Huntington Beach Pier, CA!

When I allow myself to admit that I am attracted to someone, it always has to develop into a big Broadway production. It’s never just a community-theater revival of Mame.

Aargh, the unrequited lust of the middle-aged woman. Painful as is it, it was worse when I was in my twenties...wasn’t it?

Sorry, this is supposed to be a surf blog. In between and during surfing, I can’t stop thinking about N., and what it would be like to make love with him. There are about thirteen thousand reasons why this idea is completely insanely ludicrous, but Reason #1 will suffice: He’s married.

Somehow this does nothing to reality-check my fantasies. Ah well, fantasies are harmless, and as with surf fantasies, usually much better than the reality would turn out to be even if it could.

Anyway. I am in Los Angeles on business, but aim to get in as much surfing as possible. I had to go all the way to Huntington Beach to get a real surfboard, because it turns out that there is nowhere within an hour of LA that rents them----only foam beginner boards.

So this is why I ended up at Huntington Pier, which was not part of the plan for this trip. The waves were just like Rockaway and so was the setting: the pier on the left taking on the role of the jetty with surfers arranged in order of ability from good nearest to worst farthest away. I did what I do at home: move down the line to get out of the way of the better surfers, ending up where the waves were no good.

But the thing is, when I paddled down closer to the pier, I noticed that a lot of the surfers weren’t really that good. Some were just riding straight in. Down where I was there were mainly boogie boarders, young boys, and an obvious beginner surfer who was waiting until the waves broke to take off on them. I must say that wasn’t a bad strategy, because if you got a wave just after it broke it had quite a bit of power to it, much more than NYC waves of the same size, and the rides were much longer than at home.

I did manage to take off properly on a couple of 2-foot waves, but of course then had all the problems I usually have. These waves weren’t going to fix that.