The Zen Of Surfing–Jordan’s (Surprisingly Addictive) Surf Blog: The beauty of blogs is that they place no limits on the eccentricities and infatuations of humankind. I recently came across this blog, updated intermittently by a Californian surfer named–I’m just guessing here–Jordan. It is a mellow excursion into the mind of a surfer, a diary of days carving across waves, and a frequently captivating, almost philosophical, enquiry into the nature of surfing itself. Reading it will drop your blood pressure 10 points. Here’s a journey into a single wave:

It was a wave that looked like the last one above in the set. I caught it outside with no challengers and hooked into the right. It was a really nice, steep drop, but then the wave started to fade, and I thought about just pulling out and paddling back for a better one. But instead, I cut back about 20 yards or so to the center of the whitewater hoping the wave would re-form on the inside. While paddling out at this killer new spot, I saw the inside just going off. So I Huntington Hopped the wave, battled the whitewater, and it started to reform just as I had predicted.

The neat little thing was that now I was back at the center of the peak – like a full on second wave. I didn’t have much speed from all the pumping and bouncing to get to the reform. And admittedly, my legs were pretty thired. I must have hip-hopped it about 20 or 30 yards to get to where I was.

But all of a sudden I found myself gliding along a nice clean head high wave – completely different than the “first wave,” so to speak. But I was low on speed and needed some immediately…I moved WAY up on the board, almost so that my front foot was at the nose, and we started picking up speed very quickly – almost like riding a longboard (god forbid). There were guys hanging out on the inside, and me and [my board] zipped right by them, with me now fully into a longboard pose up near the nose, and a guy hooted and I caught a glance of two or three more watching. That was really cool, actually.

I was caught up in this Peak Experience for too long. And found myself out of position because of my little longboard stunt. The wave peaked as I was mid-face and sectioned in front of me. Had I been back on the board and pumping it, I would have made it – or been able to pull into a nice open barrel – but instead was forced to immediately move to the back of the board in normal stance and straighten out to take the drop – otherwise I would have got sucked up and thrown over a shallow spot on the boil. I got lucky because I didn’t make it all the way to the back of the board in this one second adjustment – the nose almost dug underwater – whitewater exploded head high all around me, and I made it.

Ahhhhh. Makes me really, really want to go surfing…



Nice life, Jordan…

(Photo: Finkelstein)

Leave a comment