Santa Barbara Area Surf Report |
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| August Overview | 2000 Overview | ||
| Date/Time: | Friday, August 18th, 8:00 am - 12:00 noon |
| Location: | Secos / Arroyo Sequit / Leo Carrillo |
| Weather: | Patchy dense AM fog elsewhere, clear at this beach. No wind. |
| Conditions: | Outstanding. Improving with the flood of the tide. |
| Swell: | New 3 ft at 17 s southern hemi swell, our third one in a row. |
| Surf: | Head high with sets to overhead and a half. |
| Comments: |
It just keeps getting better. The plan today was to time the
tide increase to get in the water as soon as the break was surfable,
mainly so I could get home by the afternoon. Didn't anticipate that
it would work this well. Paddled out into a crowd of essentially 0;
there were three guys hanging out near the rock but nobody on the
reef. For at least an hour I was essentially alone, and the sets
were rumbling off the third reef and rideable all the way to the
stairs. So many of them! I don't think I sat and waited for a wave
more than one or two minutes during that whole first hour.
Around mid-session the crowd had filled in a little bit to maybe 5 or 6 of us in the right spots. Still plenty of waves to go around, very mellow, and I continued to get my share. Then I noticed this guy paddling out next to me and giving me a look. I tossed a standard "howzit" in his direction, but something was tickling my brain -- he was looking at me funny -- hey, it's Jose! Apparently he was trying to give me some stink-eye but with my near-sightedness I'm relatively immune to hostile facial expressions in the water. He was fresh back from a 3-week Mexico trip and feeling a little culture-shocked by the "crowd." I had to chuckle. Said crowd finally filled in with earnest at about noon -- apparently everyone had the same plan to arrive at high tide that I did on Thursday. The largest sets continued to improve in shape and by the end of my session they were no longer closing out. My perfect session continued despite the crowd push, and my surfing was finally starting to open up and get creative -- often I don't hit a good stride until I've had a ton of waves, but today I had several. Not everyone was having as good a day as me. One fellow got faded into the rock and then just a few sets after that had the same guy drop in and put a fin right across his foot and shin. From the lifeguard tower we watched the same drop-in guy do it again, but this time he spun out at the bottom and went right into the rocks himself -- cashing in his karmic ticket right away. Ah, Leo! |