DEDICATED TO SURFING

By Corky Carroll

Last week I was checking out the action at the U.S. Open of Surfing and taking in some of the side events going on.  Every time I go to some big surfing event, such as this one, I always got hit with tons of what would seem like silly and ridiculous questions such as, “I bet you wish you were still out there huh?” 

Of course I wish I was still out there because that would mean I would be a lot younger, in better shape and able to surf a whole lot better than I can at the moment.  But, in all honesty I don’t wish I was still out “there.”  Meaning in the competition.  I do wish I was a whole lot younger, in better shape and surfing well enough to do that though.  But I guess what most of these people who ask these questions don’t realize is that I am out there, meaning in the surf, every single day.  I get asked that too.  “Do you ever go out on a board anymore?”  

It’s hard, I imagine, for the average person who does not surf all the time, or at all, to realize that just because your competitive career might come to an end does not mean that you have to stop surfing.  Baseball, football, basketball and those kinds of sports are different.  You retire and I don’t think you get the guys together for a good solid game of tackle football every day, or anyway, or ever again.   But you can surf as long as your stoke will take you and your body will let you.  

I am closing in on 64 in September, the 29^th if ya wanna send along some presents or cards with money or something.  I am lucky in the fact that I have set up my life so that I can go surfing every day.  How do you do that, you ask?  Well, it’s not easy and you have to sacrifice a ton of luxuries that many of you have come to take for granted.  Stuff like pavement on the roads, electricity that works most of the time and having a dependable and steady income.  For me it’s a no brainer.  I have always lived with the “surfing comes first and all the rest after that, with the possible exception of family.”  But it has come at a cost and it has been one that I have happily been willing to pay.  I never bought into buying in.  In other words, never gave up the freedom to surf in order to have money and things.  Some people can do that but most can’t.  It’s nice to have a comfortable life with a nice car and home and steady income, insurance and credit cards that don’t burst into flames if you try and use them.  I can dig it.  But on the other hand it’s great to wake up in the morning and look out the window at the surf, down a quick cup of coffee and paddle out.  That is my life.  I am a dedicated surfer.  So, to further answer that question, “No, don’t wish I was in the surfing contest but am very happy that I AM out there every day.”  

There are other ways that you can set your time up so that you have at least a good degree of freedom to surf as much as possible.  My pal Keith Meehan sells cars at DeLillo Chevrolet in Huntington Beach.  The dealership is close to the surf so he can hit it every morning before having to be on the lot.  He says he loves his job and Dave DeLillo, the owner and long time Surf City local, understands that he needs to surf.  He is lucky.  I have other friends that became school teachers so they would have summers off and more vacation time than most other jobs.  Some people get jobs in the surf industry thinking that will allow them time to surf, but sometimes that is not always the case.  Maybe if you are Bob Hurley you can surf as much as you want, but most everyone else has to work pretty hard in that industry to get by. 

Working in a surf shop does not pay at all, but you can always work it so that when the waves are up you can sneak out for a session.  Unless you are working with George “Mayor of Main Street” Lambert, because he will sneak out before you EVERY time and leave you with the blown out remains later.  

Probably most of you are just laughing and thinking, “this guy is an idiot, still trying to be a kid.”  Maybe you are right, but I don’t think it has anything to do with being a kid.   It is the love of the feeling of riding waves.  It’s like loving having your back scratched or something except times a zillion.  An addiction of the most extreme kind. 

“Hi, I’m Corky.  I am a surf addict.”

SOME LIKE IT COLD

By Corky Carroll

There is not a shred of doubt that the chills of winter are setting in deeper each day here in our beautiful and Nirvana like Orange County. I just answered a question about how cold the water has to get before it gives you the dreaded “ice cream headache” in my Ask the Expert column. Ice cream headache, for those of you who don’t know, is much like the infamous “margarita headache” you get when you drink frozen drinks. Surfers get the same kinda thing when they have to put their heads underwater while surfing in the colder waters of wintertime. It happens when the water gets around 57 degrees or colder.

It’s getting that time of year. Of course there are all these new super stretchy ultra toasty kinda wetsuits on the market now. The problem with those is that you need to be a contortionist to get in and out of them. Or at least not a geezer with the early stages of rigormortous setting in. The last time I tried one on I got stuck half in- half out of the thing and had to call for help from the dressing room of Huntington Surf n Sport. I guess I had it backwards or upside down and inside out or something.

But we are lucky here in our little as good a climate as it gets part of the world. It gets cold in the winter, yes. But not that cold. And it gets hot in the summer too, yes again. But not that hot either. We have a very mellow climate. Not extreme in either direction. We are the lucky ones.

The reason I am brining this up, other than the fact that it really is getting colder by the nano second, is that a pal of mine who lives in Wisconsin, Great Lake Blake, was visiting not long ago and brought a video made totally of surfing on the Great Lakes. It’s cold there. REALLY cold. I would go as far as to call it extreme and that is an understatement. The movie built up to the big highlight sequence at the end when the surf was what they called “really good.” I guess the best waves come through in the coldest part of the year when they get storms. When the “epic” day arrived all these guys loaded in their car and drove twelve hours through the night and through a full on blizzard to get to the spot. I am talking mega feet of snow and ice and zero visibility on the roads. They were following snow plows and stuff. Then when they got there they had to wade through snow drifts up to their chests with their boards over their heads to get to the water. Then when they got to the water they had to climb out on these huge chunks of ice that were floating in the shorebreak like little icebergs. Then jump off those and paddle out. The water was in the low 30’s and with the wind chill factor the air was sub zero. They had full wetsuits about a foot thick with hoods and gloves and Vaseline all over their faces to keep from getting frost bite. I will admit the waves were decent. Nice little head high peaks with hard offshore wind. Looked like a pretty good winter day at Newport Beach only it was so cold that everything was the color blue. And these dudes where stoked to the max. Then after the session they had to drive back and be at work the next day.

After the video was over Great Lake Blake was smiling and gloating and saying, “see, there is good surf on the Great Lakes.” All I could do was smile and pat him on the back. I really admire that kind of surf stoke and I didn’t want to burst his balloon and say what I was really thinking. Which was, “you guys are insane.”

See what living in a place like Orange County does to you. It is so nice here that we get jaded. When the water gets under 65 we all shiver and whine like babies. My favorite is when we get a milla-inch of rain the televisions starts blaring “storm watch 2010!” Try living in the tropics where it rains a foot an hour for weeks at a time. We are a breed of super-wusses. And I am the biggest of them all. My low water temp limit has risen to mild hot tub. Jumping off icebergs? Not. Yet I still consider myself a hard core surfer. Hard, yet not “extremely” hard, core. It’s kinda like “soft rock.” But, in self defense, at my age you don’t need to be made any stiffer than you already are.

My point is that we should all appreciate our wonderful climate and realize that we are the ones who have it good. At this very moment one of our surfing brothers is scraping ice off his car window with his fin and heading out with the penguins.

LIFE IN THE FOOD CHAIN

By Corky Carroll

I was sitting on my board outside the lineup this morning waiting for a wave.  I was alone and was kinda lost in a thought about something or another when all of a sudden a big fat fish jumped out of the water and almost hit me right in the face.  Scared the heck out of me.  I don’t know what kind of fish it was and I am sure it was harmless, but you just don’t expect some flying tuna to come sailing out of the water right at you.  It brought back a very vivid memory I have of a similar situation that I experienced many years ago.

It was early in 1968 and I was spending most of the winter in Puerto Rico.  I had a little house on the hill overlooking the surf and Tom Morey, the dude who invented the boogie board, lived right next door.  We were pretty much the only surfers around at that time.  There was one dude from Florida that lived in a tent on the beach and on the weekends some locals would drive the 4 hrs out from San Juan.  For the most part we were alone in the surf almost every day.

This one day we were surfing a spot that was even far away from all the other spots and there was nothing around for miles and miles.  Just Tom and I surfing these really nice peaks in an incredibly beautiful tropical bay.  We were chit chatting about something or another when way off in the distance something caught my eye.  It was a fish, maybe two feet long, being chased by a bigger fish, maybe 3 or 4 feet long.  They were skipping across the water like two stones that somebody had thrown, propelling themselves.  I said to Tom, “check these dudes out,” as they went right past us going what seemed like 50 mph.  You could see the one in the front was squirming to get away and the one in the back was opening wide to try and eat the one in front. 

For as far as we could see those two fish skipped off into the distance, the big one trying to eat the small one.  I looked at Tom, who is about as close to a surfing scientist as you can get, and asked him which fish was gonna win out.  Would the little one get away or the big one get lunch?

Tom thought carefully for a moment and then very casually and with an all knowledgeable tone to his voice explained that the big fish would win and eat the little fish.  His theory was based on the fact that the big fish had to spend less energy in the chase than the little one because he was bigger.  Eventually the little fish would tire out and be eaten.  

I said that was kinda sad.  Tom just smiled and said, “well kid, that’s life in the food chain.”  

I don’t like the food chain.

PIGHEADED SURF CRUISERS

By Corky Carroll

As most of you know it’s been a far less than satisfying summer here in Southern California for surf.  Some are calling it the worst ever.  Not only has the surf been bad but the water has been colder than normal too.  And when you consider the fact that we don’t have all that warm of water in the first place we at least hope for some relief from the full wetsuits in the summer.  But this summer has been disappointing all the way around. 

One day recently I was standing on the pier in Huntington Beach lamenting how bad the surf was and how cold it was that morning.  Normally this time of year its magical here.  Big south swells and offshore winds.  That’s why I love fall the best time of all.  In the winter when it’s cold I spend most of the time at my casa in the southern part of Mainland Mexico because it’s warm and the surf is good almost all the time.  And I was thinking about that and on the spur of the moment decided to jump on a jet and go back down there. 

Late summer and fall is the rainy season in tropical Mexico.  And this year has been a monster year for rainfall.  All the rivers are raging and the roads are full of holes and it’s hard to get around.  I landed in the middle of a huge rainstorm and wondered if I had made the right call on this.  A pal of mine from San Diego we call Fluid Phil was with me.  That night we were sitting around on my deck with my neighbor, the infamous Iguana, and got to talking about how all the river mouths were going to be working great this year.  A thought occurred to me.  I had seen a river mouth far out in the middle of nowhere a few years back when I was looking at some land for sale that was by the beach.  It was so remote that I wrote it off as “to hard to get to.”  But I did take a mental note that there was a river mouth there with an amazing setup for catching a south swell if the sandbars were right.  I had gone as far as checking it out on Google earth to see the different roads in and all that.  Over a few (dozen) tequilas and tacos we decided to get up early and make a quest for unknown surf.

We left my casa at 5A.M. and made the long slow drive to where the little dirt road turned off the main highway and lead eventually to the beach.  The little dirt road was more like a mud river, but we decided to brave it.  I have 4wd.  After about an hour of very slow and very careful bumping and sliding around we finally made it to the beach next to the river mouth that I had remembered.  It was now about 9A.M. and it was a beautiful crystal clear morning with a hard offshore wind blowing.  A huge south swell was wrapping around the rocky point next to the river and peeling perfectly across the sandbar to the north.  We hit it right on.  The only problem was that so much crud had come out of the river that the beach was covered with mountains of debris.  I had never seen so many plastic bottles in my life.  We had no idea how to get through all this stuff and to the water, there was no path.  Right then the Iguana spotted a big pig head laying there.  No pig, just the head.  Yuck.  Then we noticed that there was a whole bunch of them.  I was creeped out to the max.  So Fluid Phil says, “well, we could make stepping stones out of the pig heads to get to the water.”  The scarey part is he meant it. 

I can honestly say that this is one of the most bizarre water entries I have ever made in my life.  I have jumped off cliffs, piers and rocks.  Paddled through rivers with crocodiles, which incidentely this river did have, and all kinds of other difficult water entries.  But walking over pig heads was a new one for me.  Not the ideal way to start the day, but hey.  We got to the water and rode some amazing waves all by ourselves. 

Two days before I was standing on the Huntington Beach freezing and now here we were having discovered and surfed a whole new spot.  We lovingly named it “Pigheads.” 

GEEZERS GONE WILD

By Corky Carroll

I am sitting here breathing heavy after an intense morning of surfing good waves with only a couple people in the water with me.  Must have gotten thirty waves today and excited about having ridden a new board for the first time today and loving it.  On one hand I am feeling great, tired but great none the less.  On the other I am staring down the barrel of yet another birthday coming up next week and that just means I am sinking further and further into the great abyss of over the hilldom.  The land of the lost.  The outers of the “out the pasture” pastures.  The gone, forgotten and done with.  Freaking Geezerland.  Argh. 

The good news is that seeing as how my birthday is still almost a week away, the 29^th, there is still time for you to send presents.  If you can’t think of anything cool to send I am fine with checks or money orders.  Heck, cash is good too.  Don’t be shy, I love getting’ stuff. 

So here I am debating the pros and cons of getting older and the con’s are winning by a huge margin.  But one good thing about becoming aged is that you can take advantage of “senior” discounts.  I just joined AARP and they have all kinds of good deals for “seniors.”  Then I am thinking, “hey, maybe we need some sort of AARP for old surfers?”  Yeah, think about it.  Discounts at surf shops, on new boards, wetsuits, surfing travel agencies, etc. etc. etc.   AARP doesn’t help with any of those things.  Hotels and car rentals yes, but a new noserider?  No.  

Whadda ya think?  I know that there are some other oldsters out there reading this who could benefit from an old peoples surfing association.  We need to organize.  First we need a name though.  Something with a cool letter formation.  Got any ideas?  Send ‘em in.  Let’s get this thing going.  I will open it up with Only Old Peoples Surfing Association.  “OOPSA.”  I know you can do better, but it’s a start.   Also, we need somebody who knows how to do these things to organize and run it.  That’s not me, I would only take all the dues and go on an extended surf vacation.  Can’t be trusted.  But one of you out there is just the right person to help out with this project.  Step up and help out all of us decrepit old surf rodents.  Be somebody.  Be all you can be.  We need ya.

Surf Dudes with Dentures, the SDD?  No, sounds like a disease of some sort.  Geezers On Surfing Holiday, the GOSH?  Somebody stop me.  Help.  Send in better ideas, and birthday presents, as soon as possible.  We are NOT getting any younger.  Surfers in the Obits Soon, the SOS? 

Going Away Geezer Surfers, the GAGS?  Shoot me now.

FLIPPY

By Corky Carroll

One of the things I love about being a columnist, as opposed to a reporter, is that for the most part I can write about whatever I feel like at the time.  Within reason of course,  I could very easily cross that line without any effort at all.  But the one thing that I hate to write about is when one of our surfing legends passes away.  Normally I leave that to the reporters.  Also, as a columnist, my deadlines are a week before the story comes out in print so its kinda impossible to really report anything as it will already have been reported by the time mine comes out.  Anyway, I just wanted to clarify that in this case because this is one of those times. 

We have lost three icons in the surfing world in the past couple of weeks.  The first was legendary surfer and former lifeguard at Doheny State Park, Peter Van Dyke.  Peter was a star in many of the early surfing films in the 1960’s along with his big wave riding brother Fred.  Then there was the shocking death of three time World Champion Andy Irons from dengue fever.  Only 32 years old.  The entire surfing world was rocked by that news. 

Then a few days later we lost one of the greatest big wave riders and one of the coolest guys ever. Orange Counties own Philip “Flippy” Hoffman.  Flippy was part of the famous Hoffman surfing family that includes his brother Walter, legendary early big wave rider and known as the “Godfather” in surfing circles.  And, of course, former Women’s World Champion Joyce Hoffman.  Flippy was not as famous to the general public but was HUGE in the inside hard core surfing community. 

For one thing Flippy was not only a pioneer big wave ride he was THE pioneer of “tow in” surfing.  That is where guys are towed into giant waves, that are too big to catch by paddling, by other guys on jet skis.  Flippy was doing this decades before anybody else.  He had a guy who towed him into monstrous waves on the outside reefs of the North Shore of Oahu with a Boston Whaler.  He did it alone and without any cameras or any kind of publicity or hoopla at all.  He just did it and keep quiet about it. 

Flippy was also a diver and I think has the world record for having had the “bends” (nitrogen narcosis) more times than anybody else.  He had it so many times he had a season pass to the decompression chamber in Honolulu.  He lived life on the edge and under his own terms.  Flippy was a true “adrenalin junky” in the purest form.  He rode motorcycles and was a pioneer jet ski rider in giant surf.  Before guys were using them to tow in other guys Flippy would just go ahead and ride these monster offshore waves all by himself on the jetski.  

One of the things that I loved about him was his love for all things fun, and funny.  He did not give a rats butt if something was cool or not cool and he had no peer group at all.  He was his own drummer.  I will never forget when the movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” came out.  Flippy went to see it and loved it so much that the next night he rounded up about twenty of us and, without telling us where we were going, took us all to the movies to see it.  He bought all the tickets and snacks at the snack bar too.  He loved jokes and anything funny, the more outrageous it was the better he liked it.  One of his favorite things to say was “f***in’ bitchin’.” (As in saying “wonderful.”).  That was his reply to almost anything.  How was the surf today?  How’s things?  Etc.  (I am not trying to be profane so please forgive the wordage, but it’s the way it is and should be told that way.)

He had so much damage to himself from all the times he had the “bends” that he couldn’t surf much standing up anymore.  So he was out on his jet ski about six months ago and it broke down out in the ocean.  Of course he was alone and was not rescued for many hours.  The damage to his lungs from so much salt water exposure took its toll and he had been in the hospital on life support.  He made the call to pull the plug himself.  Family and close friends got to say aloha.  He was 81.  I am sure that if you asked him how his life had been he would have got that big smile and said, “f***in’ bitchin’.”