If you live in California, Hurricane Marie is burned in your brain. For me, there’s one spot in particular: it was a spot called (ha ha! Yeah right!), which really only works properly on a big south, and I’d never really seen it doing what it was rumored to be able to do. Hurricane Marie, of course, produced a very, very big south, and if any swell would flip the on switch for this spot, it was this one.
I brought two boards, just in case–one a 5’11 that I loved more than anything and the other a very strange little flat thing that was not at all suited to the day. When I came to the top of the cliff at (nope, still not saying… here’s a photo, though) it looked like this:
Let’s just call it Clownfarts.
I, of course, was very excited. Four very fun waves in, though, I snapped that favorite board of mine. As is usually the case with snapping a board that you love, I felt a mixture of anger and elation. The elation would fade with time leaving only the anger, but at the moment, I didn’t care all that much. I just wanted another wave. I sprinted up the cliff to my truck where my second board was currently basking in the sun, melting all of its wax, ran into a few friends, babbled something excited about the waves, grabbed my very not-suited-for-the-waves board, and sprinted back down.
I wasn’t even close on the first wave I paddled for. The board I was on had almost no rocker, and I pearled very hard and very fast. I spent the next two hours paddling around, catching fragments of waves that I really wanted, and ended up leaving frustrated. But those few waves before I snapped my board will be forever etched in my memory. Hurricane Marie lasted a good few days before tapering off, but the memories it left won’t be going anywhere any time soon.
Much of the footage from Marie has been seen already. But, “due to contracts with motion picture projects using some of these,” Air Reel Productions “had to wait almost two years before making some of these public.”
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