Surfing with words

Today, my co-worker and friend, Summer, sent me a link to her blog. She and I are writers, as are a couple of others in the office. After all, I work in the Office of Communications so the fact that we are all writers make sense. Summer and I have discussed writing on several occasions. We do it all the time. We write at work, we write at home, we write in our minds as we go to sleep at night and we write while we do all of the other activities that we’ve chosen to make a part of our lives. We’re both aspiring novelists, but we end up writing poetry, short stories, work stuff, post-it notes, etc....everything but the novel we’ve aspired to write. I can’t speak for Summer, but I also write e-mails to people just like I wrote letters as a kid to various pen pals and family members. We were both talking about blogs a while back and she shared her blog with me: www.summercampfire.blogspot.com. Although her blog is about yoga and mine is about a surfing, they are surprisingly similar in ideas. We have completely different writing styles, but the message in her latest piece was similar to past messages in my own blog. Her blog was about persevering. I don’t want to ruin the surprise if you should decide to read it (which you should), but basically, Summer talked about concentration, commitment and suffering. All three of these abstractions definitely relate to many things in life, including surfing. Just as Summer had to decide about her yoga pose, as a surfer I have to concentrate on my actions in the water, commit to a wave and, sometimes, endure suffering (okay, this last part, more times than I care to admit).

“There's a difference between interest and commitment. When you're interested in doing something, you do it only when circumstance permits. When you're committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.”
Art Turock* (motivational speaker)

* Not really sure about Art Turock, but I read this quote a while ago and really liked it.

my own board and first surf

Well, just as with every new hobby, eventually you have to make the commitment to get the equipment or get out of the game. I decided last weekend to get my own equipment -- a surf board. Since I had already gone window shopping the week before, I knew exactly what board I wanted to buy. A 9' Softops board at Soundwaves on Montrose waited for me to come buy it. Bright orange with a purple flower made this board stand out over all of the others. Blue flowers pepper the epoxy underside of the board. A momentary fear of sharks finding me because of the flowers on the bottom of the board (they look for bright things) almost caused me to put it back on the rack. But, it was just so darn pretty, I couldn't resist it. I know it seems odd to refer to a surf board as pretty, but I can't help it.

I went out today on my new board. Waves were pretty flat, but there were enough little ones close to shore to practice popping up, sitting on the board, turning it, etc. I had some good pop-ups and could stand and turn the board. I also got a chance to practice loading and unloading it from the rack on top of my car. The sun was bright and the air was warm. It doesn't get much better than that!

back to Galveston

Although Brian -- the Galveston surfer DUDE -- called Thursday evening to say that the water was flat and he didn't think it would be possible to give a lesson on Friday, on Friday morning he called back to say that things had changed during the night and the waves were perfect for lessons. The sets were real this time he said, not nearly as sloppy as it had been during our past Friday afternoon sessions. The waves calmed considerably by the time Robin and I arrived for our 1:30 session. However, Brian felt like they were good for us to learn and practice some important lessons. For instance, we actually practiced the turnaround in the water. Brian explained that the whole process of surfing was a big circle. Because we weren't getting beat up by the waves, we practiced our jump onto the board, our turns, our look-back for waves, our swim forward and, finally, our pop-up on the waves. We also tried different boards including an 8' soft top (nearly impossible to stand on), an 8'6" hard top (a cool, marvelous ride; but different to maneuver), and a 9'4" soft top (my favorite). We both got approximately 6 to 8 good rides on small, but manageable waves.

What a great afternoon!