In roughly a month, the Boost Mobile Pro will be storming the beaches of north county San Diego.[1] This yearly stop on pro surfing’s World Championship Tour (WCT) draws thousands to the water’s edge of Lower Trestles in San Clemente, California. Ask the locals who owns it, and Orange County chargers will likely scoff at any map of San Diego County, claiming Lowers as all theirs.
Last year’s winner was then soon-to-be-seventh-time WCT Champ Kelly Slater. It was quite the show. How do I know? Because I was there. After parking in the lots up near the 5 freeway, we hiked about 200 yards down a low grade trail, tight roped the railroad tracks, and scurried over to the beach where as many ages were present as grains of sand. Upon arriving at the event, Aussie Mick Fanning was ripping a six or seven foot, glassy right. With blurring speed, he abused the wave with a mix of bottom turns, lip kicks, and cut backs, only to further embarrass it with an ending floater--essentially carving his name as the wave closed out. Fanning didn’t win, obviously, but he provided quite an exciting exit.
What often goes unnoticed at an event held at a spot like Trestles is the high caliber of surfing going on out of the contest’s bounds. True, California beaches are already suffering from dangerously overcrowded lineups. Still, spectators tunneling their focus to the pros alone run the risk of missing out on some spectacular amateur talent that is ripping lines north and south of Lowers. The wizardry some of the nobodies in the local surf communities offer the wandering eye easily force one to question the rules limiting the WCT pool to forty-five.
Since returning east last fall due to a withering bank account, that is what I miss the most. Aside from the actual surfing itself, which I usually partook in twice a day for two straight months, the soaring chances that I’d witness some paper-pusher by day cramming in a session over his lunch is something that never gets old. At Tourmaline, a mediocre, beginner's spot just north of San Diego’s Pacific Beach, there used to be this old lady; she was better than me and my friends and she was operating on a body whose parts were pushing the mid-60s. Then there's the astonishingly mobile Jesse Billauer, who after a being served a cold dish of paralysis in the early 2000s, has grown to Machado-like stature in the surf world by getting back out in the water and riding as though his surfboard was more effective than his wheel chair. Locating that type of longevity in any other sport is practically unheard of, to see it so frequently gives a keen appreciation for the act of surfing. The absence of any number of average people who are superb on a surfboard--long or short, standing or not--is a gap hardly filled by visiting the local tennis court.
Learning to surf, surfing everyday, and then leaving an environment conducive to sustaining the habit is like breathing under water. It can’t be done. You do all in your power to return to the surface and, until you do, death gradually strangles you a little more with each passing second. Explaining this to any non-surfer is useless. It’s not an experience comparable to any other. Even before I’d actually started surfing--when I was watching videos and reading the mags--I didn’t understand it. It wasn’t until I became a surfer, until I caught the bug, that I realized that there’s nothing in the world like it and it’s irreplaceable. Like Kelly Slater said in Dana Brown's 2002 documentary Step Into Liquid, “Once you’re a surfer you’re hooked…you’re done…it’s like the mob or something.”
So, here’s to all those surfers--landlocked, trying to get back to the lineup--hoping to catch just another ride away from the oppressions of the concrete jungle. To those whose feel like they’ve lost a best friend: I feel you. Keep working towards any coast, hopefully we’ll meet in the water soon.
[1]: a local colloquialism used to distinct those from San Diego/La Jolla areas and those from closer to Orange County.
