Buffer me, Gramps

Today I woke up in Ventura County thinking I would like to try Ventura Point or the Harbor, but then I checked Surfline and they were too big for me. The other breaks looked smaller, so I decided to drive by, check them out, and go to the one that looked best.

Leo Carillo wasn’t crowded, and the waves looked small and nice. But there were lots of rocks at the entrance to the water, and I didn’t know how far out. If I went straight in, it was a pretty short ride and I’d hit them in a couple of seconds. Everyone who was taking off was turning and going down the line. But I don’t know how to turn, so I didn’t see any way of avoiding the rocks.

Not knowing how to turn sure limits my surfing choices. If I could turn, I would be much more confident and could even take off on the same wave as someone else (at a safe distance, of course) knowing I wouldn’t crash into them. But in order to turn you’ve got to be able to stand up long enough...I feel like I’m years away from that point.

So I backtracked to County Line. It was four to five feet. No way was I going out. It was quite a scene this Sunday afternoon, cars parked all along the PCH, and a large peanut gallery. More cute bods per square inch than I ever have seen in New York.

Zuma was small and deserted---depressing as hell. So I ended up where my heart had been all along---back at Surfrider. I felt like maybe this time I could figure it out.

The waves were just as small as yesterday, the crowd a little smaller. Some of the same people were on the beach still or again. Even some of the same surfers were there again.

This time, in order to increase my chances of getting a wave, I concentrated on observing my fellow surfers and making a mental map of the lineup. In short order I got a sense of who could surf and who was just sitting there hardly trying for waves or missing them. (And one mottled gray head popping up from time to time without a board---a seal!)

Again I paddled for, and most definitely would have caught, five or six waves, only to have to pull back at the last minute to avoid a collision. These were such nice, forgiving waves that even when they crashed on your head (or were about to) they were easy, not like Rockaway closeouts that clobber you.

An older gray haired guy sitting next to me tries for a wave, blows it, and a second later this young kid comes speeding down the line, so Gramps is definitely lucky he didn’t catch the wave, because he would have gotten smacked. At one point where there were multiple guys on the same wave, I saw one of them actually push the other guy out of his way---actually grab him by the shoulders and push him off his board. This was so aggro that a bunch of us in the retard section couldn’t help exchanging looks and smiles.

That mellowed things out a bit, so I decided to start up a convo with Gramps. (Grandfathers are a demographic I have great success with.) So I threw out a line like, “Every time I go for a wave someone’s on it,” and we got started.

In between he was occasionally trying for waves, so I figured that if he kept doing that in the same spot of me, the good surfers would have no choice but to pull off the wave before hitting him, and once they did that I would be in a good position to take off on the rest of the wave without worrying about them hitting me. I was trying to set up a situation where Gramps would act as a buffer between the good surfers and me, thus giving me what looked like my only chance for a ride at Malibu.

It didn’t work, though; Gramps never caught a wave and the good surfers never pulled back.

Afterwards, though I’d been no more successful than the day before, I was ridiculously glad I’d tried Malibu again. I thought that now I deserved a T shirt saying “I surfed the retard section at Malibu.”