Stormy Weather

Sunday night’s wind blew sand off the beach and into the streets of Plum Island

In the fine tradition of big-ass North Atlantic storms around Halloween (see: the so-called “perfect storm” of 1991; hurricane Sandy, 2012), New England got hit by a doozy of a tempest this past Sunday night, Oct. 29. Spawned by the atmospheric marriage of the remains of tropical storm Phillipe and a cold front moving off the mid-Atlantic coast of the U.S., Sunday’s night storm brought ferocious winds and heavy rains to the northeastern part of the country — including my snug-and-cozy domicile on the quaint little sand dune known as Plum Island.

Oh, baby! Did it blow Sunday night! We had a storm back in March — a standard winter nor’easter — that delivered official winds as high as 77 mph and was as impressive as any I’d ever seen at Plum Island, but Sunday night’s storm was different. For starters, in this storm the wind came out of the east-southeast. That may not seem like a big deal but my home is aligned northeast-to-southwest, so the wider side of of the house bore the brunt of Sunday night’s winds. And those winds, while less than March’s winds — highest velocities were in the 60s — were sustained for several hours, prompting me to actually start to wonder if something major was going to happen to the house. I had fears of the solar panels getting yanked off and taking the roof with it, or the decks (which my brother is currently rebuilding) blowing down, or windows caving in, or…

Monday morning broke sunny and beautiful, but the ocean was a little worked up…

In the end, we had it pretty easy. The extent of the damage was limited to leaks on the windward side of the house and a bunch of shingles on the newly repaired roof being torn off. The former occurred in areas my brother and I had earlier this autumn identified as needing replacement so there was no surprise there, while the latter is covered by the manufacturer since they were just installed a month ago. So…no big deal. Hell, our electricity didn’t even blink.

But driving around the following evening (Monday being hockey night, after all), the damage was pretty amazing. Heading into Newburyport, the opposite side of the Merrimack River was eerily dark as Salisbury remained without power. And several other towns in Essex County were not only still dark but trees were down everywhere, several roads remained closed and crews were still at work clearing debris off power lines. Hockey went on as scheduled (whew!) but two days later there remains a lot of work to be done. Apparently, some 300,000 people in Massachusetts were without power for various lengths of time (some remain without power through Wednesday). Up in Maine, many places are also still without power. And there is plenty of damage to both property and forest throughout New England.

And another thought occurred to me as I lay awake Sunday night between 3 and 4 a.m. during the peak winds: our winds, while certainly fierce, were less than half what Barbuda, St. Martin, Dominica, the BVIs and Puerto Rico (and other places) endured during hurricanes Irma and Maria — and those places had those incomprehensible winds for the better part of a day, not just a few hours. (Our storm was moving at 50+ mph when it hit New England so it blew right through; those hurricanes took their damned sweet time as they obliterated those islands.) So while I was feeling humbled as I listened to the wind and felt the house shake, I knew I had it pretty damned easy. (And one other, somewhat related thought occurred to me also: the thought of being at sea in such winds — an uncommon though not rare event — was frightening. But that’s something I’ll have to worry about later.)

This photo was posted to Facebook on Monday. I wonder who that “lone loco surfer” could be? Hmm…

Of course, I did get to enjoy some benefits of the storm. The waves kicked up Sunday night were quite large on Monday — too large to venture into until Monday afternoon, and even then it was 100 percent ludicrous as the winds, now blowing westerly or offshore, were still steady in the high 30s, so the currents were crazy and getting into a wave was damned near impossible. But venture out I did, and I stayed for two whole waves before I pulled the chute. Tuesday saw much smaller but still fun longboard waves, which I enjoyed for a couple of chilly hours. The Atlantic is cooling down…

Just another autumn in New England.

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An Almost-Lethal Dose

Like all Americans, surfers on the East Coast watched in horror last week as Hurricane Harvey decimated Texas. Unlike most Americans, however, we also had our eyes on another storm the National Hurricane Center was monitoring.

It was an area of thunderstorms and low pressure over the Florida peninsula, and though it was predicted to become a hurricane after the air mass moved into the Atlantic, the storm never quite got there. It did, however, join with a front moving off the coast and together, the storm blew up into an unnamed extra-tropical storm tracking along the Gulf Stream with hurricane-strength winds. And those winds delivered a couple of days of epic surfer here on the Right Coast.

I spent Wednesday, Aug. 30, tracking the storm and marine reports, and keeping an eye on my local break here in northern New England. Between visits to the beach, I’d tune in webcams from eastern Long Island, N.Y. Seething with envy, I saw surfers enjoying beautiful, overhead waves caressed by light offshore breezes. That evening, a friend from New Jersey said he’d surfed Sandy Hook and that it was “just like J-Bay. Not kidding.”

Friday’s waves were a far cry from Thursday, but I had fun with longboard and a couple of GoPro cameras…

Late in the day, I took my SUP out for a brief paddle in choppy conditions with an underlying swell that was just filtering into the area. It wasn’t much but you could see things were building. And build they did, overnight and into Thursday.

I awoke to solid swell and a deep high tide in the early morning. The tide meant my local break was simply waves crashing on dry sand so I had to wait a bit until the water level dropped a bit and the break moved offshore. It did so around 10 a.m. and I paddled out alone. Yes, alone: not one other person in the water.

A friend and one of the elder statesmen of the local surf scene had a bum shoulder and couldn’t paddle out, but he watched as I timed my paddle out perfectly and reached the lineup with dry hair. After just a few minutes, I turned and caught a nice wave: a good, big drop with a couple of lip moves and I quickly returned to the beach to drop off the sunglasses I’d been wearing to cut the morning glare. When I handed them to Jim and asked him to drop them off at my house, he was giddy. “That wave…it was easy one-and-a-half times overhead!” I’d have called it head high to maybe a little overhead, but hey, I’ll take Jim’s assessment. Regardless of size, it was fun and the sets were still building.

I paddled back out, still alone, and enjoyed several waves that were big and clean. The northwest wind was strong but not too bad, so the surface of the water stayed pretty smooth, making for good riding.

And then, about an hour and a half into my session, came The Wave.

It was a set wave, bigger than any I’d seen or caught earlier. I was in just the right spot — a rare event at this break which is infamous for its fierce currents that drag surfers all over the place — and caught it easily. Up I jumped and off I rode, sliding to the bottom of a wave that was easily twice my height. Nice bottom turn…off the lip…another bottom turn…cutback…

…it was during the cutback that I vividly recall thinking to myself, “This might be the biggest, cleanest wave I’ve ever had here — and I’ve been surfing this break since I was a teenager.” Such thinking in the middle of action is never a good sign — I always say that hockey is the most Zen thing I do precisely because there’s no thought whatsoever once my blades hit the ice — and that omen was fulfilled a few seconds later when the wave closed out on me as I was bottom turning again. As I made the turn, I caught a glimpse of the small groyne on the beach and began to panic a bit as I  realized just how close to the rocks I was.

The wave tumbled me underwater and I covered my head with my arms, scared shitless that the lip was going to suck me over the falls and onto the rocks. I waited for what seemed like a minute (but was really only a few seconds, I’m sure) for the imminent back-breaking, head-crushing blow but it never came, and as soon as I popped up to the surface I began scraping for the horizon, out away from the shore and the rocks, and under two more waves in the set.

Obviously, since I’m writing this, those waves let me go. In the relative calm after the set, I gathered my board and began paddling in. The current, still increasing, pushed me north — farther north than it had ever pushed me in past sessions — and it took several minutes before I reached the sand. A few minutes of breathing on the beach restored my calm, during which a woman who was on the beach with a bunch of friends and a gaggle of kids running around, came up to me and said, “It looks dangerous out here.” I told her it was, and that she should keep an eye on the kids because the currents were so fierce.

I went back out for more in the afternoon but the swell had already dropped a bit and the wind had picked up, raking the waves with a chop that made riding them herky-jerky. Others were out now so there was (presumed) safety in numbers, but the conditions, while bigger than usual, were benign enough that nonchalance was an option.

By the next morning, the swell was pretty much gone. I goofed off with a longboard in the tiny, choppy conditions, playing with a couple of GoPro cameras, but it was pretty silly, to be honest.

But still, lingering in the back of my brain, was the memory of that wave — equal parts exhilaration and the feeling that I’d dodged a bullet. Since then, I’m back to watching the tropics for the next dose of surf. Here comes Irma…

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A Tale of Two Surfs

This (from a few years ago) or…

It was the best of sessions, it was the worst of sessions, it was the warmest of water, it was the coldest of seas, it was the week of serenity, it was a day of mental turmoil — in short, the two periods could be received in the degree of comparison only.

Okay, so, maybe I’m pushing the imagery a wee bit. But allow me to highlight the contrast in the six days between Wednesday, March 15, and Thursday, March 9, if you will.

On March 15, in the wake of a just-departed nor’easter that delivered slushy snow and an official wind gust of 77 mph to Plum Island (I measured a gust of 61.9 mph on my handheld anemometer on the beach before the peak winds hit), I paddled into the surf in nearby New Hampshire. Fierce offshore winds made it challenging if not impossible to catch any waves. The wind chilled my face — the only part of my body exposed — and the spray made it difficult to even see. And despite the fact that I run pretty warm and had never really been cold when surfing this winter, my toes and fingers were numb before I’d gotten halfway to the waves. Speaking of the water temperature: 39 or 40 degrees Fahrenheit, tops. Air temp in the teens; and with those westerly winds, take a guess at the wind-chill factor. Sub-zero, for sure.

…this? That’s what I thought.

Six days earlier, I was wearing shorts as I paddled into the 81-degree Pacific Ocean, where light morning offshores caressed rising groundswell (from a storm thousands of miles distant in the far South Pacific) into waves that threw out in an arc enabling even me — a tall, hulking, klutzy surfer — to pull in and savor the feeling of being in the ocean’s warm embrace for an all-too-brief but still life-altering moment.

So yeah, I whined to myself a bit as I sat in the frigid waters of New Hampshire fighting to catch at least a semi-decent wave. Sue me.

All kidding aside, the contrasts created psychological challenges well beyond excessive internal dialogue. The difference in my attitude as a result of the toe- and finger-numbing lack of water temperature and the brain-numbing lack of wave quality was disappointing to me. At the point in New Hampshire, I waited where the lines of waves wrapped and peeled along the point itself. Before they did that wrap, those same swells exploded on the reef at the tip of the point itself. And though the waves were (I believe) rideable, the consequences of the cold and the chop if you fell were enough that I opted to stay put at the shoulder. A week earlier in Mexico, after working up to the main break in Puerto Escondido, I took off on waves where the likelihood of making it was way less than 25 percent.

Did I wish I was still in Mexico? You bet I did. My courage, it seemed, had frozen along with the precipitation still piled on the roadways. And that was a bummer. To me, anyway.

On top of that, it turned out that the New Hampshire town I was in had declared a snow emergency and all street parking was banned. I got back to my car — where I stripped and changed out of my frigid wetsuit in those arctic wind blasts — to find a parking ticket on my windshield. Fuck! Viva Mexico!

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