NSSSS

Back at the Not So Secret Southern Spot: Virginia Beach. As before, too many people, too little waves. But hey, it’s my first time in the water on this trip!

The waves were hard to figure out (for me) and I got nothing, nada, rien for the first hour and well into the second. I thought very calmly: This is a crap session. I’m not even going to try to redeem it, because it cannot be redeemed. Not a nice dinner, not a new bikini, nothing will make me feel better. Not only is this a crap session but the whole rest of my day is going to be crap after this, I can feel it.

Having decided that, I could just relax and go for it.

The second hour, an overweight woman surfer came out. I note this simply because though all of us have been subjected to countless overweight male surfers, I have never seen an overweight female surfer before. (I. is very overweight but doesn’t count because she doesn’t surf, she only pretends she can.) And she was really good! She came out on a shortboard and got rides and hooted for herself! And that made me feel like crap even more, except that she was really stoked and nice and tried to be helpful to me and others.

So finally I was able to figure out that I had to try to get the waves later, even when they were ready to crash down on me and even later than that, when they had already broken. That’s what she and another guy were doing while most of the others were much farther inside waiting for the waves to reform. Once I figured that out I was able to get going. Not riding. Just, I was able to be propelled by the waves several times, then attempt to stand up and even stand up, but once I was up my board just stopped moving and I didn’t go anywhere. Partly this was because I was just really riding whitewater, partly because I was standing up way too late, partly because I took off at the wrong angle (I had no sense of the way the waves wanted to go and was just pointing my board away from the jetty the way everyone does at home).

Meanwhile, she and other shortboarders and also longboarders were getting nice long rides. For the millionth billionth time I felt like a retard, like I was clueless about some simple thing that everyone else in the word did without effort. It’s the same way I feel about sex, the reason surfing and sex are so inextricably linked in my mind (ah, but that’s the topic of my next book). I can’t help feeling that I could figure out one I could figure out the other. As for proving or disproving this theory, obviously I can’t, since I will never figure out either one, but I am as convinced as I have been of anything in my life that it’s true nevertheless.

Oh, and the rest of my day actually turned out to be very pleasant.