We parked on the bluff just above the beach, got out of the car and put on our wetsuits, then walked down the path and across the beach with flippers in hand. The shorebreak foam ran over our booties and we hooted at the cold water seeping into our wetsuits at the calves—it was about eight or ten degrees, but quickly warmed up. We walked out to where it was waist-deep, then put on fins and pulled up our wetsuit hoods, and dived under the next breaker. Though only our faces were exposed, that was enough to have us all screaming at the shock of the cold, standing again chest deep. We breasted out, still on foot, turning our backs when the waves crashed into us, then dived under a tall white wall of broken water and started swimming.
It was hard work getting outside. The waves always look smaller from the beach, and smaller still from up on a bluff, especially when there's no one riding them to give you a sense of scale. Now we saw firsthand that the broken waves were walls between two and three meters overhead, and getting under one of those can be a workout if you don't do it right. And no matter how good wetsuits have gotten, it still feels cold in them at first.
I dived deep just before a wall hit me and relaxed, letting the bottom of the wave's underwater revolution shove me back. A bit of turbulence shook me like a flag in a wind, then pushed me up hard, out of the break. I hit the surface swimming head-up freestyle as hard as I could, through the hissing wrack to the next boiling wall, where I dived under again. If you time it right, so that you use the waves' underwater action to help you, it makes getting out much easier than if you fight the break directly. Irishka is a real master at this, and on this day as always she was already far ahead of us.
Six times under for me, and then I saw that I might make it over or through the next wave just before it broke, so I sprinted hard, kicking my long fins and feeling the backwash sucking me out as well, and flew up the face of the next wave and smashed through the clear upper section, then fell down the back of it and swam on to get free of the turbulence. Outside!
And the next wave was just a lift into the air, giving me a brief view around. I was floating just down the line from the point break, and I could see Irishka and Freya already out there ahead of me. Irishka swam out to a wave, then turned and was swimming backstroke hard when the wave picked her up—a big mass of water, a mound swelling into a wall as if by magic, carrying Irishka higher and higher on it.
Then she spun onto her chest and fell down the face of the wave. She extended her webbed gloves down and before her, making a little planing surface, then twisted and made a sharp bottom turn, throwing a white wing of water out away from her cut. Wetsuits these days are much like birdsuits, in that they stiffen in reaction to the stress on them, and the knees will lock together, allowing Irishka to hydroplane over the water's surface, touching it only with her hands, lower legs, and fins.
She skidded like that out onto the broad shoulder of the wave, which was breaking left at a steady majestic pace, not fast except in occasional bowl sections, which she fired across; but usually she had time enough to carve lines up and down the face, slipping up near the crest and then shooting down and dangerously far out in front of the break, where in effect she had to catch the wave all over again, but with much more momentum this time, so she could rise back up the steepening face toward the waterfall that was pitching out over the flat water below. A tube, yes! There was a fast section mid-beach, it appeared, where the wave went tubular for long stretches, so that Irishka disappeared from my sight for seconds, then shot out of the tube high onto the shoulder, cutting down again to stay in the wave.
Yow! I cried, and swam hard for the point break. Freya took off on one just as I arrived, and disappeared past me with a whoop. Now I had the break entirely to myself, and the very next wave looked just as good as all the previous ones, even a bit better. I swam for the steepest part of it, and saw I had gotten to its takeoff zone in time, and so turned and swam hard for shore. The wave picked me up and I began falling down its face, and knew I had caught it. After a big turn at the bottom I barreled out onto the shoulder of the wave, studying the wave rising up under me to my left, but aware also of the river-mouth canyon standing to my right, and the sky. I was riding the wave as if it were a toboggan ride, down a shifting hill perpetually swinging up into reality before me.
The experience of riding a wave is so strange it is hard to describe. During the ride time changes, or I should say consciousness of time changes—if these are not the same statement. The moment balloons. You seem to notice ten or a hundred times as many things as you could in any ordinary second. Yet at the same time, or in a paradoxical oscillation, everything seems to rush by in a moment. Each ride seems to be a timeless little eternity, jammed into a few seconds. Often the rides really are only a few seconds long, but they feel that way at their ends even if they have lasted a minute or more. Maybe it's just that at the end you always feel it wasn't long enough!