The Ferris Files

The Bay Area’s wind this weekend is so atypical that it made the evening news. In Southern California, still smoking from last week’s wildfires, these gusts might be called a Santa Ana. But here they’re so unusual they don’t have a name.
Driving to Linda Mar in the bright sunshine I noticed that the American flag [...]

Tonight I floated at Linda Mar in a fog. I mean real fog – a thick cloud hugging the water – but the weather made my brain foggy, too, like I was surfing in a restless dream.
Waves rolled out of the mist, but I couldn’t read their size or contour. The beach was back there, [...]

I am proud to report my first surfboard repair. My favorite steed, a Bing Bonzer, somehow developed an inch-long tear on the rail, and I opted for an in-house convalescence. The girl at the NorCal Surf Shop sold me a tube of resin and said a dab would do me.
With the help of two grades [...]

This evening little drops of brine keep shedding from my nose. They taste of Ocean Beach. This morning I braved Ocean Beach, my nemesis, in the company of my friend Scott, and the power of the waves sent saltwater into my sinuses like a firehose.
If a wave at Linda Mar (my usual break) pushes like [...]

I woke up this morning and one look out the window propelled me out of bed. The sky was serene blue and every tree glowed gold in the October light. A perfect San Francisco fall day. It’s an easy mistake, thinking a fair sky means a fair sea.
I drove into the Linda Mar beach in [...]

I wonder sometimes if America’s obsession with surfing is due for an ebb tide. Haven’t all the good waves have been surfed already? Is the demand for “Endless Summer” movies really endless? Is there anything left to say about this sport?
However, after attending a lecture on the science of surfing last night, I feel we’re [...]

Just to scare myself, I have started reading The Devil’s Teeth, a book about the great white sharks that feed at the Farallon Islands, just 30 miles or so from my favorite surf spots.
The first sentence, about a seal execution, raises the hackles of a surfer and keeps him reading: “The killing took place at [...]

Every surf break has its alpha male, and this afternoon at Linda Mar beach it was a man I’ll call Methuselah, a heavyset man with a bald head and a bull neck and a wet gray goatee. He positioned himself far out, turned his back on the other surfers and looked straight out to sea. [...]

This morning Bob America lurched over to my place for a surf session despite the rough fermentation of the night before. He had downed two Negro Modelos, two glasses of an Australian pinot, a glass of bubbly and two pints of Guinness, best he could remember. The libations had stayed till morning and were now [...]

I had just struggled onto my second wave this morning at Ocean Beach when something blue-black flickered past me quick as a starling.
The apparition was past before I recognized it as a fellow boardsman. Sliding along a sixty-degree wall of water, he had simply weaved around me, no room to spare, like Jackie Chan in [...]