I thought it had been a private moment, getting eaten by the wave, but it turns out Jeff saw the whole thing. CD says “do yourself a favor and read Jeff’s great summary” and he’s right…you should! Jeff described the day as one of his top five Ponquogue days ever. For me the day included one of my top five mistakes in the waves ever, and for some boneheaded reason I left it out of my summary of the day. In what Jeff describes as a Maui Moment I was so very much in the wrong place at the wrong time. So now I figure I better cover it in my own blog too.
I was shlogging through the shore break in a race to clear the sets of increasingly punishing impact zone dumpers. I thought I was going to be fine…I’d just cleared a four footer before it broke, so surely my forward progress (or imagined forward progress) put me on the good side of the impact point. But no. A new wave jacked slowly to eye level and hung there as I approached…twenty feet away, ten feet away, eight feet away…
It felt like time was slowing down. It felt like I could take a tape measure and detail parts of this wave standing in front of me, diagram it on a piece of paper and determine whether or not it was going to break on my head (please no) or pass under me in an exhirating elevator ride up and down (please yes).
Six feet away, five feet away…
(I had been lucky in these situations all day.)
At four feet away I realized what a complete fool I had been. I was about to have “Bozo” tattooed on my ass, on my forehead, and on the soon to be tattered remnants of my board and rig. There wasn’t even time to dive, so I just stepped to the left and curled up as the wave crashed down.
Under the water I was strangely calm, resigned to the broken mess of carbon that I was about to swim after and drag up on the beach. But incredibly when I surfaced my gear was right next to me, intact! I actually waterstarted and got out of there, thanking my lucky stars.
In the future I will be chicken jibing or diving with the mast into the wave. I don’t expect that kind of luck often.
Anyhow it was a memorable, wonderful, brutal day...go get the details from Peconic Jeff!
I was shlogging through the shore break in a race to clear the sets of increasingly punishing impact zone dumpers. I thought I was going to be fine…I’d just cleared a four footer before it broke, so surely my forward progress (or imagined forward progress) put me on the good side of the impact point. But no. A new wave jacked slowly to eye level and hung there as I approached…twenty feet away, ten feet away, eight feet away…
It felt like time was slowing down. It felt like I could take a tape measure and detail parts of this wave standing in front of me, diagram it on a piece of paper and determine whether or not it was going to break on my head (please no) or pass under me in an exhirating elevator ride up and down (please yes).
Six feet away, five feet away…
(I had been lucky in these situations all day.)
At four feet away I realized what a complete fool I had been. I was about to have “Bozo” tattooed on my ass, on my forehead, and on the soon to be tattered remnants of my board and rig. There wasn’t even time to dive, so I just stepped to the left and curled up as the wave crashed down.
Under the water I was strangely calm, resigned to the broken mess of carbon that I was about to swim after and drag up on the beach. But incredibly when I surfaced my gear was right next to me, intact! I actually waterstarted and got out of there, thanking my lucky stars.
In the future I will be chicken jibing or diving with the mast into the wave. I don’t expect that kind of luck often.
Anyhow it was a memorable, wonderful, brutal day...go get the details from Peconic Jeff!
awesome
Posted by: george markopoulos | July 27, 2009 at 07:11 AM