Lotsa love for tiny waves
noseriding baby
When you’re a kid, when you’re twenty-three, you’re annoyed by the longboarders. They come wobbling down-to the beach in late spring like fat wildflowers, carrying their great big surfboards (heavy as hell) under their arms and they sit way-out there where the waves aren’t even waves yet. They catch everything, those fucking longboarders.
And so, logically, when I turned thirty-three, I bought a longboard. A secondhand Donald Takayama off Craigslist. I only ride it in the summer (when the waves go flat).
Planted in the American consciousness is the backward notion that surfing is a summer hobby. It’s not. Surfing is best when it’s cold. Cold water makes the waves big and, at the best of times, you get to this kind of ride-or-die place. You get out to the edge of things. Maybe not where you want to live, but fear isn’t necessarily bad place to visit, it’s occasionally sick to drop in and look up and see the dark-blue ocean ten feet above your head and briefly wonder if this is how Moses felt walking through the Red Sea and then oh shit, you’re underwater and better hold your breath bitch because this world only lets you breathe on its own terms.
The summer isn’t like that. The summer is dudes smoking pot. Drinking Pacifico tallboys in the parking lot, paddling out nice-and-easy to the waves, knee-high, walking up to the nose of the board. I like to run up there. Nose-riding is its own kind of thing.
Nose-riding, it’s a summer thing, you do it when it gets warm. They used to call it ‘hot-dogging’ — nobody can hot-dog in a wetsuit. Imagine a hot-dog in a wetsuit.
The first day it got warm this year Bondro paddled up to me. Bondro’s this asian dude with long hair and a cartoonish hippie drawl. We were both wearing 3/2 wetsuits and after a few waves, we both looked around and noticed that all the girls were surfing in bikinis and Bondro said he was gonna paddle in, change into boardshorts. “thighs out, brother— the ladies have inspired me,” he said.
When I paddled out the next afternoon (a Monday) Bondro was sitting beside the peak with an inflatable cooler, some kind of floatable rig he’d brought out. He wasn’t the first one to figure out how to drink beer and surf at the same time (I used to surf with a red-bearded ex-Steelers linebacker in the Outer Banks who made a cupholder out of surf wax and put it on the nose of his board and, thinking himself a genius, briefly tried to patent it) but, like everybody else, Bondro was totally fucking jazzed that he’d put two-and-two together.
“Only problem is I can’t walk the stringer after a few,” Bondro laughed.
The stringer is the center-line of the surfboard. You have to walk the stringer to get to the nose, to hang ten, as they say. To hang your toes off the front of the surfboard.
After a few, well that’s beers, obviously, probably Pacificos. Though it looked liked Bondro had some 805s in there as well.
Noseriding is basic physics, You’re up at the top, at the nose. How it works is this: picture a see-saw. On a good day, I weigh 220lbs, so I need at least 220lbs of water on the tail of the board to keep me afloat. It’s actually super easy to do. Patagonia did a good/basic video on the physics.
And noseriding is one of those few things that, though not difficult, is insanely fun. It’s artsy, the dance of walking along the board, sure. But more than that, it’s incredibly (I don’t have a great adjective but let’s say breathable) to be up on the nose of a surfboard and to have nothing below you but the ocean, to be the last thing on this wave that came from Africa or Asia or wherever, to be the last thing that happens to it. To look down and see only your toes and to look forward and see only the ocean and then you duck, you get a dump of water over your head. My god, you’re happy.
There is a definite kind of self-encapsulated glory in that, there is a definite kind of happiness. One that only comes about in the summer when the waves are small.