At 10:53 AM 11/23/99 EST, Tom wrote: > In the winter months a group of Seattle area kayaker/surfers hang out at >beaches west of Port Angles. A west or Northwest Swell with a flood current >gives good surf. We have looked across the water to the North thinking there >must be good surf over there even with a south west swell. Would you be >willing to share some information on surf spots along the North side of the >Straits of Juan de Fuca? > >Last spring I meet two board surfing bothers from Vancouver. They found it >cheaper to drive to the Olympic Peninsula then to take the farriers across to >Vancouver Island. I love the coast around Cape Flattery. Surf, caves, seals, whales (alive, dying or dead!), wind, whatever you want. Ever paddled in the tide race off Swiftsure Bank against a big swell or wind, just SW of the lighthouse? Don't - you can be dead in minutes. You can hear it from miles away. Tried it once, never will again. To this day, I still can't go back even near there. You will not ever hear me mention it on this list again. Yes we do have good surf just North of Victoria. Jordan River is the most common place. There is a place called French Beach, but the surf is smaller there, and the waves dump -but great for storm paddling. Generally past Jordan River, Sombrio Beach is the other hot spot. Jordan River is too damn busy these days. Years ago, on a busy weekend, half a dozen long board surfers, one or two kayak surfers. This past weekend on our surf course -- our club, vans full of private boys-school kayak surfers, board surfers in hoards, body-board surfers, and mixed within these ranks, wind surfers riding waves and narrowly missing slicing up the rest of us with their skeg-fins. An accident waiting to happen, talk about "saturation point"! Sombrio is awesome, with fewer people, great waves, and pristine beaches since they made it a park and cleared away whole families of squatters in time for the Commonwealth games (a nasty bit of business that was). I would have liked to have gone to Sombrio the other night - good diagonally breaking waves, clear night, full moon. THAT can be an awesome treat and experience if you haven't tried it (gotta know your beach to do this safely). Long Beach is where most of us head for "real" surfing - though not specifically within the parameters you wanted description of. A six hour drive or so is needed. Many mainlander *kayak surfers* get the ferry to Nanaimo on the East coast of the island, and then drive over to the west side. Like the Washington coast, miles of sandy beach gently shelve out to seaward, generating huge waves even from smaller swell. Wave periods tend to be around 9 seconds. On a big winter blow, it breaks a mile out to sea. One such winter a few years ago, I folded my fiberglass WW kayak right in half on a big wave. As the kayak sprang back to relatively straight form again, the broken seat actually pinched the bum of my wetsuit. I could not wet exit (my paddle was gone for rolling). I got a one hand-roll off, got part way back up, went over again and blacked out. I remember coming-to a bit later, washed up on the shore, coughing up seawater (it drained for days). My Chinese buddy (who built the boat) pulled me out. I cussed him fiercely over his poor lay up. He cussed me back for externalizing my screw-up (the kayak-meet had been called off due to the eventual heavy dumping at low tide). We then both laughed out loud at the missing piece of wetsuit material and my white-ass patch. We lost the car brakes on the steep grade back out of the mountains to the East coast (I had to change pads in the pouring rain). The two halves of the kayak were stuffed cone-style into each other (we had finished breaking it in half). We found a dumpster, and bid farewell to the old gal. A number of board surfers die at long beach from time-to-time. Some years are not bad. The last guy they pulled out recently was a rather black-humoured affair a friend told me -- it was done so callously; one guy just said "bummer", then they just left the dead guy on the beach and kept surfing while one individual went to call for assistance. To be out in big waves off Long Beach is to ultimately know the insubstantialness of one's ego and it is to experience inwardly the inchoate abyss that the fathomless sea has always been -- and from which we all crawled out of -- if you believe in that path of evolution; guaranteed though, you will crawl out of the sea at Long Beach, but hopefully with your kayak in one piece! BC'in Ya Doug Lloyd (Who sincerely hopes no one is PaddleDumb and tries some of the stupid things I have done in my past lives - had nine, down to a couple) *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - All postings copyright the author and not to be reproduced outside PaddleWise without author's permission Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Fri Nov 26 1999 - 00:27:54 PST
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