It’s not just that I got to surf with in my opinion (and many other people’s) 2 of the better longboarders in California, or the fact that I was in a cloud from waking up before 5am the past 3 days on little sleep. The reason I was so happy was simple. I was on 248 days straight of pure stoke.
Yesterday’s self rocked, because at 4:45 I woke up to a packed back, clean car, and the last of my already ground Nicaraguan coffee, just waiting for a douse of hot water. Down the road my surfmobile was soon loaded with another 9’6 board and some serious camera equipment, joining in the trip my surf coach Mike Siordia and shutterbug Lucio Gomez, aka Porto Surfer Photography. Mike snoozed in the back while Lucio and I swapped life stories, Ventura bound and gazing at a pastel pallet in the sky, ready for a morning of play.
One more board and body pickup of pro longboarder Vince Felix and we were on the boardwalk of C Street, logger heaven and my new favorite surf break, with the crumbling Ventura pier off to the left jetting out into the sea, the perfect peeling right point break, and the backdrop of Santa Cruz island, one of the 7 Channel Islands, off in the distance adding a vacation-esque feel to our morning. The small crossed up swell at C Street had us thinking we could do better, so a second try at Rincon and nonexistent surf led us back again down the way we came, just a short walk north of where we started.
Suiting up next to these legends on the tree trunk on speckled cobblestone beach, I was thinking to myself, no matter if the waves were good or bad, how lucky I was to be looking out at the endless deep blue, and how the colors of the world are the most beautiful and wispy just after sunrise. And then Mikey started talking about how he looked like a fruit salad with his bright purple wettie and berry board, which caused me to lose my train of though, burst out into belly laughs, and almost lose my footing on those sharp rocks.
Felix and Siordia had me in a surf trance, and if I was paddling back out from one of my own slow rollers I just caught, I couldn’t help to stop, post up, and watch either of them flow with finesse down a glassy face, even if it meant I was getting smashed by that incoming wave.
Thanks to breakfast burritos from Vince, the tired trio, now in a food coma, left with full bellies and zipped (slowly) back down the 405, pressed up against red bumper lights, stoked as ever.
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