Introducing the Clubhouse Page

As most people know I’ve been setting up the CSC Clubhouse in Rockaway since this last fall. Covid has kept me conservative about blasting it out and filling it up, but things are starting to loosen up and the clubhouse is ready to go. By “loosen up” I mean many of us have had Covid, have gotten the vaccine, or are just so used to the protocols that we’re able to navigate life with them in place. I’ve set the place up so that it can be reasonably shared with others without any overlap. We’re pros at using text groups to communicate our moves — board pick ups and drop offs, co work hours, shower turns, wetsuit storage, etc. I’ve made a dedicated page on this site to read about the clubhouse, with links to products in the store.

Clubhouse

I experimented with a scheduling page for co-working but it’s too confusing and I’m going to stick with Venmo and text messaging for now. Scheduling stuff around surf and swells just requires a kind of flexibility that cloud computing cannot keep up with. As you’ll see on the page, we’re ready for overnights. Please get in touch via text or email before booking, but you should be pretty good to go with the way I have the forms set up on the site. I’ve also decided to rent out boards from the CSC Quiver. This is a great opportunity to try a number of different shapes and fin set ups before purchasing your next board.

Phenomenology of Surfing: 3 Sessions, 1 Morning

Here’s a 10 minute video that documents the last morning in February surfing around the Rockaways. I was coaching Brant Weil who is figuring out how to ride his 6’6” CSC x Barahona Potentia shape. I’m riding the same shape, but in 6’1”. The video contains voiceovers and slow motion. I explain some of the things that I consider while I am surfing — both in terms of overall conditions and particular thoughts and considerations that I have and make while riding waves. The filming is done by CSC student Emory Lee. Emory alternated between their Canon and their iPhone. Surf filming is a great way to get better at surfing, and I mention this in the video. I will be doing more videos like this one, but I will also do some that get into one particular aspect, say wave judgment, or the take off. Not all of these will go public. The best way to ensure that you get all of the content is to sign up on our Patreon page. Right now Patreon subscribers get early access to all content. For example current subscribers have already seen this video. There are some cool perks over there, so check it out!

Introducing the Philosurfing Series on the YewTube

Inspired by the fact that I finally launched the channel, I’ve posted another vid quick on the heels of the last one. This a day in the life style video. I will call all the day in the life style videos “Philosurfing” and will label them with the date. They won’t all have the same formula, but you can expect that there will at least be two things: philosophy and surfing. Here, inspired by the audiobook I had just finished listening to, The Four Horsemen, I discuss surfing, religion, and sport on my drive to surf in NJ. Then I have a surf session, over which I have done some voiceovers to help people understand better what to look for when entering a wave. Then I head back to NY, check the surf again, decide against it, go back to the CSC clubhouse, rinse the gear, and sit down to read Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, the preface of which we discussed in book club last night. I had thought I was done surfing for the day, but then I saw the winds had glassed off and that there was still some significant swell on the buoy. So I paddled back out and had an incredible session. Stoked and fortunate that CSC stalwart Emory Lee was walking their dog on the boardwalk and got some great iPhone clips of my last waves, which I placed at the end. There will be more vids of this sort, but the next few will feature more about the style of teaching and focus on some of my students. I’ll also do some more detailed gear review vids to get that process started. It’s fun to make these things. Likes, follows, comments appreciated!

CSC YouTube Channel Is Live: First Vid On the Conatus in Spinoza's Philosophy

At long last I’ve gotten the YouTube channel up and running. The above video is my first one. Not all videos will be of this deep of a philosophical nature, but it’s definitely a genre I will continue to explore. I plan to put up progress videos, testimonials, CSC backstory, vids about common mistakes, club surfing compilations, day in the life stuff, etc. I am still in the planning phase. I have not yet figured out how much will be completely free and public and what kinds of vids I’ll have a membership only function on. I’ll be figuring a lot of that out through the Patreon Platform where my page is www.patreon.com/conatussurfclub. My intuition is that people who pay in and support CSC the most should at the very least get early access, if not exclusive access to some content like inside surfing tips, gear reviews, and any promotional stuff that pops up. You can help in these early phases by simply going to the YouTube channel and subscribing. Also helps if you view, like, and share my vid and any subsequent vids I put up. Going to try to keep things fresh, interesting, and authentic to my vision of philosophy and surfing. Will update here, in newsletters, and on patreon as things become solidified.

Philosophy of Surf Fuel Pt 1

As I sit down to write this I am quickly realizing that I could author a whole book on food, my relationship to it, what it means for us as human beings, what it means to us specifically as surfers, recipes, pairings, ideas for stocking the pantry, for what to pack on surf trips, how to eat on surf trips, and of course epic pics of ingredients, meals, and waves. As if I didn’t have enough on my plate . . . still couldn’t hurt to put another iron in the fire. In this post I will touch on all the subjects above, but will undoubtedly not be able to do justice to them all. Hence calling it Pt 1. There will doubtless be more posts on this topic. I imagine we’ll also add a cooking component to the forthcoming YouTube channel.

We are what we eat. We are also what we drink and breathe and see and touch and who we know and what we believe. We are a lot of things. We are porous and changing and subject to entropy. Like the rest of nature we are energy converting beings. Our cells are constantly rearranging and dying and growing. It’s truly an incredible process. Food is not only physical fuel for us human beings, as nothing is merely physical for us. For we are the creatures that have this very particular and special relationship to language. Our lives are always wrapped up in meaning making. Food is one of the most important organizational phenomena around which meaning is made in human life. Every meal tells a story. Think about it. We have media outlets dedicated to food, scientific specializations for studying it, religious rituals concerning it, and complex economic industries tied to it.

My brief history with food runs as follows: breast milk (no formula here), homemade smashed vegetables from our garden, lots of omnivorous homemade meals by mom, divorce, two households, stopped liking vegetables unless mom cooked them, fishing for salmon before school with dad from 6-13 years old, lots of meat and potatoes and cereal, didn’t really drink water, read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair in 1996, converted to vegetarianism, failed, started working in the restaurant industry in 1995, moved to Costa Rica in 1998, started drinking water, became vegan and the end of that year and stayed vegan until 2003, worked in casual fine dining off and on as a waiter from 1995-2012 (new American, Italian, French, and Japanese restaurants), had a stint helping my mom with her and her friend Katie’s organic catering company 1998-2000, continued to develop my skills as a home cook from vegan days onto today’s present omnivorous phase, pandemic hits 2020, I cook more at home than ever before. Obviously a million stories to tell in there, but them’s the cliffs notes.

I was a vegan in some of the most fundamental parts of my young life, from ages 18-23. It was in that period that I learned to love drinking water, eating vegetables and legumes, and preparing meals at home. I also did a lot of vegan baking — scones and calzones and cookies and pies — because although there were plenty of ready made offerings in Bay Area grocery stores and cafes by then, they weren’t that good. It was in this phase that my current sense of “comfort food” was established. There is nothing like hummus or tahini noodles with tofu — really anything with tofu, which I consider a junk food — or a big plate of fried potatoes or sweet potatoes, or a No Cookie cookie, or sesame sticks (my particular weakness). Oh yeah and fake meat Asian cuisine. Vegetarian Palate “chicken nuggets” anyone? Can’t leave out samosas (not fried in ghee) or greasy bengan bharta. You get the picture.

Our little garden in Rockaway. Leafy greens are life!

I’m not vegan any longer, although as I think I make clear, I am firmly converted to having a primary source of my calories derive from the plant kingdom. When it comes to animal by-products I’m one of those annoying bourgeois locally sourced farmer’s market only types, with the occasional exception of some sharp cheddar cheese for melting or half and half for coffee, if I can’t get to the market in a given week. The pandemic has radically changed my approach to meat, and I am pretty firm on just getting stuff from local farmers via the farmer’s market and stuffing it in the freezer for our 3-5x monthly protein spike. I like the long lasting energy and complex flavors that meat provides, but do not need it for every meal, nor do I need to eat it every day. I think there are farmers raising animals out there in a sustainable and careful manner, and those are the kind of people and practices I like to support. Yes, the animal dies, but places like Lewis Waite farms convert the whole thing into various products. We’ve purchased soup bones, leaf lard, and livers from them this year. Not only does it honor the sacrifice the animal made, but it also makes for more adventurous, flavorful, and exciting cooking.

I also understand that there are many people who rely on factory farms not only for jobs, but also for affordable protein, and who do not have access to the resources or the education that I do to see how it is imperative that we as a species move away from factory farming. Unfortunately, I do not think all the fake plant-based meat is the answer, although for now it seems to be the way the food industry is headed. Substituting what Sophia and I call “angry meat”, i.e. factory farmed meat, for fake meat to be eaten at every meal, is simply based upon the wrong-headed assumption that meat should be at the center of one’s meals and one’s diet. Don’t get me wrong, as I write above, I love fake meat, but I consider it a treat or an indulgence, not a dietary staple. I also think that the “old fake meat” — tofu, tempeh, soy protein bits, gimme lean, soyrizo, different wheat gluten things — was perfectly fine as it was. There is absolutely no need for fake meat to be any more “realistic”.

Another major result of my vegan phase, or my coming to an awareness of the importance of food in our lives, was an attention to how much packaging goes into groceries and just how much waste our food habits produce. Home cooking does not eliminate waste altogether, but it can radically cut down on the amount of trash produced per week. During the pandemic we have been baking so much more. Just ordinary stuff you don’t think twice about buying at a store like bread and rolls and crackers. If you make crackers for example — and they’re super easy! — you cut down on a plastic bag inside of a box and the box itself. I think you also save a ton of money, since the primary ingredients in crackers are flour, oil, salt, and water. They’re great with homemade hummus or any dip you like. I’m sure you could substitute all kinds of different flours, if of course you have a real gluten allergy. Don’t get me started with the gluten-free people. I’m not having it. You have body conscious issues/want to be thin for bad patriarchal society reasons, just say that’s what it is. Real gluten allergy, however, is a real thing, and very rare. Wheat and thereby the glutinous flour it creates is a miracle. And yes, like everything else, there are better ways to grow it, harvest it, and process it. But if you’re on a budget, simply want to save on packaging, and increase the yumminess of available snack food, there’s nothing better you can do than staying stocked on a few types of flour. But why stop there? May as well also stay stocked on yeast and a keep a starter in your fridge for breads and rolls too. Humans of all social classes have turned to bread as the “staff of life” since time immemorial. Like meat, you don’t need it every day, but our bodies do process it well, especially if you’re a surfer who needs a quick replenishment of calories after a three hour session.

Simple crackers: 1 c. flour, 1/4 c. olive oil, salt, some water. Make a smooth dough. If too wet add more flour. If too dry add more water. Divide into 4 balls. Roll super thin. Pierce with fork. Cut into squares. Put in oven at 500 for like 4-8 min. Voila!

King Arther Four Yeast Rolls. So easy.

When you buy vegetables at a farmer’s market you don’t need plastic bags. Even less do you need plastic bags if you can manage to find some space for a home garden. I think it’s really cool that vegetables come in these perfect packages, and that there’s so much of them that you can use. Take squashes for example. They last a long time out of the fridge — perfect for these winter months — and you can eat the flesh and the seeds inside. I will no longer eat any squash without also roasting the seeds. Squash seeds are a fantastic surf snack or road trip snack. They also go awesome on salads and to top savory vegetable pies.

Behold the perfect packaging!

Always roast the seeds!

Savory pumpkin pie.

This brings me to the basic philosophy of local and seasonal eating. Sticking to buying from local farms and farmers markets keeps you eating with the seasons. Sure, you don’t get to have as much lettuce and green vegetables as you would like in the winters, so instead you eat cabbage, squash, beets, and potatoes, and stuff that is heartier because it can weather the cooler climate. Of course I’m speaking from an east coast perspective. If you’re in Costa Rica, for example, the weather is not too changeable, and your diet there looks different. On our retreats at Rancho Diandrew we’re eating lots of fresh fruit — pineapple, mangoes, papayas, bananas — and locally caught fish. Funny enough the heartier cruciferous vegetables — winter veg here — stand up to the warm climates better than the more tender sorts of veg. So it’s a lot of cabbage and squash and beets down there too. California has a larger variety of produce available year round, which is why I have always argued that SF fine dining is superior to NY. That and the service is better because people are in the industry for the food, not to become actors. When I moved to NY the very idea that a place would require a head shot for a service job was preposterous to me. It still is. Either you know about food and wine pairing and you can articulate that to guests and multi task like a mad person or you can’t. Your face can make the delivery a little sweeter, but is quite peripheral to the actual skills required. That whole point is currently moot during the pandemic. Restaurants and their workers are fighting for their existences like never before. The restaurant industry has always been been a precarious kind of business, and now we know how susceptible to the adverse effects of a pandemic it is. Supporting restaurants and take out is a hard one for me because although they produce jobs, they also produce a lot of waste, and home cooked food just tastes better. It’s not a black and white thing of course. A lot of the techniques and the pairing knowledge I’ve gained for my home cooking comes from my 15 something years in the restaurant industry. It’s also nice to go out from time to time, and we’re all missing that right now. In general, however, restaurant food, including take out, is best limited to 1-2x a month.

I won’t ever buy the argument, “I don’t have enough time to cook at home.” First of all, we do not need too much food to keep us alive. Second, if you have a primarily plant based diet, vegetables cook quickly, and are satisfying and delicious. Third you can make one big meal or dish, like the pie above, and that effort provides for 2-3 more meals down the road, saving time, packaging, and thought. There’s nothing like coming home from a satisfying surf and doing nothing other to refuel than heat up a gorgeous plate of leftovers. Or maybe you had a slice of the veggie pie in the car for a snack after surfing so that you’re not ripping apart the cupboards when you get home. This has been a newer discovery of mine, which has been a huge game changer in my mood and my food habits: eat a snack directly after surfing. I’m on the fence about whether to eat before surfing. Some people hate it. For me it depends on surf conditions, weather, time of day of session, and how long I plan to surf. If it’s going to be firing from first light through the day, I’ll make sure to put something in the gullet to fuel me through morning. Oatmeal or a pbj or some roasted sweet potato. Regardless of whether I’ve eaten before surfing or not, I make sure to get something in directly after. This is why the pre-made crackers and rolls and veggie leftovers from dinners have been crucial, especially during the pandemic. You don’t want to go home so hungry that your brain can’t process what you want to eat or cook. Get a little fuel in there so that your brain can work well enough to make its next plan. As much as I try to keep my packaged goods minimal, things like Clif Bars, sardines in tins, and nuts are absolutely awesome for this purpose.

If you’re going to surfing all day and do off-the-lips into the sunset, you gotta have some good surf snacks.

Having a well-balanced diet centered around home-cooked, seasonal, locally-sourced, vegetable-heavy meals will keep you surfing better and longer. It will also keep you on the lighter side of your weight spectrum (all humans fluctuate in weight), which is always optimal for surfing. I have learned to become more accepting of the fact that there are many ways for healthy bodies to look, but overall it remains an objective fact that all people surf better when they are on the lighter side of their optimal weight spectrum. This becomes even more the case when you have to wiggle in and out of a 5mm wetsuit! But this doesn’t mean you have to be austere and not have treats and things that bring up sweet memories and create those rad dopamine sensations. This fall I got really into making apple cider doughnuts. Another thing that is surprisingly easier than you would think! I’m not making doughnuts every month, but they are certainly a great treat with a hot cup of coffee before or after surfing in the cold!

I believe that everyone can and should learn to cook! Follow recipes. For real. Just follow them. Get one or two cook books and make a bunch of stuff in there. Learn the cooking times of all the different foods that you eat. Once you know those, coming up with meals on the fly is a breeze. This is only the start to my posts about surf fuel. In the future I will share recipes and tips, and dig further into some of the details that inform my strong opinions about food and diet.

Phenomenology of Surfing Cont'd: Hurricane Epsilon Oct 22-25 2020

Storm names have moved into the Greek alphabet for the first time in my life since moving to the east coast (moved here in 2009). Didn’t even know that this was the convention for naming storms after first names have been exhausted! Moving into the Greek alphabet is a funny surf/academia crossover for me since I studied and read ancient Greek in both undergraduate and graduate school. When I teach ancient philosophy courses I always make my students learn the Greek alphabet first so that they can identify important Greek philosophical terms in our readings, which I like to write on the chalkboard in both their original and transliterated forms. Ya know words like philosophy (φιλοσοφία), episteme (ἐπιστήμη), ethics (ἠθίκα), aesthetics (αἴσθεσις), phronesis (φρονήσις), and democracy (δημοκρατία). I personally hold the opinion that Greek is the most important language for grasping the significance of words in scientific thought. I read Latin too, and it is important, but a greater majority of our technical scientific vocabulary derives from Greek. And apparently an important part of our technical east coast swell vocabulary does too! The Greek alphabet is as follows:

Alpha (Α, α) — short ‘a’ as in ‘ah’ or ‘hat’

Bēta (Β, β) — ‘b’ as we use it

Gamma (Γ,γ) — ‘g’ as we use it

Delta (Δ, δ) — ‘d’ as we use it

Epsilon (Ε, ε) — short ‘e’ as in ‘pet’ or ‘center’

Zēta (Ζ, ζ) — ‘z’ as we use it

Ēta (Η, η) — long ‘ē’ which sounds like a long ‘ā’ as in ‘ate’ or ‘hate’

Thēta (Θ, θ) — ‘th’ just as we use it

Iōta (Ι, ι) — ‘i’ as used in Romance languages, making the ‘eee’ sound as in ‘tortilla’

Kappa (Κ, κ) — ‘k’ as we use it

Lambda (Λ, λ) — ‘l’ as we use it

Mu (Μ, μ) — ‘m’ as we use it

Nu (Ν, ν) — ‘n’ as we use it

Ksi or Xi (Ξ, ξ) — ‘x’ as in ‘box’

Omikron (Ο, ο) — short ‘o’ as in ‘hot’

Pi (Π, π) — ‘p’ as we use it

Rho (Ρ, ρ) — ‘r’ as we use it

Sigma (Σ, σ or ς) — ‘s’ as we use it (the two ways of writing the lower case differentiate when it is used in a word or at the end of the word)

Tau (Τ, τ) — ‘t’ as we use it

Upsilon (Υ, υ) — classically ‘u’ as in ‘put’ but later transliterated as ‘y’ so the word ‘hypēr’ in ancient Greek (meaning ‘over’) may have been pronounced ‘hupēr’ — in modern Greek pronounced the same as iōta — ‘eee’

Phi (Φ, φ) — ‘ph’ as we use it to sound like ‘f’

Chi (Χ, χ) — not ‘x’ but rather ‘ch’ as in ‘Bach’ — kind of a hard ‘k’ sound

Psi (Ψ, ψ) — ‘ps’ which just sounds like ‘s’ as in ‘psychology’ or ‘psychotic’

Ōmēga (Ω, ω) — long ‘o’ as in ‘mote’ or ‘tote’

Alpha, Bēta, and Gamma all formed as storms, but I remember not where they ran off to. Delta was the first surfable Greek alphabetical swell to grace our shores. That one was mostly just local wind and didn’t last too long. I remember the most fun I had surfing Delta was the day it arrived. It was wild and chunky with hard winds from the ENE. And then about a week later Epsilon popped up on the radar.

Epsilon started in the ESE and slowly crept northward before turning its sights on Europe. And when I say slow I mean slloooowwww. I did a number of virtual oceanography courses during the start of Epsilon. It’s always fun to do an oceanography course on swell and wave generation and have there actually be a large, spinning, red blob to watch in the southern Atlantic. When I’d click the forecasted radar, advancing in sets of 12 hours, we would see that the storm was not changing relative position very much. It was moving slightly westward and slightly to the north, just in the tiniest increments. This lead me to believe that the fullest pulse of swell would arrive a bit later, and that the initial pulses would be quite weak, with longer, more infrequent lines.

Thursday, October 22, was the day Epsilon arrived, and it had all that first day swell hype. I had scheduled some sessions early, myself hoping to video since it would have been the first day without fog in the morning in quite a few days, and also because having seen how slow and far away the swell was moving, I wasn’t totally hyped to tire myself out in inconsistent closeouts. At first light people were pouring out of their cars, already suited up, shortboards under arm. The tide was very low, the sets were very few and far between, there were many closeouts, and it was packed to the gills. Still, there were some great waves coming through for the patient surfer. The patient surfer this day was Russell Kummer. Russ had one session left in his package and I’d been rescheduling with him for weeks, waiting for a day that was dry enough to film. He has been putting a ton of work in on his own, and this seemed like the day to get the last one done. Russ had an epic session. He was really patient for the sets and dealt with the crowd superlatively, letting everyone else fight and froth over closeouts, leaving himself out the back in position for the one peeler that would roll through every 5 minutes or so. We were working on him figuring out how to time and execute cutbacks and floaters — seeing the section ahead of time and getting the back foot sufficiently over the fin cluster to pivot the board around and back into the pocket. In general timing the move early and finding the fins are the keys to doing maneuvers in surfing. There are other nuances like hand placement and the amount of pressure to apply to the tail per the move, but these are secondary to understanding the wave in such a way that you see the section before you get there — this gives you enough time to prepare yourself to execute or at least attempt the maneuver. It is also generally better to start with horizontal maneuvers like cutbacks, floaters, and simple end section taps because they are founded upon finding the mid to high, fast line of the wave where you need less bodily technique to gain the requisite speed for the maneuver to be effective. Many newer surfers make the mistake of going too far to the bottom and trying to do a bottom turn-top turn combo without yet understanding whether or not the wave will allow it. You typically see people try this and burn all their speed at the bottom and either the wave rolls off without them or when they make it back up the face the wave kind of dies because it never had enough face to do such a turn in the first place.

Russell Kummer, Epsilon Day 1, on his 7’6” Barahona. Mid wave speed line with tucked in knee. Pic: Dion Mattison

After getting a ton of great clips of Russ, I worked on similar stuff with Nelson Hume. Nels had a bit more trouble with the crowd than Russ, finding himself in that chaotic swirl of people fighting over mediocre inside closeouts. The tide was coming in and there were still a few great waves coming through, but it was slowing down and some of the peaks were shifting to the middle of the beach. When it was obvious that Nels was really out of rhythm I flagged him in so we could watch the lineup together and restrategize his session. When he came in a 10 minute lull set in, and I said, “See, you’re catching as many waves here on the beach as you would be out there.” Then we saw some pulses with nice corners and figured out where they were on the bank. He paddled back out and was in position for a good deal more waves, and on the ones he “blew it” it had more to do with form and timing than it did with lineup management. He definitely had a much better flow with the waves after our beach strategy session. Towards the end of Nels’ session the fog descended again and I had to put the Sony Alpha 6400 away. I used my iPhone 8 to film the rest of his surf, then paddled out in the mist with Leslie Kang, Karen Ingram, and Deb Ghatak.

I had scheduled Leslie, Karen, and Deb at the higher tide because they all struggle with steeper drops, so I was hoping for some fun, fat peelers for them. But nah. Just fat, wobbly closeouts on offer. We moved further in and tried to get the gentler ones. We did find some rights in the middle of the beach and each one of them nailed a few closeout drops, which is important practice when you’re gaining confidence in your surfing. There is an intentional way to take off and ride closeouts and this is first to acknowledge that the wave is a closeout and then decide that you’re going to go just for the sake of sticking the drop. Of course it is much more fun to ride along the green face, but if you’re still struggling with knowing the difference between lefts, rights, and closeouts, and with timing your stand up so that you don’t pearl on steeper waves, then it can be good practice, especially if the majority of waves on offer aren’t peelers. Another strategy is to refuse to go on anything that will not peel. This means fewer waves in the session, but possibly better waves of the few you do get. At the start of one’s practice it’s good to mix both strategies into different sessions. Proficient surfing is always premised on wave knowledge, not on knowing how to stand up. If you can’t read the wave correctly it’s probably not worth standing anyhow. So if you choose to stand it’s vital that you know whether you’re going on a left, right, or a closeout.

First day of Epsilon Oct 22 pm session when “the left” turned on for the first time in years. Pic: Kevin Roberts

After a long, soggy morning, I meandered back to the clubhouse, warmed up, made lunch, and texted about the swell with various people in my orbit. Kevin Roberts and Brant Weil were in touch about a possible evening session. Tide would be low again and I had my eyes on a certain left that has come back to life. This is the wave that is featured in MG’s stunning edit at the top of the post. I had surfed it the evening prior before the swell arrived and it showed promise. I also tried it at the end of the Delta swell. At that point it was this quick slab that would tube then mush off. I figured that if the sand kept building up there, the mush off section might shape up to help keep the face open. Epsilon day 1 proved my prediction correct. When Brant and I paddled out the only people surfing it were the two grommets that wear rashguards outside of their suits. I think they’re brother and sister. Next time I surf with them I’ll ask and I’ll ask their names as well. They have that great spirit of youth about them. Kevin decided to sit out this session, and instead he filmed Brant and I with his iPhone. So some of the footage you see in the edit is from Kev’s phone. Like the last shots of Brant walking up the beach and me diving under a horrendous closeout. It was an incredibly fun session. The sets were becoming more consistent as the swell inched northward. The wave itself was coming to life in a way that I’ve never seen there. The best ones were almost indistinguishable from a ripple when they came in. I would paddle for what looked like a 6 inch wave, stand up quickly, the bottom would drop out, and the wave would jack up to a chest high tubing runner. The sand was extremely shallow, which caused the wave to throw over itself quickly. In surf lingo it was ‘slabbing’ or behaving like a ‘slab’, which is a wave that comes out of deeper water and breaks over a shallow shelf, be it rock, reef, or in this case, sand. A key feature of slabs is that strange phenomenon where they appear to be small or at least small compared to how they turn out after they hit the shallow ‘slab’ and ‘grow’ or ‘jack’. For tube fiends like me these kinds of waves are highly sought after. They can be extremely difficult for newer surfers, especially since they usually have a visual component of staring at some kind of rocks as you take off. Of course it is unwise to focus on the rocks. Just as with driving, you go where you look. So if it’s down the line you want to go, then down the line you must look. Sometimes the eyes avert slightly down as you’re moving into the take off, but as soon as you land they should travel up to the lip that’s pitching over your head. This is the same regardless of whether you’re backside or frontside. Another truth of surfing this kind of wave is that it is easier and safer to take off as deep as possible, rocks and all. The deeper section can be surprisingly softer and easier to enter than anything out on the shoulder. It is a common mistake to hang on the shoulder expecting an easier time of it and then getting tossed in the lip to oblivion. Why? Because you’re trying to take off in the spot where you should already be getting tubed. I’ve read this in countless surf magazines and heard it from 100s of pros in post heat interviews at places like Cloudbreak, Teahupoo, and the Box. This is of course much easier to do when it’s just you or you and a friend taking turns, but can become very complicated when a wave like this becomes crowded. In that scenario you can often have people pushing one another too deep, which is also a thing. The heavier the wave and the tighter the take off spot, the more need there is for communication between all takers. Fortunately this session remained me, Brant, and the groms until dark. To be completely honest, I went in probably a full 30 minutes before full dark, as my near sightedness makes it pretty tough for me to see waves at dusk. I had had my fill and had coached Brant into some sweet little runners, so I felt good about the session. Plus I had been surfing all day.

That night I monitored buoys and noticed that Epsilon was definitely getting closer and stronger. Can’t remember the exact details. I suppose I could scroll through texts I had with my friend, surf bud, and yoga coach, Evan Perry. Somehow 8ft @ 9 or 11 seconds pops into my mind. Winds were forecasted to be funky on October 23rd, Epsilon Day 2, but I had a feeling they’d stay chill in the foggy haze in the dawn hours. Upon rolling up to the beach I became worried that the fog was going to be too dense to see a darn thing. To my great surprise it was just high enough and the left was three times the size of the night before, empty, and regurgitating. I pulled my suit on and waxed my board in record time. I chose the new 6’1” Barahona Shapes “Tiburon” double wing swallow tail. When I first was doing boards with Jose I was putting my own names on the models, and I called this one the “Potentia”, which means “power” or “force” in Latin. Whether you call it a Tiburon or a Potentia, the shape is the same: it’s kind of a “big boy shortboard” or hybrid fish with a lot of forward width, well hidden foam, and pulled in tail with very sharp edges for precision surfing. Gets into waves early and has enough rocker to manage steep drops. I also ordered one in 5’6” — that’s the one with the green airbrush you see in the video. The stock quiver model is a 7’6” and that’s the other orange one — the one that Emory is riding on Epsilon Day 4. I had fallen in love with the 6’1” from the first wave I rode on it in the session with Leslie, Karen, and Deb. It was the only good wave I got that session, but the thing just locked in. Tons of speed and flow and held the rail in a roundhouse almost unlike any board that I’ve had in quite some time.

The new Barahona shapes x CSC shortboard quiver from left to right: 5’3” fish, 5’6” Tiburon/Potentia thruster, 61” same model, 7’6” same model. Pic: Dion Mattison

For whatever reason I’m better at seeing in the dark at dawn than the dark at dusk. Evan took much longer than I did to suit up, so I was out alone in the mystical tubing conditions. I got caught inside by a good sized set on the paddle out and watched tube after tube crash in front me. This at least help me orient myself to the take off zone. The first wave I paddled into I couldn’t judge the size. It was just a grey lump of water. When I got to my feet I’d say it was a bit over my head and quite rotund. I wasn’t deep in the tube by any means, but I was right there in that pocket beholding a gorgeous cylinder of ocean energy. I probably hooted a little as I kicked out. The second wave I caught was even better. In the video it’s the deepest tube from the GoPro angle, but still doesn’t do the whole wave justice. It doesn’t even appear that I am even that deep in the tube, but I must tell you it was a splendid vision and it felt like a stellar ride from where I sat behind my two human eyes, which have very different lenses than the GoPro does. The wave was just perfect. The drop was easy because I took off deep. I touched the wall with my left hand, pointed forward with my right, dropped my butt over my left heel, and held a mid line on the face, making sure I was going slow enough to be inside, and fast enough to make it out — sometimes it is worth it to get a slightly shallower tube so that you make it rather than being too greedy with your stalling technique and getting stuffed on the foamball. It let me right out and then I got a little bonus cover up in the middle of the beach. That was just a head dip, but it’s a good way to end a wave. There was a third tube that was perhaps longest and deepest, but in the Murphy’s Law of GoPro, I missed the shot. A piece of kelp had flown onto the lens upon take off and was covering up the lens until a bit of spray knocked it off as I was exiting the tube. That left the lens clear to capture the bonus closeout tube I got at the end of the ride, which is featured in the video. Had a number of other fun waves that morning then the tide and wind came up, which put a slight damper on the magic. The wave was fatter and choppier and no longer tubing, so I surfed down the beach with Juan for a little bit. I surfed for about 3-4 hours that morning and then went home to rest and write.

Screen grab of second wave. Some people saw me on this wave from the boardwalk. My view is nice, but I bet theirs was even cooler. Pic: Dion Mattison

I made it back to the left for an evening solo session on the 5’6”. No footage of that session. It was pretty good sized and wild. I only stayed out an hour before the wind started really howling from the SE. I was feeling out the 5’6” a bit more. I had size L ‘Rake’ model futures fins in it and it felt a little sticky. The board was responsive, but I wasn’t feeling the fin set up. I either needed a set of smaller fins or to ride it with two larger side fins and a small trailer. That was my hypothesis at any rate. Also during this session I pulled through the back of a closeout in the middle of the beach, the board pressed my foot up and back towards me ever so slightly. It wasn’t even a wipe out. I had made it through the back and laid down on my board thinking, “Damn I just sprained my ankle.” It wasn’t bad, but we all know when our bodies tell us they didn’t like something. I knew it wouldn’t take me out of the water, but I would have to ice it and monitor it moving forward. I had an ominous feeling about that session. I was surfing out of a compulsion because there was swell and because there was no one out. Both are perfectly reasonable justifications for surfing, but I saw the chop and had a tiny feeling that it was a session I could skip. Sometimes it’s hard to know whether that voice is fear or reason. It’s probably just common sense.

That night I had to consider my plans for Saturday, October 24th, Epsilon Day 3. Day 3! We never get swell events this long. The winds were forecasted to be funky and hard from the SW and SSW. I did have ding repair to pick up with Charles Mencel in NJ. But then I also saw that the winds were forecasted to swing NW late in the day. Mitch and his awesome camera only had one day to film this swell, and this was it. He didn’t have time to search for waves in NJ. Furthermore, I don’t like NJ in SW winds and low tide. It’s just going to be crappy, and if I’m going to surf crappy surf, I might as well surf crappy surf at home. But what if the winds went WSW? That’s a different story. I did want to obey the mantra, “Never leave surf,” so I formulated my plan as follows: get up early, check “the left”, if it’s “good enough” surf and film with Mitch, do your normal Saturday run to the Edgemere Farmer’s Market to buy milk, have breakfast, go to NJ and get ding repair and surf if worth it, return to NY and grab the evening session. It turns out that the day went exactly according to plan! It was hard onshore in NY first thing but the tide was low enough for the left do be doing it. Mitch’s camera is awesome, and I also wanted to shoot some stuff in the 2mm hooded that Yuhiko and Isao at Still Blue NY Wetsuits made for me. The rip was bonkers, but the suit is so flexible and the 6’1” has so much flotation that it was no problem fighting it. A few people saw me catching some fun waves and they paddled out and got ripped right past me. It was pretty funny to watch. I surfed for exactly an hour then let Mitch get to his next gig. Everything else went according to plan. I left for NJ after the Farmer’s Market, got my ding repair from Charles, surfed a little in Spring Lake — it wasn’t great — dropped off boards to sell at Barewires Surf Shop, then made it back to NY by 330p.

Peak Epsilon Day 4 around 6p. Pic: Dion Mattison

The swell was on full pulse mode, and the wind had laid down but it still had some storm wobble and funk in it. The tide was still draining out and the wind did not switch nearly as early as I and others had hoped it would. I went to “the left” and it was packed! There were a few people getting what looked like fun rides. I had met up with Brant again but he decided he wanted nothing to do with the crowd and the size and the wobble in the wave. Since he’s just recovered from a grade 2 MCL tear I think he made the right call. I chose to ride my Barahona 5’3” twin keel fish and to just brave the crowds by being patient and going for those fun little inside “grower” waves I had been pin pointing in earlier sessions. From the first wave I took I found a rhythm with the spot, the crowd, and the board. So many times when you go into a crowded session with a game plan and low expectations, you get pleasantly surprised. The board has so much spark and liveliness right off the take off. The keels give it that classical “bar of soap” feeling of smooth speed. I had Jose put wings on the tail to pull it in because I don’t like too wide of a tail on my fishes as some do. I find the wider tails have a tendency to slide out a little more. I prefer my boards to turn in a tighter arc.

The wind switched offshore just before dark and the tide drained out even more. I was nearly blind by 530p again and felt I had caught my fair share and went in. In hindsight that was the worst decision I made the whole swell. Blind or not I should have stayed out. Never leave surf, even if you can only barely see it. The only upshot was that I was on the beach long enough to help a young woman named Taylor get some first aid after smashing her board against her head. It looked like she needed about 5 stitches near her eyebrow. I rinsed her wound with fresh water and gave her some sterile gauze pads to keep pressure on it. Allie Marsiello helped her to urgent care. So if you get in a spot of bother at the beach and I’m around, do remember I always have a full first aid kit in the van. I would even come out of pumping surf to help you. When I got home that night I told Sophia about it and she said, “Oh did you give her some of those steri-strips you have?” D’oh! No I didn’t. Another reminder, anything stitch-worthy, I have steri-strips to hold the wound together until you can get sewn up.

I went to bed that night kicking myself for not staying out longer, and woke up stressed out that it would be beyond crowded the next morning. I had Emory and Brant on the dawn patrol schedule. I held off scheduling others until the tide came back in because that wave has a really tricky takeoff. Brant had already surfed it once and Emory is an advancing surfer, so I was pretty confident they’d do well out there. MG was down to film this time too.

I warned everyone that it was going to be nuts crowded since it was Sunday, there was still swell, and offshore winds were forecasted throughout the morning. However, one thing I didn’t account for in my crowd prediction: 40 degree weather. I accounted for it in my choice of a suit, a 5/4mm hooded Xcel (no gloves and booties), but didn’t think it would also mean that Emory, Brant, and I would be surfing the left alone for an hour at first light. Here is a clear case of me projecting my surf fixations and paranoias on others. Actually very few people were frothing for one of the first cold days of the impending winter season.

This session comprises the bulk of the footage in the video — it’s all the stuff with the incredible light, as it was the first day without cloudy gloom in the morning. I’m on the blue fish getting head dips while dolphins swim by out the back. Emory Lee is on the orange board. They were taking off on gorgeously shaped walls and achieving a pretty functional pig dog technique in terms of style. We’re still working on hand placement, especially the left hand (closer to wall/on wall), and timing the end section to either pull off, pull in, or straighten out before it comes. This requires slight tweaks to their pig dog posture. In general you want to stay loose in your surfing so that you can make minor adjustments to your stance. Often these adjustments are so tiny one hardly notices them, but they often make the difference of a good and poor read of a section. And of course other times they’re glaring, like when the lip slams you in the head when you should have been under it, riding on it, or out in front of it.

Brant’s wave selection was good in the early part of the session, but he too is working on different techniques for timing and navigating more tubing waves. He often goes into this half stance which worries the hell out of me with his knee because it’s just out there exposed and when the lip hits him I fear he’ll reinjure it. I was trying to get him to do a pig dog technique similar to Emory’s — back knee down on board to provide stability to the knee and to straighten out the body so it fits into the small backside tubes — but we didn’t get to it this session. Brant’s surfing actually came alive after MG put the camera down. It’s harder to film in 40 degree weather than it is to surf. You’re sitting or standing still with the biting offshores nipping at you all the while the body is contracting and stiffening. As the tide drained out further into the morning the waves got better and better. I didn’t want to torture MG much longer than an hour — freezing on the beach watching perfect waves — so we made the call to cut the filming around 830a. She said she had to turn on the van and warm up for about 20 minutes after the film session. Makes sense.

Low tide was at 10a. Having had sufficient fun on the fish for the first part of the morning I took out the 5’6” for the remainder. I had purchased some True Ames S Double Twins with a trailer online earlier in the week, per my assessment that thruster set up I had in there was too stiff. The S Double set up turned the board on immediately. So much more flow through the fins and so much more release on turns. The frequency of the sets started to slow down a touch, but because there was increasingly less water over the sand bar, the sets that did come stood up much nicer and had more room in the tube. Long time Rockaway local, Sol Joseph, paddled out, as did 5 Borough Skateboards owner Steve Rodriguez. Brant stayed out. Emory went in. MG paddled out on the fish. I had caught enough waves in the early part of the day to make me satisfied, so I changed my game plan to only the largest set waves. There were a few more people out frothing for the inside waves, so I didn’t compromise their ability to get those. I just let all those ones go, even though some had a really nice line and plenty of room for turns and pumping. Sol and Steve and I practiced proper communication and turn taking. As a set came in we’d all determine whose turn it was and cheer the other on. I got my best tube of the swell at this part of the session. One of those not a drop of water out of place waves. Brant and Nick Langelotti were on the shoulder looking in. Sol had caught the wave before and was watching from the inside. The wave was emerald green in color with the yellow translucent lip from the mid morning sun in the east. I felt I was pretty far back in it and managed a micro pump to stay mid face. Per earlier comments, I’ve been finding these micro adjustments to make all the difference in terms of making vs not making tubes. The board starts to slide down to the bottom of the tube and you put a little pressure on the back foot to place the board a few inches higher, making sure butt stays nice and tucked, front foot keeps front rail line steady and horizontal. Small adjustment, world of difference.

Throughout Epsilon I had been trying out the Totum Sport supplements to see if they helped with endurance and recovery. They do. In the previously described session I had one sachet before paddling out, one mid session during the board change from 5’3” to 5’6” (pictured above), and another after surfing. These little salty packets are based upon the research of a Frenchman named Rene Quinton who discovered that the mineral components of sea water are shockingly similar to those of our blood plasma. Totum Sport harvests this sea water underneath plankton blooms in the north Atlantic. The effect it has on performance for me is that I don’t feel parched in the water. Unlike other sports, we don’t have fresh water readily available to rehydrate while putting in long sessions. I do have a water bottle on the beach, but when the surf is pumping it’s hard to stay out of it too long. The Totum Sport helps me retain the water I do drink, and again, keeps me from having that low energy parched feeling in 2+ hour surf sessions. Never thought I’d endorse a supplement, but I can really get behind this one. I was put in touch with the folks at Totum Sport by UK and NY based photographer, Dan Lee, who lives here in Rockaway. This is working out to be a fine partnership all around, and if you want to try the stuff you can get 10% off with code CONATUS10 at checkout.

Of course Totum Sport is not food, and after 3.5 hours of surfing I needed some serious fuel. I left the remainder of spinning tubes to the mid morning crowd, loaded up the van, and took the 5 minute jaunt to the clubhouse. I reheated some oatmeal with apples that I had made earlier in the morning, and also made some bacon and eggs to go with it. The bacon, like any meat product I buy, came from the farmer’s market, and the eggs also came from a local NY farm. Throughout Covid and into my middle age, I’m increasingly not compromising the value of local and small farms, especially for animal products. Factory farms suck, and local farmers need support. Although it’s still not this easy. Not everyone has access to the education or the resources to make these kinds of choices. I get that. We’ll keep working on it.

Surf fuel. Pic: Dion Mattison

Ben Israel and his new 8’6” CSC x Barahona gem! Pic: Dion Mattison

The last session of the swell included Liz Golato, Bonnie Stamper, and Ben Israel. Ben came by the clubhouse when I was just finishing my breakfast to grab his new 8’6”, which he’s storing here. The waves had gotten significantly smaller and more manageable. The left was fatter and the wind was light onshore, so the quality had diminished a bit. It was also strangely a touch more crowded than at any other point in the day. Still, there were waves, and we surfed them. Ben got his first start to finish drop on his new board. Liz was in form off the jetty. Her pig dog technique is looking the good. As with Brant and Emory, Liz is working on not hesitating off the drop and on timing the end section better. Bonnie is on their heels, but has only been surfing one year. She’s come so dang far, and now we’re really working making sure that she’s standing up at the first 1/3 of the wave so that she can get across the green face rather than getting stuck at the bottom after standing up 1 second too late. Not only does this have to do with keeping the head up and looking down the line as one enters the wave, but it also requires the hands be further back towards the hips to lift the chest and head so that there is sufficient room for the lower body to smoothly glide into standing position. From there one has got to trust one’s feet and get those hands off the deck of the surfboard. Bon nailed it in her wave towards the end of the vid.

And with that session the 4 day Epsilon surfing extravaganza game to a close. The weather got gloomy again and it rained buckets the rest of the week from Zēta, which followed shortly after, and was a fun enough swell event in itself, although a lot more like Delta — mostly wind, so short lived. This weekend we’re looking at the remnants of Ēta to give us some little pulses. That one did a number on Central America. Will further Greek alphabet storms continue? It’s hard to say. Thēta would be up next if so.