Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Dry Spot


W WIND 15 KT WITH GUSTS TO 25 KT.
WIND WAVES 2 FT.
W SWELL 14 FT 11 SECONDS.
BUILDING TO 18 FT.


In March of 1992 I took my nephew and went down to Short Sands on a Monday for 5 days of camping. We stopped at a hardware store in Seaside and bought a tarp since it was pouring down rain the whole drive to the coast. I didn't think much about it but when I opened it up at the campsite I saw it was a 40' x 60' unit! Turned out to be an excellent unplanned error. We covered 2 whole campsites in the deserted campground with our tent smack dab under the middle of the tarp's peak.
My nephew was a teenager and was just learning to surf, even in 1992 there were relatively few midweek surfers out so we largely had the waves to ourselves. The surf wasn't too big and we just hung out on the beach when it wasn't pissing rain, surfed when we wanted and hunkered down at the campsite when we were hungry or the downpour was too intense.
Some coworkers of mine were on a "retreat" in Seaside on one of the nights we were down, staying at a hotel there. So I fed the kid and headed over to town to see what was up. The retreat in question was an effort to consume as much alcohol as humanly possible and apparently they were being highly successful. I partook for a bit, but headed back before I regretted ruining my planned next day of surfing.
By Friday we were pretty "camped" out, so we consolidated our stuff and packed some of it up to the car. We surfed all day in the rain that seemingly never let up. The surf was definitely the best on that last day as I recall, great rights off the the south end that deposited you into the rip for the escalator ride back out in the rip. We knocked off about 3, went back to the camp, ate a late lunch and packed up the rest of our stuff. As we loaded the final wheelbarrow load a couple with surfboards walked by..."You leaving?", they asked. "Want the tarp?", I asked. They eyed the swamped out campsites everywhere and then looked at our now completely dry site and said, "Yeah!"

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