Who likes a stale blog?

Get freshly baked blog delivered to your inbox every Thursday. Sign up for Weekend! and get 10 ways to play and the Surfblogger and go have some fresh fun.

Eastside Surfblog past entries

Read 02/26/09 entry
Read 02/12/09 entry
Read 02/05/09 entry
Read 01/29/09 entry
Read 01/22/09 entry
Read 01/15/09 entry
Read 01/08/09 entry
Read 12/31/08 entry
Read 12/24/08 entry
Read 12/18/08 entry
Read 12/11/08 entry
Read 12/02/08 entry

03/05/09

If you believe in old sayings, since March came in like a lion, I guess we can expect nice weather from here on out. Of course, being from the South, I never could get into Groundhog Day. Never seen one. Closest thing we have is a possum. Maybe if one of them is in the middle of the road and manages to see the pickup truck first, we’ll have four more weeks of winter? I tend to believe in these things. Like “Red sky at night — sailor’s delight, red sky at morn — sailor take warn” or “When the cream sits out too long, you must whip it. When a problem comes along, you must whip it. Whip it good.”

One thing’s for sure, the weather this winter has been unpredictable. If you were like me last Saturday and checked the surf early, you were treated to some pretty fun little waves. I checked my usual spot and it looks like the sandbar we’ve had for the past couple of years has shifted somewhere else, so I drove down to the walkover at 25th Street and it was breaking much better. Kind of lumpy, but both the lefts and rights were working and stomach to maybe chest on the sets. Definitely sweet relief after so long without a session. On Sunday, things went from weird to sub-arctic, and now I’m sitting here looking at a temperature forecast for the weekend back in the upper 70s. So all of this really complicates my weekend surf forecast. I did manage to call it right last week, so I’m going to go out on a limb here and say there’s a good chance it will be rideable again Saturday. Low tide is midmorning, so crack of dawn or let the tide turn and do a brunch patrol is my call. The wind model shows a slight wind and the swell period model looks longer than 10 seconds. Maybe another slurp for the parched. And bring your longboard, because it won’t have much size. Oh, and one last thing, since the time changes this weekend, the whole go surfing after work thing is back on. I’m basking in the possibilities.

One observation I’d like to share from my surf session Saturday is that this whole dogs on the beach thing at the IOP has gotten out of hand. Now, before you label me as an animal hater, I’ll tell you I’ve been a dog owner my whole life. What’s got me concerned is the amount of dog poo everywhere. As more people move here, the pressures on our beaches from all kinds of people and activities continue to increase, and irresponsible dog owners are going to force beach residents to take action to restrict or ban dogs. I don’t take Blogdog to the beach, so this particular ban wouldn’t affect me, and it wouldn’t matter to me if other people can take their dogs to the beach or not. But I am concerned when the residents of our beaches come together to make laws, because it’s been my experience that they make laws that are only increasingly restrictive, not the other way around. And banning dogs can lead to bans on public parking, surfing, kiteboarding and just about anything else that the majority of island homeowners don’t like.

Face it, nowadays, the typical homeowner on our beaches is a pretty wealthy individual; and money is power. Get a bunch of angry rich people with dog poo on their shoes in a room together, and bad things can happen to us mere mortals who just want to go for a quick surf after work. Just look at the beaches up North. Public (paid) parking in designated lots only, surfing in a restricted area only, no dogs, and wall-to-wall rules. And this is what is considered normal by people from New Jersey or wherever. So when these people come down here and buy the IOP megashacks and get fed up with dog poo all over the Southern fantasy lifestyle, the next thing you know they’re on Town Council laying down the law as they know it. And I can’t blame them. There’s a certain amount of rights that come as a property owner and a whole bunch more that can be assumed under the guise of civic involvement.

But who gets screwed in this deal? Surfers. Why? Well for one, restricted beach access, or surfing in designated areas only, would just about kill the sport here. The surf is just not that good to pack us all into one spot. Imagine if the Washout was the only place surfing was allowed on Folly. Second, besides someone with a dog, we are the most visible nonresidents at the beach. Our cars have racks on them and are plastered with stickers. We have boards under our arms and are generally laughing, rat-tailing each other with towels and having a good time right on the edge of some pretty expensive lawns. Face it, when there’s a swell, we’re there in droves and everybody can see it. So as an angry property owner, get rid of the dogs and the surfers and you’ve pretty much thinned the herd down to a manageable level.

So, why this rant? Because, as surfers, we’d better get proactive and start policing our beach before this happens. We need to get militant about dog poo, litter, disregard for property and any other behavior we’ll pay the price for. If you see somebody crossing the line, call ’em down for it. The Hawaiian surfers have been forced into this mentality, and if you are doing something they don’t like, da bruddas aren’t shy about letting you know it. It’s time we shed a little bit of our Southern gentility and got irresponsible people in line. And if you’re a dog owner, do us all a favor and take Fido to the dog park where a dog can just, well, be a dog.