There’s No Place Like Home

Being a surfer in New England is not easy. The water is usually frigid, the ocean usually flat. What waves we do get tend to be locally generated, with winter nor’easters usually creating the biggest surf.

The highlight of every New England surfer’s year is hurricane season. No, it’s not easy to cheer on storms that can wreak havoc elsewhere, but the fact remains that these tropical behemoths typically don’t mess with New England (this year’s Irene being a notable exception), they generate large surf from great distances away so there’s usually nice weather here on shore, and they’re in the fall which is when our water is warmest. Throw in the bonus that they tend to arrive after Labor Day so the crowds are even smaller than usual and it’s a great recipe.

So imagine my delight when I returned home to New England just in time for Hurricane Ophelia to cruise northward through the Atlantic. Ophelia’s trajectory was perfect: a few hundred miles offshore so there was no destruction, and straight north past us here in the north-of-Cape-Cod section of the region. Sadly, Ophelia had one fatal flaw: speed. She blew past us at twenty-five to thirty miles an hour, so she didn’t spend enough time in the window needed to send significant swell our way. What could have been an epic Sunday and Monday turned into a “cross your fingers for Monday” situation. So cross my fingers I did. All weekend.

And there was payoff. Finally.

This afternoon, I had a truly primo surf session. DeLIGHTful, even. Simply wonderful. And not just any surf session. No, this was at my home break, the wave I grew up surfing. A place where I have the most intimate knowledge and the deepest connection. MY place. Home.

For about half an hour, forty-five minutes, I had this break all to myself. It was spectacular, with high-performance waves peeling along an underwater sand bar before unloading in a hollow shore break just off the beach. Head high, glassy, lined-up walls, with warm water (even by SoCal standards: my 3/2 fullsuit was much too warm) and bright sunshine amid puffy cumulus clouds…all to myself. Yes, all to myself. With no one to battle, no one to have to outmaneuver, I got more waves in thirty minutes here than I’d get in an hour-plus in San Diego County. But more than the wave count was just the simple pleasure of being able to surf casually, nonchalantly. Without having to worry about positioning in the lineup, I enjoyed a carefree session where I could instead focus on the act (art?) of riding a wave.

No, the wave wasn’t some razor-sharp, super-hollow Hawaiian reef break. Hell, it’s not even a shitty beach break in L.A. County. But it’s mine and it’s home and it was wonderful. Bottom line: I had the kind of session this afternoon that gets a surfer stoked for days and weeks on end. It was that good. And all I can say is, “thanks.” To the Atlantic, to the planet, to the universe: one big “mahalo” for an afternoon to remember.

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Iceland Got Real Surf!

The recent stormy conditions may have kept Polar Bear in port, but they did one very nice thing: they built up a bit of surf. As a result, yesterday I finally got to enjoy some actual surfing in the Greenland Sea. Last week it was fun paddling around in the small waves — and even standing on a couple of little rollers — but it wasn’t really surfing, per se. Yesterday was.

No, there are no photos. All three of us — Maik, Danny and I — headed over to Skálavik, a bay on the tip of the peninsula north of Ísafjörður open directly to the expanse of the Greenland Sea in the late afternoon. On an incoming tide we shared head-high surf with the biggest seal I’ve ever seen in my life. We surfed the beach break in the middle of the bay, paddling out from the east corner of the bay where a rip current made the work pretty easy. The current drifted us west, past where a stream rushed into the bay from a gorgeous waterfall farther up the valley, and into a shifting lineup. It was really hit-or-miss with what you’d get: between the current, the shifty beachbreak peaks and a strong sideways wind, more often than not you’d get sectioned on take off and nothing but whitewater on either side.

Which wasn’t too bad on the sets, which were overhead by a foot or two. And on the couple of waves that actually presented a bit of section, well, that’s what it’s all about. Ahhhh!

In all honesty, the surf wasn’t great. The chop was challenging and the close-outs were a drag. But the joy of dropping into an overhead wave? Well, there’s little else that approaches that. And to be out in such a beautiful location with just two other friends (and our new seal friend who’d pop his head up every now and then), well, it made the chill worth it. A nice way to wind up our time in Ísafjörður.

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Welcome to a Goat Rodeo…Polar Bear Style

Finally chilling out after a busy Friday here in Ísafjörður. We got Polar Bear mostly ready to go tomorrow by stowing the two inflatable dinghies, washing the boat down, cleaning the interior, doing laundry, moving some of the berths around to accommodate incoming guests, etc.

But the Polar Bear goat rodeo continues. The weather forecast is still more moderate than it was a few days ago, and while a run due north to Scoresby Sund/Ittoorqqortormiit/Constable Pynt is still out due to heavy winds and seas in the forecast for that area, the drive to reach Greenland remains so strong that now we’re going to head west-southwest to Kulusuk but…

…but we don’t know if the guests arriving tomorrow can get a flight out of Kulusuk next week.

— No worries. There are several daily flights to Reykjavik from Kulusuk tomorrow so that’s OK

…but (and this is my personal favorite) we don’t have a chart for the Kulusuk area.

— Despite being told to get a chart in England yesterday, Boy Wonder called this afternoon to say the chandlery in Reykjavik was closing today (Friday) and wouldn’t open again until Monday, so his plan to get a chart en route was out and could we do anything about a chart? And did we really need a chart? Legally, yes, we need a chart, and Boogie won’t go without one, regardless. Boogie spoke with the harbormaster who checked with an ancient local who used to sail to Kulusuk regularly to see if he still had an old chart lying around…no luck. Then he tried a friend of the skipper of a local boat (Aurora, a boat we saw at Jan Mayen way back when, now currently in Greenland with guests) to see if he had a chart lying around…well, that friend-of-the-skipper is playing in the band at the bar/restaurant across the street from Polar Bear so we’re going to check in with him later, see if there’s a chart in his car or something.

The bottom line is: if we don’t get out by midday tomorrow, the weather is forecast to get nasty enough that we’ll be here for at least a couple of days. We’d still get Boogie and Marlies’ friends to Greenland, and we’d get there for next week’s guests, but it’ll be close AND we’ll be hanging out in Ísafjörður for another couple of days…which wouldn’t bother the surfer in me (see yesterday’s post), especially since my wetsuit boots and gloves arrived this morning from home (thanks, Mom!). I’d also get to check out opening day of the English Premier League (a lot of Man U and EPL fans here in Iceland, it turns out). And frankly, the three of us had such a great day yesterday — we rented a car and spent the day touring the Westfjords region — that the guests could have plenty of fun in the interim.

More on that later…either in the next day or so, or after we return to civilization in a couple of weeks. Either way, I’ll get at least a quick update posted tomorrow if we’re heading to sea.

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