surfing at long beach

[rick stoehrer]

last night after braving the traffic N (and not to knock the over 60 set, but sheesh! do some of those folks realize that really, when travelling on route 127 it's okay to AT LEAST APPROACH the speed limit??!!) and a quick phone call to Liz (Help - where again is that beach?) i made it to pebble beach in rockport. Which for the geographically challenged is right off of 127a by turks head motel.

in any event i arrived at 7 to see mr crangle already in the water and playing to his hearts content....jealous, i started to quickly unload and with a little help soon joined him.

from pebble, we headed down to long beach past a bit of a headland (turks head, perhaps? dunno, didn't have a chart with me) and over to long beach where the swells were coming in, breaking rather quickly and spilling onto the sandy shore on the low tide.

we played there for a bit and while the combat roll worked quite well (SHAMELESS PLUG - thanks to the brilliant Dr. Zilberfarb - orthopoedic genius!!) i didn't get any really great rides. although i did pole vault rather nicely when the stern dug into the shallow sandy bottom.....and over...yahoo!

ride of the night was mr crangle, speeding down a wave face with the tube of the wave curling above him. as he looked up and saw/realized the soon to be outcome...it was funny and great and everything you want to see in a boat! after it broke on him and tossed him over, he did a quick high brace while under there, it rolled him back up and he bongo'd the wave into shore. beautiful!

the weather was fantastic and the colors as the sun set pretty nice...the sea went from that great blue/gray with the reflection of gold/pink to a flattter gray as the sun went down. above us there was an enormous cummulus cloud rising thousands of feet and the different vertical surfaces reflected the same varying hues of the sunset....yeah, in all, not a bad way to end the day.

thanks to mr crangle for answering the call to the beach late on a tuesday afternoon!