Eastside Surfblog past entries

01/08/09

I’m writing this on Wednesday and, looking at the IOP Web cam, there seems to be some rideable surf. But since I’m sitting here writing this, that doesn’t count for me, does it? The wind and swell models show the wind switching around to offshore later today, so this is one of those quick “here today, gone tomorrow” swells. Those of you lucky enough to catch it, I salute you. The model shows some swell coming in on Saturday, but not much size. If the wind cooperates, it could be rideable. Last week was a pretty miserable week for surf. The weather was great, but Mother Ocean took a long winter’s nap on us.

Being East Coasters, surfers here have elevated figuring out what to do with ourselves when it’s flat to an art form. I recently discovered that head shaper Ed Boudolf has taken this to a whole new level. Mrs. Blog and I passed by his house a couple of weeks ago and could see him looking studious in his study, so naturally we decided to go hassle him. To our delight, he had taken up painting. And I don’t mean with a roller. He’s always shown talents as a board shaper, airbrusher and general bon vivant, but I must admit we were genuinely impressed — to the point that one of his pieces was purchased as a present for Mrs. Blog and currently hangs in the Boom Boom Room. Plus, as Big Ed explains it, he is much more attractive to the opposite sex as a starving artist than he would ever be as a starving real estate agent. So go buy some of his stuff now, because when he starts eating paint and cutting off pieces of his ears, the values will skyrocket and he’ll pretend he doesn’t speak English.

So, back to the surf — or lack thereof to be more accurate — what’s a guy to do? Mrs. Blog, fearing a physical deterioration of a degree to match my current mental deterioration, force marches me off to the health club gulag. The problem with surfing is that it is such an absolute rush it pretty much makes anything else you do a real letdown. And, for me, going to the health club is a snore. Plus, I really feel out of place and self-conscious. Especially when I’m lying on some machine clanking my little weights together and out of the corner of my eye I can see Brutus P. Deltoid over there curling the total land mass of Liberia like he was eating popcorn in a movie theater. The really healthy people there, both male and female, are kind of scary. Don’t they have jobs? Will they read this and kick my butt in the parking lot? I wish I had a tank top, shaved chest hairs and tattoos on my guns. So what I do is, after I’m done with each machine, I move the weight pin from whatever pitiful amount it is I can lift to something beefy, like 150 lbs., so the next person after me will think I’m a stud. Does that make me a bad person?

The other thing I find hard is to get motivated to get an aerobic workout. For me, the setup is all wrong. I see all these people on the treadmills running toward TVs they’ll never reach while they watch CNN. There are raging wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza. The economy is in the toilet, and Gazprom is holding Europe hostage. Turn the thing around, put CNN at my back and I’d probably set some kind of record running away from that kind of news. Or, better yet, rig up some kind of tray with a couple of Skoogie dogs and a cold Heineken just out of reach — I’d run like a deranged Iditarod husky.