Evening surf at OP last night ended up being rather fun with Sir R and Mean Howard. I cut too hard on my first wave and dug a rail (almost the entire length of my board) into the wave. Mushy waves require gentle finesse and body english, I discovered. Slow waves are nice sometimes because you can look down the wave and see four moves ahead. If you know where you're going, it's easier to understand how you're supposed to get there.
This morning, I was back at OP because Mean Howard woke me up at 6am with a phone call. "It's foggy and I don't want to go out alone." It was okay. Not as fun as the previous morning with bigger walls and sunnier sunshine, but still... it's surfing.
2 comments:
Excuse my ignorance but I don't live in LA - is OP Ocean Park, as in the former Pacific Ocean Park pier area?
Yup. I didn't know this until about a year into haunting the spot when one of the regular crew members mentioned surfing the POP as a grom. And then last year I was in a crowd gathered on the wall looking at the dismally flat day, coffees in one hand and cigarettes or tall tales in the other, when someone introduced this old gruff guy who mentioned being part of the demolition crew that tore out the Pier. "It still breaks over there because I don't think we got the cement all the way out from the bottom." This also explained why sometimes it would peak in that area, but immediately flatten out to the right in an annoying deep spot (a place, I can only assume, where the sand has drained out and around after big swells come through, creating the annoying deep spot around the alleged cement posts).
By the way, it's really quite crap so I really don't recommend surfing here. :)
I'm only partially kidding. Yes, the line-ups have gotten more crowded even in the paltry few years that I've been surfing, but I'm always curious as to why people learn to surf at OP. It's a shapeless beach break wave that smacks beginners around in a sort of dangerous way. (I don't know if you're a beginner, but if you come to L.A. and want to surf, I can think of other places that are better for beginners.)
And if you're not a beginner, again, I'm not sure why you would come to OP. I've asked this of the experienced guys crew -- why do they keep coming here when they are good enough to haunt Malibu or Topanga? Some of them just live up the street. Some of them have been surfing here since they were 15. Some of them say, "There are more chicks here."
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