Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Winter Surfing :: Long Beach , NY


Tuesday morning I was woken up by a dream. While putting on my 5/4/3 winter wetsuit for the first time, I found out that Jake had forgotten the gloves and booties he promissed to lend me. I started smacking him around and told him that he'd done it on purpose. Two hours later as we pulled into the parking lot, he told me that he too had the exact same dream one month earlier when Chris Gentile took him surfing in NY for his first winter session.
I had pretty much been a hater on cold water surfing. I had dealt with Santa Cruz 4/3 with booties which was fine but I thought to myself, "It's going to have to be at least 4ft with light offshore winds for me to pop my cold water cherry." Truth be told it was kinda anti-climatic. I paddled out into waist high clean surf, and the only thing remotely uncomfortable was that my face stung when I duck dove. The highlight of the whole session were the two girls that pulled up in their little Red Bull car asking us if we wanted some Red Bulls. I guess we did look like a couple of extreme dudes all buff in our winter surfing gear.