Santa Barbara Area Surf Reports

Comments:

How often do we get a 20 second period swell in from the West? Not often enough but this was all time. A few factors were making it not so perfect, the first being the extreme tides which made some windows not as good as others, condensing surfers together during ideal time frames. Greggory and Rio and I went to Deveraux because Campus Point parking was a zoo. I shortboarded while they took out the logs. We choose the wrong time to paddle out, right during a set that was easy to duckdive but not easy to turtle roll for those cats.

The sets weren't huge, but they packed a lot of 20 second water behind them, and they were pitching out and closing out. Less than half of the set waves had a nice shoulder the rest were top to bottom beachbreak closeouts, at least where we were. Greggory awared me with the spirit award of the session for my takeoffs on waves where I had no chance of making it. After every such wave, where I'd honestly think I could make it, so I'd stroke in, do a bottom turn and the either wait out the whitewash or get crushed, G would comment "good spirit. After once such wave, I took off and managed to get crushed within 2 seconds. I popped up no further than 20 feet away from where I started, right near G and Rio. It was surreal.

It wasn't all closeout bombs though. I had a few smaller rights and lefts that offered turns. Rio got into a few fun ones and G carefully planned out his to much success. What was amazing was how many hacks were out there. The lulls were long so sometimes people, or a group of people would paddle out without incident and then soon realize they were in over their head. My favorite image of the day came after I popped up after getting into a closeout right. As I popped up and started to paddle out again, a set came in outside and a pack of 8 longboarders hastened to make it over the wave. None of them did, so 8 boards got ditched 100 feet in front of me. Over $4000 in nice shiny brand new boards getting tossed aside and strewn in all directions, straining on their masters ankles who were somewhere under water wondering why they were out there. For one of the first times at Deveraux a shortboarder had a leg up over longer boards.

Towards the end I saw a longboarder pull out of a closeout and try to bring his board over the top with him, but it got lip planted and brought down. His leash gave and the board was heading towards me. I jumped off mine, got on the longboard and paddled it out to the very thankful swimmer who was glad I saved him a couple hundred feet of swimming. Good deed done for the day, I caught a few in to meet the crew and recieve the good spirit award.