The Ferris Files

San Francisco’s wastewater treatment plant sits directly opposite the city’s most popular surf break, but the doctored water doesn’t end up there. Nowhere close, in fact. The effluent is discharged from a pipe four miles offshore and 90 feet down – in other words, a fish’s problem, but not yours, unless of course you eat [...]

What does it smell like in a wastewater treatment plant? Not as bad as you might think. A powerful chemical-detergent smell pervades, masking something the nose can’t quite identify.

Once through the door and into the innards of the Oceanside Water Pollution Control plant, our guide Catania showed us the “influent gates” where the first big [...]

As news emerges of sewage emerging into San Pablo Bay, it is only highlights how little we Bay Area watermen and -women know about the waste that might reside in our water. That was the question that motivated my recent visit to San Francisco’s wastewater treatment plant, 11 miles south of the spill and opposite [...]

A few weeks ago I braced my sniffer and joined a tour of San Francisco’s wastewater treatment plant. No, I’m not mentally ill. The Wastewater Enterprise Oceanside Plant sits directly opposite the break at Ocean Beach where I occasionally surf, and I wanted to know exactly what I’m swimming in.
The answer to that question turned [...]

One headland north of my standard break is a beach called Rockaway that I have never surfed. I peer down onto it from Highway 1. The waves look inviting, but I have heard rumors of strange circular currents, huge sets, broken boards. I keep on driving.
My surf buddy Matt said the swell was small today [...]

Today the wind whipped Ocean Beach into a frothy soup, so instead of getting wet I ducked into the Wise surf shop. I consoled myself with sport’s second-greatest joy, which of course is buying new stuff.
Yes, that’s me below, modeling the O’Neill SL Psycho Glove and the O’Neill Squid Lid, both in black. There is [...]

If you’ve ever seen a surf video, you’d think that the song in a surfer’s head is pretty much electric guitars, drum machines, and a lot of screaming from a raspy-voiced grungestar with greasy hair. I am here to tell you that’s a bunch of marketing hoo-ha.
Today as I floated off Linda Mar Beach in [...]

I was in the parking lot this morning at Linda Mar, waxing my board and eager for my first surf session in more than a week, when a cop in a black dune buggy drove up and yelled, “Beach’s closed!”
Last week’s oil spill in San Francisco Bay had finally reached my bread-and-butter break. Dead, oily [...]

My plans to surf at Ocean Beach today were drowned, or rather coated in oil, when I heard about the 58,000 gallons of fuel oil spilled by a container ship when it grazed the Bay Bridge yesterday.
Reports have big slicks moving north along the Marin coastline, rather than south toward my usual haunts, but Ocean [...]

Psst. Don’t tell anyone, but I think I just might be getting better at this surfing thing.
If you’ve been reading this blog, you know that there’s a move I find super-scary – tipping myself over the edge of a wave that is big enough to go vertical. It feels like leaping off the top of [...]