Montecito Lad Odyssey

Page’s father drove him up the coast with all his luggage, but the surfboard stayed in SB. His mother made sure of that. Page had been able to smuggle his wetsuit, however. His mother had insisted that it stay, but at the last minute, Page threw it into the car trunk from where he kept it in the garage. He was on the road before his mother noticed it was missing. Page knew his dad didn’t care if he brought it. His dad just wanted to keep things cool with mom or else he had no peace either. Page and his dad were on the same wavelength. They knew the main problem was keeping mom from freaking. She was a real bitch from hell when she did.

​When driving up to Monterey from Santa Barbara, there are two ways you can go once you hit San Louis Obispo: 101, which is a two lane freeway and goes north on an inland path, or the 1 also know as PCH, Pacific Coast Highway, which is one lane and follows the winding coast through Big Sur. Page asked his father if they could go up the PHC, and he agreed.

The PCH through Big Sur is one of the most beautiful drives in the world. The stretch of almost a hundred miles from San Louis to Monterey consists of basically undeveloped mountains jetting strait out of the ocean about twenty five hundred feet. There are groves of Redwoods all along the way, primarily in the canyons cut by the streams from all the rain that region receives.

Page loved this area. He knew it because Pat’s family owned a small house in the middle of Big Sur on a twenty-acre lot. The house sat on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean, as most of Big Sur does. Page used to come up here with Pat and his family for long weekends in Junior High. It was where he first had experience with big waves and where he first got to smoke real high quality buds. It contained a very mystical quality to it. The mist rolls up the cliffs and canyons and slowly envelopes the Redwood trees. The waves are huge and crash against the shore with a thud that vibrates the ground. You can look out into the ocean and see whales spouting, sea otters playing in the kelp beds, elephant seals and harbor seals basking in the sun on top of the rocks that line the coast, and if you were really lucky you might see a great white fin. This was rare to see since the shark is usually below the surface but Big Sur was beginning of the red triangle, the area that these sharks are known most to frequent.

Pat’s house there was right down the road from Esland Institute, a new age retreat center. This place had hot springs that were in caves on the side of the cliff, and Page and Pat would go and bath in them after a day of surfing Sand Dollar or Willow Creek, the two best surf spots in the south end of Big Sur. Esland was a private resort, and no one can stay there unless they have a reservation. However, Pat knew the son of one of the staff and so Page and he had access to the hot springs without a problem. The one catch was that there you had to go naked. No one wore close to the springs. Page had been a little self conscious about this at first and also quite excited at the prospect of perhaps seeing some beautiful naked women, but he never did see any hotties and usually the springs were empty when they went, so he didn’t feel too self conscious.

Page’s first surf encounter with Pat in the Sur was during the fall of his seventh grade. They were both thirteen years old. Pat’s mom dropped them off at Sand Dollar for the day with their boards and some food and of course, although she didn’t know it, with some buds. Sand Dollar is a big bay surrounded by cliffs on the edge of a savanna. You can’t see the waves from the parking lot. It is only after you walk to edge of the cliff, which is about a hundred yards from the parking lot, that you have a view of the bay. They got there around nine in the morning and would be picked up again around three in the afternoon. It was a sunny day but cool, around seventy degrees. As they came to the cliff’s edge they couldn’t believe their eyes. There were huge waves breaking perfect on both sides of the bay and in the middle peaking left and right about a hundred yards out. No one was there. The parking lot was empty. They sat there in amazement watching these perfect waves in perfect conditions with no one out. It was a young surfer's dream come true.

Page and Pat ran down the stairs to the beach and immediately started undressing to put on their wetsuits. Our hearts were beating intensely and our adrenaline pumping. “Dude, we’re going to get worked,” Pat said to Page.

“Yea, but we got to go out, man,” Page replied. “I say we go for the south point, we’re both goofy foot and the lefts will be the easiest for us to catch.” In SB there were only rights primarily, which meant that they usually had to surf with their backs toward the face of the wave since they both kept their right foot forward. Surfer who put their left foot forward are called regular foot, and those who put their right foot forward are known as goofy foot.

Page had always been comfortable in the water. He learned to swim when he was three and began body boarding when he was six. By the time he was in fifth grade, he was learning to surf on an old seven-foot gun in little surf. He had stood up on his first wave and rode it straight in the white wash all the way to shore. Then he started to get better and buy shorter boards which were more maneuverable, and he could surf waves up to four foot decently. But, he had never seen waves, not even to mention trying to surf waves this big. It usually didn’t get bigger than six foot in SB, at least at the beaches Page surfed. Sure, it did in storm conditions, but then the waves were unorganized and choppy. These waves at Sand Dollar were clean.

It was much colder in the shade of the cliff in the early this time of morning, around sixty. Page and Pat shivered as they put on their three/two mil. wetsuits and three mil. booties. Their eyes were fixed on the perfect peeling left off the south point. It was big out there, at least ten foot, and it was breaking really far out. The white wash from the waves rolled in consistently, wave after wave, every few seconds until it reached the shore. They would have to paddle out through that white wash, a hundred yards of it, about three to four foot in height, before reaching the place where the waves were breaking.

“I hope there’s no great whites in the bay today,” Page said.

“Shut the fuck up, Dude!” was Pat’s response. “Don’t even say anything like that, fuck, now I’m going to think about it out there, don’t even allow your self to think about it man.” He said this last thought more to himself than to Page. “Alright, lets do it.”

They walked up to the water together and started wading out into the bay. There were several sandbars and crevasses in between them. They walked out a few feet and dropped into chess high water from knee deep water.

“Fuck! This water is cold!” Page shouted. It was about fifty degrees and with the thin three/two wetsuit, made for sixty five-degree plus water of SB, they were colder than they had ever been before in the water.

They got on their boards and started paddling. They hit a sand bar and got off the boards and waded some more. They were about forty feet out when they got on their boards again and didn’t need to get off, at least not intentionally. Within minutes they were getting pulled north into the middle of the bay by the current. Page was fighting hard to paddle to the south point, but Pat went with the flow just trying to get out and was getting carried way north into the middle of the bay. Soon, Pat was totally out of Page’s sight, but Page didn’t have time to worry about it. He had to concentrate on duck diving the white wash that kept coming towards him. Wave after wave of white wash hit him, and he kept duck diving the best he could. His head felt like an egg being crushed under the water every time he went under the water. Neither he nor Pat had wetsuit hoods to warm their heads, and neither had ever gotten ice cream headaches from duck diving before.

It took Page about an hour to finally get through all the white wash before he had to deal with the open faced waves. He was exhausted. He had lost his board a few times duck diving the white wash and each time he thought he might drown as he was twirled around under the cold water. Only the leash on his left foot told him which way was up to the surface because his board was the most buoyant thing and rose to the top first. Had his leash broken, he was sure he would have drowned, but it hadn’t yet.

Now he was paddling toward open faced waves, waves that had not yet broken and turned into white wash. He paddled even harder than any time before because he knew if the wave broke in front of him then it would hit him with the most power, but if it could get to the wave before it broke, he could duck dive it easily or paddle over it. He made it over the first open-faced wave. Then another came at him a bit further out. He was able to duck dive it before it broke. When you duck dive the face of a big wave, it sucks you in to the face and shoots you out the back on your board, propelling you toward the outside, giving you momentum to make it over the next wave. Unfortunately for Page the sets were getting bigger and bigger, breaking further out after each wave. He saw this huge twelve footer coming toward him. It was about five feet in front of him when it broke. The lip of the wave seemed to dig a hole into the face of the ocean that sucked Page in and pulled him down deep into a rinse cycle. He had tried to duck dive it, but his board was immediately ripped out of his hands.

Page spun and spun under the water. He was doing summersaults backwards and could no longer feel any tension from his leash. The board was gone. The leash was still on his foot but the board was no longer connected. He wanted to panic and try swimming to the surface, but he knew from reading surf mags and watching surf videos not to do anything. The only way to survive was to relax. When the turbulence had run its course, you could feel the upward pull of the oxygen in your body pushing you toward the surface and start swimming in that direction. If you wasted your energy trying to swim to the surface too early, you might actually be swimming deeper down thinking you were going up.

Page felt the oxygen running out within his lungs. Fortunately, he still had good lungs. All that under water swimming at the Coral Casino Swim Club playing Marco Polo as a kid had taught him to hold his breath under water for over a minute. Finally, the turbulence let up, and Page was able to swim up. When he got to the top, he immediately took a huge breath and was prepared to start swimming deep down to get out under the turbulence of the next crashing wave. He was lucky. There was a lull. The last wave had been the last of the set, and as he look around he saw his board a few feet away from him.

Page swam to his board and started paddling outside before another set came. Once he was far enough outside to feel safe, he got off his board and looked at the leash plug to see why his leash came off. The nylon string, which connects the board to the leash, had come loose but it was still in the plug. Page pulled up the loose end of his leash and quickly tied another knot to the board. This time he tied it double.

Page was way out now in the ocean, past the break point and seemed to be drifting even further out toward the open ocean. Pat was nowhere in sight. Now Page had to paddle toward shore so he wouldn’t get sucked out to the open ocean outside the bay. As he paddled, he started to wonder if there were any great whites near him. While he was dealing with the waves, he wasn’t worried about the sharks too much since he thought they didn’t like the turbulence anymore than he did. But now, he felt like shark bait. It is a tricky thing not getting too far out past the point break and not getting caught inside. If there is a lull, sometimes you feel like you are too far out, and then a hug set comes and works you on the inside.

Now Page was in the right area, not too far out and not too far in. A wave began to break slightly in front of him and he was in the perfect place to catch its shoulder. He paddled for it and caught it, a bit too late on the drop in though. Page dropped down the ten-foot face standing on his board and when he reached the bottom of the wave, the nose of his board went under the surface of the water. Page got hurled forward and smacked the flat surface of the water with his face. Then the wave crashed on top of him and pushed him deep and placed him in the spin cycle again. This time his leash didn’t come off, and he was able to find his way to the surface much quicker.

He turned his head and saw another wave coming. He was tired. He dove and swam as deep as he could. The wave went over him without any turbulence. He got back on his board and decided to call it a day. He would start paddling back in and catch some white wash into shore. He wasn’t good enough for these waves, and he was freaking that a great white would pull him under any second. A wave broke fifteen feet behind him, and he caught the white wash in. It took him to about fifty feet from shore and then he had to start paddling the rest of the way.

When he got on shore he saw Pat there. He was exhausted. He hadn’t even surfed a wave after all that, but he had survived to surf another day. As it turned out, Pat hadn’t even made it out passed the shore break. He had thought Page had died, but there was nothing he could do but wait and smoke some bowls. The beach was still empty. It was around twelve o’clock.

They got changed out of their wetsuits, smoked a few bowls and ate lunch. Then they just sat sun bathing on the beach, sleeping, until three when they climbed back up the steps to the parking lot. Only a few people came down to the beach while they were there, but none of them were surfers. When they got to the parking lot, Pat’s mom was there waiting for them.