Surf Blog
September 7, 2008
So this was the day we'd all been waiting for.
I've been surfing the Virginia Beach, VA area most of my surfing
life. Since the waves are fairly inconsistent and the gasoline
not cheap, checking surf forecasting websites has become a morning
ritual and an evening obsession as I roll through page after page of
maps, charts, and finely tuned opinions concerning what the waves will
do. In all my years of checking such sites, I have never only
seen the surf forecasted as "poor" of "fair" for the Virginia Beach
area. Imagine my surprise when I opened the surf forecast and
read the word "good" describing the surf for Sunday the 7th and Monday
the 8th! Some sites predicted the surf to be at least head high
and clean...
 t
Tropical storm Hanna tucked into the east coast just below Cape
Hatteras and was moving north, positioning itself just behind Virginia
Beach and hinting at some serious off-shore wind. At the same time,
hurricane Ike was southeast of Florida, a category 4, and could
possibly send swell north-northwest towards Virginia Beach... 
Coffee in hand,
I stroll out of the Sandbridge Market into a parking lot
already filled with surfers. The sun has not yet risen but
everyone is bummed because we can already tell the surf is not as good
as predicted. Clean, mushy, chest high at best and a long wait
between sets. My hopes of shortboarding were ruined, so I drove
the 100 yards to Surf & Adventure and picked up one of our demo
stand up paddle boards, the 7S Uberfish (a 9'8" retro-fish quad fin...
I know right?) a few minutes later I was paddling out and
managed to catch a few drops, but the waves were closing out and almost
unmakeable...  After a few sketchy drops on the paddle board,
I decided I could try and go make lemonade with my shortboard. I
switched out the 9'8" monster for my trusty 6'2" thruster and walked
north up the beach, in search of a sandbar that wasn't closing out.
Everyone who was out that morning knows exactly what happened
next. In the blink of an eye, in a time span of less than a
second, the wind switched from breezy offshore to howling longshore out
of the north. This is a perfect example of how tempermental the
Atlantic ocean can be; less than an hour after sunrise and the
winds had already changed for the worse. I jumped in the water
anyways and got a few turns in before the wind pushed me south to the
Sandbridge Market again. The morning did not go exactly as
planned, but I managed to get a few good waves and a few good pictures
to boot.
I tried to look at the bright side: I might actually be early to work for a change. FREESURFTIPS.COM
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