Gray November...

Okay, so here's my first post; inspired by today's surf sesh:

Most New England surfers will tell you that Autumn is their favorite season.  Of course there's the foliage, flaming reds, rust oranges, golden yellows as you drive to the beach, and the still tepid water (read not yet frikkin, frigid cooollddd!) and after a long torporous summer of heat, humidity, and no surf, the ocean comes to life with tropical swells and nor'easters.  What's not to love?  But gray November, though often monochromatically bleak, and numbingly cold, has much to offer as well. 

Witness my morning surf at a well known (but not often surfed) beach in my corner of the Maine coast.  Adhering to the surfers' code of not divulging spot names, I'll call it "Clamdiggers," which has a double meaning, not the least being that that's for much of my session I went digging for clams on takeoff after takeoff.  To be fair, I brought the wrong board for the swell.  Le Platypus (my board) was designed as a "mushbuster" for small days and though the waves were not huge (waist to chest high with some outside bombora sets that doubled those dimensions) the power and steepness of the whumpa-thumpa beachbreak at Clamdiggers had me walloped, ragdolled, and pretzled time after time.  To be even more fair, after a rough coupla years of injuries and surgeries, and alot of time out of the water, I got a lot of polishing to do to clean off the rust of my surfing skills. 

Yet, despite my struggles, it was a glorious and awe-inspiring session.  I surfed solo with the entire break to myself and only the odd beach stroller to witness my rides. 

Some things I saw, feelings I felt: 

Though I'm 52 years old and have been surfing for 37 of those years, I still get butterflies of anticipation as I scramble frenetically into my wetsuit before I go out...

While first paddling out, I saw a loon get tumbled over the falls, bouncing down the face of the wave; I've never, ever seen a seabird get caught by a wave like that; they always seem to have an innate intuition for bobbing over or ducking under without getting nailed...later, another bird (don't know what type) surfaced right next to me after a dive; apparently he didn't see the wave bearing down on us either as he tried to take flight at the last second but got swatted as the lip came over...

The sky was gray, the sea a faintly greenish-gray, and just a whisper of offshore wind; perfect surfing conditions; later, as I was leaving the water, the sun broke through with the passing front and the wind increased velocity exponentially...an evening drive-by after work, revealed by the light of a full-moon, that the swell had dropped considerably...I'm dawn patrolling it tomorrow but I think it will have gone flat...

Though I didn't manage to get inside any of them, there were tubes aplenty; there's an indescribable beauty of seeing a crystalline lip hurl over and barrel from an in-the-water perspective that nobody but a surfer can fully appreciate...

I did catch a few waves that didn't annihilate me; le Platypus, while not designed for thumping shorebreak, did lay over really nice and carve on rail off the bottom; real surfing is all about the RAIL, baby!

I tweaked my left bad knee on one wipeout, then on stepping off my board in the shallows after my last ride, I tweaked my right bad knee; both are throbbing now...

My session lasted for almost 3 hours and I had it all to myself; there's a certain peace in a solo session that also cannot be described...

After all these years, and all my travails, and though it is gray, and bleak, and dead, and I'm into the 5mil wetsuit, booties, gloves, and hood, which means it's cold, and it's gonna stay cold for the next  6 months...I still dig it; there's still nothing better than a day in the water...in Maine...in November...