Santa Barbara Area Surf Reports

Location:		Ventura County
Weather:		Sunny with Light Offshores
Conditions:		Shifty Jacking Peaks, morning sickness then groomed
Swell:		SW and NW Groundswell
Surf:		Head High, Some Overhead Sets
Wetsuit Life:		6 Sessions in Rip Curl Bomb

Comments:

Mank was in LA for the weekend and had 4 hour window to surf. I convinced him to meet me half way between there and Santa Barbara for a dawn patrol. We decided on a beachbreak in Ventura County that I'd never surfed despite my folks living 15 miles away. A mile long beachbreak that funnells South and North swell onto shallow sandbars, with a dallop of localism on top. The plan was simple, meet at dawn, keep to ourselves and find our own peak. No interaction with locals, no attempting at being anywhere near a heavy if he was taking off. This plan worked well because we were the first guys out in water. Several were looking at the waves and we couldn't tell if they were big or small, makeable or not-makeable, so we headed out, trying our best to look like we knew what we were doing.

We found a peak that looked fun, but the peaks kept shifting, and we kept drifting south. Soon there were a few guys at the main peak, and we stayed at the next peak over. The sets were big monsters that were fast and tough to make. I took off on a couple of mid-sized waves, would get one turn in, and then high tail out of the impact zone as the curtain came down, exploded behind me, and then took me under. This was one of the most powerful waves I've surfed per unit volume, even head high waves would put your body to the test underwater. It was shallow, and interactions with the sandbars were common both on wipeouts and duckdives. Mank gets the MVP for this session, he took off on 3X as many waves as I did, most of them unmakeable, and came up somewhere down the line. It paid off big time for him once as he got a glorious left that took him all the way to the beach, and way down the line. It also caught up with him, by the end of the session his key had been forcibly removed from his interior key pocket and was loose inside his wetsuit down near his knee. He also got dis-orriented under water once, and when he made it to the surface he almost puked.

The size and power of this place, added with the many years of hearing localism stories, completely got in my head. By the end of the session I was a physcological mess, wussing out on any wave that didn't come with a money back guarantee of not closing out, and staying equadistant between other surfers. A few big sets came in, I think those were the sets that combined the SW and NW swells together into supersets. These things were a foot or so overhead and feathered on the outside sandbars, held up for a few moments and then exploded on the next sandbar. I was about .05 seconds from dropping into one of these. I caught it, was angled to got left, and Mank was on the inside paddling out. I would of been the MVP with eye witness proof of wrangling in a Big Momma. Instead, I opted for pulling out, to see it detonate wall to wall behind me. We didn't encounter localism on the human front, but mother nature dealt with us non-locals in kind.