Ghost Waves

Waves are ephemeral by nature.  Spawned by wind and storms, bands of energy travelling through a liquid expanse.  Drawing on sandbar or reef or wrapping 'round a point, toppling, crumbling, or heaving, dependant on the bottom configuration, they break, sometimes gloriously, rumble shorewards and expire, their remnant wash filming back down the sand, over cobblestones, or simply blasted into vapor against a rock face...

Surfers plan, scheme, google, and travel...lotsa travel, by car mostly, sometimes plane or boat.  They hunt and search and pray to be in the right spot at the right time, to ride these energy bands, breaking as ephemeral waves...

Given the ever growing number of surfers world-wide, you might think that most of these waves get ridden.  Watch a Malibu, Pipeline, or J-Bay line-up on any good swell and you'll rarely see a wave roll through unmolested.  Yet, most waves do break and tumble, plunge, or crumble, not only unridden, but unseen...

There are numerous spots around the globe where surfers congregate, places where the best waves break with enough frequency to keep an indigenous tribe close-by, ready to plunder.  The number of unknown spots is rapidly dwindling, and the more nomadic surfers have to travel further into the wildeness to find them.  But not often discussed, are ghost waves.  Waves breaking so ephemerally that you can't even label them as legitimate spots. Waves where for a fleeting moment, perhaps only one set, or even a single wave, when all the variables come into alignment, at a spot that normally goes unconsidered, that spirit their brief existence without notice or acclaim...

Occasionally, a surfer might glimpse one of these waves, while driving to a more known spot.  Their brakes may squeal as they stop to witness...and usually wait to see if there are more.  Most times you drive away, passing off what you've just seen as mirage...  Yet you usually catalogue the image away, and you keep driving by this spot, sometimes for years, waiting, hoping to see it go off...dreaming that maybe, someday you'll paddle out and catch one...

I submit here, three such ghost waves, breaking in three completely different spots, yet all within the same mile long stretch of a well known surf locale... In my 38 years of surfing in this area I've never seen anyone surf at these spots, never seen them break quite like this... Yet on this day, here they are, or were...

Maybe, just maybe...if I keep checking...