12-21-05 Big Wednesday

A monster of a swell steamed into Orange County on a Wednesday. I was reminded of the movie "Big Wednesday", and the voice over: "they came in from the north".

Actually, these came in from the west. All the forecasters had seen it coming for several days. The daily surf report for Tuesday on Surfrider's web page had a caption under the day's photo reading: " Are you ready for tomorrow's big waves?"

Chase called me Tuesday night, to confirm a meeting spot for the morning. We agreed to meet a Bolsa Chica, near the "prison tower". Knowing what was coming, I told him that we may have to move up to Seal Beach if the waves were too big.

Then, I slept right through it. Being the week before our office's traditional holiday closure, I'd been working at an obscene pace, including preparations for a particularly dreadful meeting on Wednesday morning.

Instead of waking up to my alarm at 4:45 am, I woke up to my daughter tugging on my arm. "Daddy." She whined. "Gwen go pee-pee." She no longer wears diapers to sleep, but comes and wakes an adult up to go with her to the bathroom instead. I got up and followed her, realizing what time it was and that I had overslept.

While we were in the bathroom, my cell phone rang. It was Chase.

"Where are you at?"
"I never got up. I'm still at my house."
"I wouldn't come." he told me.

Chase reported the worst of what I had imagined. The waves were huge and the beach breaks at Huntington couldn't handle them. They were completely un-surf-able. Huge, 20 foot walls of water, breaking all at once in giant mounds of foam, one right after the other.

On my way to work, I got two other calls from people asking me if I had gone surfing. Both were from people driving by the beach, and seeing this outrageous spectacle, they felt that I was the one to call. I reported to both that I didn't go, and that I would probably wait for the swell to die down a bit before I attempted to surf in it.

On my lunch break, I drove to the beach. I simply had to see it.

It looked like hell. Gigantic breakers pushing foam up into the bottom of the Huntington Beach pier. As a spectacle of nature, it was awesome to see. Spectators lined the pier just watching the water explode all around them.

As a surfer, an old one, and not a very good one, it looked like death. I parked at tenth street and watched for a half hour or so. There were two or three brave souls in the water trying to paddle out, but nobody made it past the inside break, let alone out to where the monsters were. I didn't see a single surfer from the river to the pier and beyond who had been able to swim out through that mess.

Rumor had it that a few spots had produced waves worth riding. Seal beach, Blackies, San Onofre, a few spots north of Palos Verdes, and the reefs in north and south San Diego. My brother, in for the holidays, had paddled out in Pacific Beach in San Diego and caught a few big ones. Of course, he's been surfing north shore this year, so he's far more capable of swimming around in big surf then most of the surfing population here. Even he reported that the Sunset Cliffs were outrageous, and he decided not to risk it.