The first day of surfing...

The weekend had a bipolar complex: rainy on saturday, thunder, lightning, winds, and then sunday, just hours and hours of sun. I went swimming a few times for short durations and it occurred to me, it was finally time to get over my winter aversion to cold-water surfing and just break down and do it.

I got out of work at a decent time, after an early morning of live shots at an exclusive Norfolk restaurant, where I got to scarf down a seafood medley for breakfast that would have put me back about $70 on any other day. Heading home, I did my calculations, and realized I’d be in the water about two hours after low tide, low tide being the seemingly best time for sandbar breaks at the north end of Virginia Beach. With that knowledge and after a quick Surfline update, I knew it would be good fun for a little while and a perfect way to get myself back in the spirit of wave riding again after a four month sabbatical.

While packing up my gear, wetsuit, boots, wax, board, sunscreen, water, I noticed my neighbor’s son was home from school. A sophomore in high school and new to the area, I asked him if he wanted to go. He was down, so we loaded a boogie board and rash guard, yet I warned him the water was still cold; about 50 degrees Fahrenheit at my last check.

We made it to my favorite Virginia Beach spot, 85th street, where I’ve been going locally since I moved here four years ago. It’s the closest spot to my house, a mere 20-minutes from driveway to beach.

Parking was wide open, as expected, and when we hit the beach, there were some good waist-to-chest-high sets rolling along the sandbars. I got suited and made no haste getting wet and out there as my neighbor’s son slowly negotiated the frigid, whitewater shore break.

The first wave rolled to me and I snapped into it, popped up well, and took a little trip on the knee biter. As I flung back into the foamy wash as the wave lost steam, I felt renewed, understanding, to a very small extent and on an entirely parallel level, the process of baptism, where baptists hurl themselves into the murky depths of rivers and creeks and are reborn. I was, once again, reborn.

After an hour of playing in the slowly declining conditions, I noticed the neighbor’s son had retired to where we had made camp, so I caught one last fun dribble towards the shore and made my way.

“I’m cold,” he shuddered.

I laughed and we got our gear packed and made our way through the dunes to the truck, loaded, and headed home.

“Why do you do that? It’s so cold?” he asked.

“I don’t know…it just makes me feel better about everything.”

When I came home today, after a second day of surfing, this time for about three hours, he came over and asked me if I could teach him to surf.

Mahalo…