For the years I've been living in the Northwest I've been lying to myself about snowboarding, telling myself that it's as good as surfing that it's as rejuvenating, but it's not. Sitting in the water for three days now, it feels better and better each time. My body feels amazing right now, although I'm missing yoga, and my head is feeling very well too. In the six hours of so I've spend in the ocean I've exchanged about ten words, most have been good morning, and a couple were about how the waves sucked but it didn't matter since we were in the ocean. It’ s such a pleasant sense of solitude, with the company of others in such close quarters too. There are lots of nods an gestures, but people most keep the lineup quiet unless they are out with friends.
Today I went out in the late morning, it was high tide, glassy but the swell still isn't there. Still had a lot of fun. The dolphins came back, and got really close in today, I saw one pop up about two feet away from one guy, there were several times they were 6-12 feet away form me. When the surf isn't as big they don't tend to play in the waves which is unfortunate because it's amazing to watch.
The slowness of the swells has made it hard for me to catch them, I'm on my 6'2" board which is still too thin for me since I'm not paddling most days in Seattle, so I think I move it around a bit slower than I should be. I also always seem to take a while to gain the confidence to start taking off late. So I've been repeating the mantra "its never too late to take off" every time I'm paddling for a wave. Those late takes offs seem to give way to a nice angled drop in and most of the time the shoulder of the wave is solid enough to get a good ride. The other half of the time the whole wave crashes and just kick out of the wave and paddle back out. I always try to let myself off the hook for making silly mistakes since my timing is so off form not surfing enough. It also doesn't help that I've never been as good as I want to be, maybe some day. One more day of surfing, and only a hand full of months until snowboarding. Despite what I said about snowboarding in the first sentence, I still love it, but I've never seen dolphins while snowboarding, snowboarding doesn't help my nasal passages drain, and it's hardly ever so warm that I stand around with out a shirt on after snowboarding. But I'm still anxiously waiting for Alpy to open up again. Maybe surfing is more fun because I never seem to care about the conditions, I'm just happy to be wet and paddling around. Maybe that would change if I was doing it every day, but I know that Jinxy and Josh and I had some of the best days when the surf was the lamest.