surf is cold and flat with a windy NE chop predicted for the weekend. Plus the real world keeps intruding; this time in the form of the health care debate. What a mess that was.

This is a scary country we live in. It seems to me our elected leaders are all pretty cheerful and collegial when they are deciding which country to bomb next. Slapping backs and waving flags. But heaven forbid they have to come together to decide how to take care of a bunch of our fellow citizens — might just cause a big political fight in which everyone loses. Oh sure, there’s always a debate about defense spending. But the thing that is so frustrating for me is that debate is never so acrimonious. If actions speak louder than words, then our country’s leaders seem to find it easier to make war somewhere else than to take care of their own here at home.

We are a nation at war, and I guess we all just have to live with it. But in the context of the health care debate, Congress is pretty generous with public funds for destruction but will fight for years to preserve your right to go bankrupt taking care of a sick family member. If this is about public money, why do we always invade places and blow it all up at great expense and then send over more money to build it back at greater expense? Near as I can tell, the people we are currently “helping” range from being apathetic to outright haters. That will never change. And once we come in and blow their stuff up, then isn’t everybody there pissed and vowing to hate us forever? Since they’re gonna hate us anyway, wouldn’t it be a better financial deal just to leave it blown up? Quit the pretense of being their benevolent Uncle Sam, tell the truth, and say it serves ’em right for hating us to begin with? Plus, it would save them the trouble of blowing it up again themselves when we aren’t looking.

I’d like to see our leaders find a little more balance. Just for a while. Call a short timeout in their stupid ideological differences. Break off a little piece of that war money they’re so quick to spend and take care of our own. The last time I checked, 41% of the world’s total defense spending was by the good ol’ USA. The next in line was China, at 5%. I’m pretty sure we have a bunch of stuff here at home that needs rebuilding. Suppose we spent some of that money keeping millions of our own kids from being hungry and uneducated? Maybe give them access to basic health care. Build high-speed rail, new energy grids and, you know, enter the 21st century. Since we like blowing stuff up, we could blow up a bunch of our old stuff and rebuild it new. You could even hold a lottery to see who gets to push the button. And when we’re done, I bet the people here wouldn’t hate us. Oh, wait a minute — the people here are us.

I know. I sound crazy. It’s the pollen talking. All the trees are out to get me.

Cheerful blog

03/11/10

I’m really going out on a limb here, but I think I was actually warm for a couple of days. Not that the feeling has lasted long, but could it be wrong to get my hopes up? It’s harsh to have them all washed away on the commute to work this morning. I really love the way all the streets flood when it rains. So quaint.

I also love the way some people drive when it rains. I can never quite figure it out. Do stupid people drive stupid all the time and I just don’t notice until it rains? Or does the rain place some extra level of cognitive pressure that stupid people can’t handle so they do stupid things? Or my current theory – that stupid people all huddle together somewhere stupid, marinating in their own stupidity, waiting for the first raindrops to fall, until finally, they can all jump in their cars and spew pent-up stupidity over the rest of us like the foam popping out of the top of a shook-up beer at the end of a NASCAR race. But I’m mellow about it; breathing and counting to three.

Philosophical, actually, because I’ve come up with a list of reasons to be cheerful and, being your full-service Surfblogger, it’s my duty to provide you with:

Reasons to Be Cheerful 1-2-3

1. Ian Dury:
2. The time changes this weekend so it will be light outside when we get home from work for seven glorious months.
3. The surf forecasting sites show a possibility of surf today, if you can go.

As for the weekend surf forecast, there’s all kinds of green globs moving around offshore, and it looks to me like there is going to be some kind of action. The daily wave height forecast, on the other hand, didn’t look too hopeful. So I’m conflicted. I think the wind speed and direction will be the real decider. The first ESA contest of the year is this weekend, so some of us are committed regardless of the conditions. The water temperature is still in the low 50s, so bring all the rubber you own. Brrrrrrrr.

In the meantime, I’m going to stay buried in my work and hunker down in my safe little office until this rain passes. Because I’m like that little kid whispering in that scary movie - “I see stupid people.”

Anger blog

03/04/10

WHY? WHY? WHYYYYY! We’ve all been good, haven’t we? We’ve already suffered through more than our fair share of snow, wind, rain and ice. Why punish us further with more of the same? After months of careful research and observation, I can assure you that being cold sucks, and I’m pissed off about it. Aren’t the real estate prices here punishment enough for living within spitting distance of the beach? I think all the tax reform brouhaha going on at the Statehouse should include a minimum temperature amendment.

Dear Resident-Type:

As a result of ridiculously low temperatures, the value of living in the state has dropped considerably. Therefore, in consideration of having to live here and deal with all the stupidity and weirdness that goes on without the benefit of being warm and having a nice suntan, the state of South Carolina hereby grants you a tax rebate.

However, because of recent budget cuts, there is no one left in Columbia who knows how to operate a calculator, and our office recommends you get in touch with a tax attorney, who will be more than happy to assist you in getting everything sorted out after months of hassle.

Sincerely
Clancy J. Muckitymuck
State Office of the Dudes Who Send You Letters

It could happen. Write your congressmen, and tell ’em the Surfblogger sent ya.

To be fair, we did have one warm day that I remember on Saturday before last. I remember it for a couple of reasons. First, is that it was the day of the annual ESA awards banquet. A good time was had by all. The ESA might as well just go ahead and engrave a bunch of trophies now and give them to the Tanner family. It has to be genetic, it’s the only explanation. Plus, I have to give a shout-out to Rick Anson, who continues to be the guy to beat. To consistently surf competitively at the highest level is truly amazing. I don’t really know a lot about other local amateur sports, but I’d be willing to bet there isn’t anyone else here who has stayed at the top of their golf or tennis game for the (20? 30? 40?) years that Rick has dominated the surf contest arena. I just wish he was either older or younger than me so I wouldn’t get completely thrashed in every heat.

The other reason I remember that nice Saturday so long ago is that it provided impetus for Mrs. Blog to assign me various tasks in the yard. And my assignments invariably involve the use of some cruelly barbaric tool, like a shovel. For, you see, Mrs. Blog can look out over a yard and see any number of bushes, shrubs, flowers and even trees that would look ever so better growing where they are not currently doing so.

Now this is a skill completely foreign to me. When I look at bushes, shrubs, flowers and trees, they are either dead or alive. If the former, too bad for it, and if the latter, whoopee — think I’ll have a beer. But, if there is one thing I have learned after more than 30 years of marriage, it is to dig when and where instructed and shut up. So I did, dug, and after a few hours, old shrubs were in new locations and everything was right in the world.

The following day, I came down with a terrible cold that I can only attribute to being in the dreaded Third World Terminal on my return trip from Rooster Island. Other than the misery of it, no big deal. Until the next day, when I woke up covered in itchy bumps. Like, EVERYWHERE. So that’s when I freaked out and became convinced that I had caught some rare and lethal tropical disease that would make me into a snotty, itchy, crawly, flesh-eating zombie until I was excruciatingly rendered a dried-up corpse found in a closet years later.

You can imagine how much patience it takes to be my doctor.

I know why my doc carries a clipboard. It gives him something to hold on to while listening to me raving about voodoo curses, tropical diseases, decayed appendages, painful death from the outside in and the inside out, flesh-eating zombies; you know — the usual. So after a few minutes of ostensibly keen interest in my raving self-diagnosis and deep knowledge of accursed tropical hexes, a half-lidded stare and some white-knuckled clipboard gripping, he calmly informed me that I had a common cold and had gotten poison ivy from digging up Mrs. Blog’s shrubs. “Oops, hehe, well uh, never mind the whole zombie thing there, Doc. But it could happen, I’ll tell ya that.”

So I got various pills, unguents, nasal sprays and the like and pushed the zombie/death fear back into my subconscious, where it can live to fight against reason another day. One of the pills I had to take for the poison ivy is this prednisone stuff. It’s like some sort of steroid, and you have to take a bunch of it at first and then gradually lessen the dose. That stuff will make you nuts. Not like I need the help. I’m usually pretty mellow about everything, but this stuff made me really angry. I knew there had to be something wrong with me when I was standing in line to order a sandwich and was really pissed off at the people in front of me for talking and laughing. How dare they.

Bev accused me of ’Roid Rage. This pissed me off even further, because if I’m going to be a roid droid, I want to stomp around the office all sweaty with Mark McGwire guns, gnarly tattoos, six-pack abs and a Jay Leno jaw with a big wad of chew in it. Spit brown juice into all the trash cans at people’s desks. I want people to cross the street when they see me coming. Get some respect, know what I mean? Being really angry and skinny is like being the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz. And we all know what those flying monkeys did to that poor little dude.

So what I’m going to do is go dig up a bunch more shrubs and get another gnarly case of poison ivy, go see the doc and get a bunch more of those pills. Then I’m gonna take ’em all the day before the next ESA contest and show up on the beach like some demented pro wrestler, flexing my deltoids and shouting incoherent slogans about the weather and tax rebates. I’ll never be able to out-surf Rick Anson, but I could damn sure chew the fins off his boards in the parking lot.

Rooster blog

02/25/10

We didn’t exactly go off the grid, but we did go close enough to sit on the edge of it, wiggle our toes in the spicy air and imagine what it would be like. You could go off the grid here in Charleston, I suppose. I know a few people around here who have never been on it. But off the grid, as I imagine it, would be somewhere more exotic.

One of the advantages of being a surfer is that it simplifies the process of choosing an island. There either is surf or there isn’t. If there is, then it becomes a matter of defining the size potential, crowds, aquatic danger, etc. etc. Way down on the list are such things as accommodations, electricity and other creature comforts. A successful surf trip requires only one key ingredient — waves. An extraordinarily simple formula.

So you have to admire our courage when Vinnie and I decided to ask Mrs. Vinnie and Mrs. Blog to come along with us. Because, although we love them dearly, our wives don’t usually see things through that same lens, which complicates the formula immensely. And it’s not as if either one of them is some innocent ingenue, either. Over the (dare I say 35) years the poor things have sat on some godforsaken shore/rock/pier/car hood waiting for us to slake our surf lust, they have been almost carried off by libidinous natives, trampled by herds of wild ponies, devoured by biting flies, slithered over by snakes, shredded by wind, pooped on by birds, drowned by rain and blistered by the sun. Just to name a few.

I know this is going to sound selfish, but it’s pretty hard to enjoy a surf session when your wife is being torn to pieces and eaten by hungry animals. All the shrieking, running and thrashing about on the shore makes it hard to concentrate on your bottom-turn-off-the-top combo. Damned bad form, if you ask me. At least they could have the decency to be devoured quietly.

In any event, the poor creatures have known what they are up against for decades and are pretty much old hands when it comes to a surf trip. So we fulfilled the criteria for what we thought would provide the best waves, and Vinnie and I, being consummate gentlemen, chose an island with a fairly decent chance of hot water, electricity and safe beds. Heck, Mrs. Blog and I even brought our own pillows from home. But we were completely surprised by the hazard that lay ahead.

You’ve probably heard about cases where man has intruded on nature and introduced some foreign species which then becomes invasive. Well, our little dot of paradise was completely overrun by a monster that is scientifically known as gallus gallus domesticus. Yep, chickens. Now, those of you who know me well will know that I have quite a bit of history with this particular species of bird. It is actually pretty quaint to have them running around underfoot at the ferry docks, restaurants and beaches. But it is another thing entirely at 4 a.m. when every rooster on the island starts crowing fervently.

Shakespeare had it wrong. Macbeth didn’t murder sleep. Roosters did.

Free-range alarm clock. (Photo/Surfblogger)

It looked to me, at least in the places that served visitors, that fish was the main menu item. I kept asking Mrs. Blog if she thought the locals ate any chicken. I know by the third day, I was ready to eat chicken at all three meals. It was most unpleasant to have my body battered by surf and then sufficiently balmed by rum only to be awakened a couple of hours before daylight by some over-amped McNugget calling to his jungle-fed paramours. Vinnie kept urging me to take them out with rocks, but it would be my luck that the locals would catch me sneaking around their backyards in the dark with a handful of dead chickens. Suppose there’re so many roosters because they have been deified and are ardently worshipped?

Who knows what tortures a bunch of angry Rastafarians would subject me to after I killed a bunch of their gods? I’m too skinny to provide a satisfactory roast, but I could be easily carried to the edge of the cliff and thrown in. I shudder to think. But I’d make a pretty cool shrunken head, though. I’d be totally stylin’ to be this little head hanging from the rafter of some reef-side shack. Bone in nose, lips sewn shut, looking out over those glassy, turquoise bombs for all eternity. I don’t think I have enough hair left to be mounted in the traditional way, but perhaps they could give me some kind of miniature weave and hang me by my little purple dreadlocks. However, I digress.

Just another day not at the office. (Photo/Surfblogger)

So anyway, the other thing to deal with is the double-whammy you get when you go to Rooster Island. First, you have the guilty pleasure of being somewhere all turquoise and warm while everybody back home shivers through snowstorms and the like. And second, all those winter storms that are making everyone back home so miserable are going out into the deep Atlantic and spinning long-period groundswell right onto the exposed reefs and points that wait a thousand or more miles to the south. So while I felt both guilty and privileged to be on a tropical island, I was also dealing with some of the biggest, most consistent surf I’ve ever seen in my life.

I get caught inside and worked just about every time I surf. It’s part of the sport. The new dimension for me was surfing off of a rock shoreline where there was no option of giving up the fight and going to the beach for a breather. You either made the wave and kicked out in the channel, or you didn’t and clawed your way back outside through the impact zone. I spent most of my sessions exhilarated that I made it, or terrified that I would be wailed across the coral heads and rocks that seemed so far away when I took off, but menacingly close when I fell.

I got quite a few scares and some bumps and scrapes, but never did get killed or anything. I think it was because I didn’t charge it on the biggest days, I kinda hung on the shoulder and dodged the macker sets. Which is pretty frustrating. Because I do way more surfing in my head than I do in the water, and that little movie always stars me charging it on days that look exactly like the waves I was ducking. So I spent several after-surf evenings fairly humbled. Whoever invented rum was a genius.

We were already talking about coming back to Rooster Island before we even got on the ferry to leave. But, more important, we were talking about why we were leaving in the first place and how we could figure out a way to stay. I’m thinking the restaurant business looks pretty good to me: Colonial Surfblogger’s Jungle-Fed Fried Chicken. Your kids will dig the free shrunken head that comes in the Happy Meal.

Dream blog

02/04/10

Long about this time of year I start running out of things to do. And I don’t mean work things. There’s plenty of that to go around twice. I’m talking about after work and the weekends. I could be crazy like Dave and go surfing in 47-degree water. I have all the wetsuit stuff. I’m just having a really hard time wanting to. Especially with all the rain we’ve been having. Maybe I’ll wear my wetsuit hood in the backyard.

I had to go down to New Orleans last week on business and had some free time between meetings, which was interesting enough. But there’s obviously no surf and therefore didn’t really scratch much of my main itch. For a while it was interesting to stand on one of the balconies above Bourbon Street and watch what people do before, during and after they hurl. But it doesn’t take long to figure it all out, and it’s best to move along down there and watch where you step.

So I’m stuck trying to make myself feel better by seeing if anyone else is getting waves. I always start out with people who have it worse than us. Like this guy.

Or this guy — of course, he’s a sponger and most likely won’t be missed.

And this guy, who’s pushing wetsuit technology to the limit.

But, to be fair to the boys over there, it does, indeed, get good.

Then there’s the people who have it better than us. Like these guys. And these guys.

So dream on, and don’t forget your raincoat.