The Ferris Files

Dominating the Waves

Every surf break has its alpha male, and this afternoon at Linda Mar beach it was a man I’ll call Methuselah, a heavyset man with a bald head and a bull neck and a wet gray goatee. He positioned himself far out, turned his back on the other surfers and looked straight out to sea. When a big swell arrived Methuselah turned his fat board around and rode that wave straight in. No one ever got in his way.

It’s a fact of surf etiquette that an alpha male (or female, rarely) always and instantly emerges, even among complete strangers. We watermen are like chimps or wolves in rubber suits. A human must dominate or defer. Or perhaps Methuselah’s superiority was a testament to how powerful it is when someone simply demonstrates these waves are mine. 

Methuselah talked to no one and no one talked to him. A few guys hovered on their boards just a couple watery feet closer to shore than he. I paddled out and joined the beta males.

A wave approached that was just a little bigger than average. Methuselah showed no sign of movement. I took chase. The swell plumped into a delectable riding surface: bigger than expected, with a large and lazy face that I carved up and down for what seemed like forever. I finished it off by doing a 280-degree turn and catching air off the back.

I paddled back out to Methuselah’s orbit. He turned and gave me a nod and flashed his bright blue eyes. He said, “That was a nith one!”

Methuselah would have said “nice one” if it wasn’t for the two front teeth he was missing. Or mithing.

“Best I caught all day!” I grinned, happy for the benediction of the head chimp, but with an implicit bow: I am a bad surfer. I not your equal.

I am a chimp, after all. Can’t upset the order of things.

Bobbing with Bob America

This morning Bob America lurched over to my place for a surf session despite the rough fermentation of the night before. He had downed two Negro Modelos, two glasses of an Australian pinot, a glass of bubbly and two pints of Guinness, best he could remember. The libations had stayed till morning and were now engaged in negotiations as explosive as the Iraqi Parliament’s, and it probably wouldn’t help to subject them to a couple hours of violent bobbing up and down in the Pacific. But Bob showed up anyway.

Bob is a rock n’ roll hero but hasn’t caught a wave in two years. I pulled out my 9’6” Softop, which I keep as a loaner for friends, and on the drive to Ocean Beach he ranted about the jackass antics of our local senator, Dianne Feinstein. Bob is always good for fervently poetic observations on politics and culture, such as Phil Collins, whom he recently described as “a touring piece of saffron that sang monkey songs from a schooner.”

From the cliffs above Ocean Beach we could see the break was in a playful and mellow mood. I paddled straight out for a ride; Bob floated about in the shallows for a while, marinating.

Twenty minutes or so later he mustered the mojo to stroke out through the whitewater to the real waves, and there he sat, staring toward the open ocean for what seemed like a long time. I wondered if I’d see no rock n’ roll at all today.

I caught a grand slow roller and, surprise, there was Bob, catapulting in toward shore right next to me. We got buried together. That was Bob’s Wave #1. Near the end of the session came Wave #2.

I saw Bob spring to his feet, watched his board planing straight for where I floated; he bailed, kindly, because if he hadn’t I might be writing this account for you minus my scalp. 

Perhaps three seconds of ride time in a two-hour session. Afterward, while drying himself off with a red, white and blue towel, Bob America declared himself satisfied.

“When you ride a wave, it’s good as sex, and as good as playing rock n’ roll music. So if I can just set my sights on those three things, my life would be fulfilled,” he said.

Sometimes a Bad Day...

I had just struggled onto my second wave this morning at Ocean Beach when something blue-black flickered past me quick as a starling.

The apparition was past before I recognized it as a fellow boardsman. Sliding along a sixty-degree wall of water, he had simply weaved around me, no room to spare, like Jackie Chan in neoprene. My first thought was damn.

My second thought –after he paddled back to the lineup and gave me an ain’t-I-hot grin – was how good my fist would look, just there, on the bridge of his nose beneath his neoprene cap.

One wrong move and we’d both have collapsed on a deck of fast-moving fiberglass.

But I made no fist. I was in the wrong and both of us knew it. Whoever is on the wave first, closest to the peak, owns the wave, and in the excitement of the moment I hadn’t seen him.

He caught wave after wave. He’s one of those greedy surfers who gobbles waves like Cheetos. The wave boils behind him and his tongue hangs out, like Mick Jagger slurping a microphone.

...Turns Good

So that’s the kind of day this will be, I thought. Good waves, none of which I would ride; each would be snared by the superior surfers who lurked in a testosterone-addled cluster at the peak.

Then, inexplicably, all the obnoxious surfers left, probably for their pressing appointments to kick neighborhood dogs or steal candy from children. The sun remained, though, as did the light offshore breeze and the banks of fog at postcard distance. Every surfer was polite and did not hoard, and best of all, the cranky beast of Ocean Beach delivered the mellowest of waves.

Then, just when it seemed that things couldn’t get any better, a foursome of dolphins surfaced, not thirty feet away. Two big ones and two baby dolphins. Baby dolphins.

“All we need now is a rainbow, and an ice-cream cone when we paddle back to the beach,” I told the fat longboarder in the silver helmet.

“Yep,” he said, taking another gander at the dolphins sunning themselves. “Doesn’t get a lot better than this.”

Tiptoe Past the Pit Bull

Rodeo Beach is a junkyard dog of a surf break. It is fast and steep and has bitten me every time I’ve visited it; this morning I tiptoed in, hoping to have a couple joyrides without making it angry.

Only three other surfers were out and they placed themselves in the gunsight of the break, just 20 yards or so from the cliff that forms the beach’s north wall. I floated a little farther south, on the break’s crumbly shoulder, hoping for exactly that, some crumbs.

An unassuming wave rolled by and I tried to hop aboard. Whoa, I’m up! I coasted the face with an ease and speed that surprised me (I haven’t been out in a while). The beach zoomed up under my feet.

The wave at Rodeo breaks almost right on the beach, as if a successful ride would leave you and your board stuck upright in the sand like a child’s sandcastle shovel. None of that. I jumped off the board and into two feet of water.

I repeated this. Two more times! The mean old dog was snoozing for sure. Wow. Could I head into where the real waves are and take my chances?

I watched a five-foot wave roll through and collapse on itself with a SMACK!

Naw, I thought. Don’t push your luck with a pit bull. Time to go home.