Some valient efforts there, but some small error, or slight quirk in the wave dynamics means no option to "opt out". Nature takes over control.
Most of those look far more dangerous than they are, although an excess in flailing on the way down might prove unfortunate if you re-enter the water awkwardly. If you fall into the wave near the middle or toward the base, it is not too hard to escape the worst of its power. If you exhale and swim down toward the bottom as hard as you can... the natural rotation of the wave pulls you back up behind it... and there ya go...
Being picked up by the wave and thrown forward as it breaks... makes for a fun ride.
or slight quirk in the wave dynamics...
Sigh.
My best and worst / best day surfing...
A quick trip to Hawaii... not a lot of lead time to plan... almost no time while there to have fun... but, the day we arrived... my friends and I had a few hours to play with, and the surf was up... coming in steady.
We headed to a nice public beach on the northeast shore, an all sand beach... in a bit of a horseshoe shaped bay that concentrated the waves that rolled in and amplified them... so that the 10 to 15 foot waves a bit farther up, turned into 20 to 30 foot waves where we were, and slowly growing a bit larger over time. With no time to plan, no logistics, we just checked in, then packed into the rental car with hotel towels, and went out body surfing...
And that was perfect, had us joining in body surfing with the local kids... and... three solid hours of near perfection... Made it one of those days you have once in a lifetime... doing this or that, when everything just clicks... making it a day that you'll remember forever...
And then...
I noticed, too late... that everyone else had ducked out of the wave I was now taking... whether I wanted to or not...
A faster moving rogue wave, unseen by me, had come into the bay at an odd angle... and, its timing had it perfectly intersecting with the wave I was committed to... in exactly the spot where I was taking it. The convergence of the two waves did something I'd never seen before...Rather than pushing forward and breaking, the wave I was now riding instead sort of paused briefly... and, in that pause, it acted exactly like a tsunami... sucking all the water ahead of the wave back off of the beach... and, as it did that, the only sensation I had, horribly out of place, was like that of riding a fast elevator. The wave basically held its form as it rapidly grew from 30 feet to 60 feet...with me perched just forward of the leading edge. And, as you say, with no option to "opt out"... I was hanging, briefly, in space, spit out higher at the point of convergence, on the upward ride... and then fell 60 feet, out in front of the wave... landing hard on the beach in a couple of inches of water. And, then, a 60 foot wave landed on me.
I was surprised when I landed, flat on my side with my arms tucked in... that there wasn't enough water even for for my head to go under. It was like being dropped from 60 feet into a kiddie pool, making a big splash, and not getting your hair wet. It immediately dislocated my shoulder, which hurt, and pulled my arm from the socket as it tore... which hurt more,,,
But, it turns out, a 60 foot wave landing on top of you is a spectacular pain killer. The wave hit me before my head had time to hit the beach. And, when it hit... it was loud... it was just as sudden as the end of my fall had been... and, shockingly, to me, it was vastly more violent than the end of my fall had been. It first rolled me from my side onto my front and forcibly splayed my arms and legs. The tuck I'd held in the fall was not sustainable. Trying to tuck my chin in... made no difference. My legs and arms flailed wildly,.. both arms the same... both entirely out of my control... and I hardly felt any pain. One arm felt a little different... not that it mattered. The wave converted me into a flopping rag that was being used to violently scrub the floor of the sea... pushing me forward at what seemed a fairly steady pace after a first violent acceleration... while whipping me rapidly back and forth, side to side, randomly, alternately pushing all of me along the bottom while mostly pressing me down into it, or lifting my butt a bit to shove my face down into the sand with a bit more vigor. Only tumbled head over once. Only rolled along the long axis of my body once, but that was more like the water I was travelling in twisting then me twisting. Never once thought about that, or why that happened, until today. But, its indelibly etched in memory. A sand beach. No rocks. Beyond observing what was happening to me, as it was, entirely outside my control... that's what dominated my thoughts: "no rocks, no rocks"... and, while I saw a few pass by, there were none I came close to hitting. Which is just lucky.
I never passed out, or, don't think that I did... What I noted past "no rocks" was... "this sure is taking a long time". The violence continued and seemed endless... I'm sure it would have ended sooner, if the wave had not sucked all the water off the beach first. But, it did gradually reduce to a more gentle effort in scrubbing the bottom with me just a bit less violently. And then... it stopped. The motion didn't end... and it didn't let me float to the surface... but it quit mopping the floor with me. And I think the end of the violence in pushing me along the bottom, and a return of pain, not me passing out, is the cause of a bit of a pause in my memory between that, and what happened next.
The wave was much bigger than the norm had been. It surged forward far up onto the beach, wetting towels, sending chairs and ice chests floating, almost to the parking lot and the road, and carrying me along the bottom, I think, right up to that line where the normal wave action usually ends, where the slope of the beach ends in the water, in a small gravelly trough. Only there did it relent, I think... the rolling motion of the wave ended, and I finally bobbed up... to be carried along in the now linear flow to be deposited well up on the beach. I don't remember the wave receding. I do remember being adrift, briefly. limbs dangling, in a couple feet of water, and then being sort of dropped into the sand, and finally gasping in a breath. I don't remember tumbling up the beach or anything like that. I have no idea how long it really took. Seemed like a long time. I could easily hold my breath for three minutes or more, back then... and I'm sure it wasn't that long... maybe a bit more than a whole minute, start to finish ? But, the fall to the sand from the wave spitting me up and out seemed to last quite a while... which I know it didn't.
My friends had mostly tired earlier than I had, and were watching from the beach. They ran out into the surf, after the wave ended... hoping, they said, to recover the body before the retreat of the wave sucked it back out to sea...
I was stunned, but mostly unharmed. A couple of new sand burns to go with my new sunburn. I remember feet appearing... and growing in number. Then, they had calves, and knees. I tried to push myself up and fell, instead, my arm not working. But, also, it didn't hurt... it was entirely numb, and I had no control over it. On a second attempt, a few of those legs had become quite shapely... others were not... so, clearly I was not dead. A group of local Hawaiian kids had come running, and now formed an animated circle around me... Everyone on the beach came over to gawk... as a couple of the kids helped to pick me up off the beach... Oh, I can feel that... They got me standing up... and were trying to communicate with me... to see if I was alright. it didn't seem like it. They were talking to me, but i couldn't understand them... or, couldn't hear them... just distant mumbles. They thought I'd been knocked senseless... My friends noticed, or were called in, and came running up after a minute... and also tried talking to me... and I couldn't understand them either. That caused a lot of confusion... for them and me. They were afraid I was brain damaged. I was afraid the wave had destroyed my hearing. I tried to reach up and touch my ear... but again, my arm didn't work. The other one did...
Touching my ear, expecting blood, what I got was sand. The violence of the wave had solidly packed my ears with sand, from the ear drum all the way to a smoothly rounded surface level with the outside of my ear at the edges... entirely filled with sand the whole way. I couldn't hear them because of the sand. I spoke to them to say "I can't hear you, my ears are full of sand"... and learned then that I couldn't really hear myself either, with ears full of sand, which was rather weird. I couldn't get the packed sand out of my ears using just my hands. The beach had a shower... so I walked over there and took about five minutes in the water to get the sand out of my ears. Eardrums fully intact... not a given with the dynamic pressures and violent changes in a big wave.
While I was doing that... a group of five or six late teenage to twenty-something Hawaiian girls came over, also intent on removing the sand that a day on the beach had left on them... which they did by removing their bikinis... and carefully ensuring no bit of their scalp or any crevice harbored any residual sand. "Are you OK" they asked ? "That was a spectacular fall".
I smiled, then, as I am now... glad to be alive...
And, that was my best / worst / best ever day of surfing... all very surreal, at the time, and still...
I couldn't use my arm for three weeks.. much longer before it was close to normal. Still have to work the free weights to keep the shoulder in shape... feel it when I forget to do that for too long... but, now, it's just an old postcard I sent to myself long ago... back when I was a bit less buoyant. Which, as it turns out, makes body surfing easier... if less fun for errant onlookers.
I do know to watch for rogue waves, now.. but have never encountered another. Not like that one.
If you want to learn to surf bigger waves... you're going to have to learn to take a fall off bigger waves... ? Mostly, it won't kill you, if you do it right. Experience makes a big difference for those with the fortitude to get much experience, or those who grow into it. There's more fear apparent on the beach than in the water. Do try to avoid rocks. But, on that day, on that beach, I wasn't in control enough to avoid them... and was a whole lot luckier than others there have been with much lesser waves. |
