Head high to 1-3′ overhead, a touch of sideshore wind and only light texture. Sounded good enough for me, so I made the short trip down to Linda Mar this morning for my first session since moving to San Francisco. Was it my worst day in the water? That’s a tough one - there are [...]

I took the morning off last Monday and went to Wrightsville Beach with King Charles (hereafter, “KC”), a friend and co-worker of my brother’s. It was the first time I’d been in rideable waves with the new Ted Kearns 6′3″; and two short, uncomfortable hours in the water confirmed a few things:

• I am woefully out of paddling shape.
• I am a terrible surfer even when I’m in shape.
• I say I’m a terrible surfer mostly because if I was in a situation with even mildly treacherous surf, where I needed to ride my supposedly-very-easy-to-ride hybrid fish to safety, you would hear about my death on the news. I would be the guy who had a buoyant foam conveyance at his disposal and still died. Of incompetence. You would talk about me with disdain among your friends for weeks, until the conversation turned to Britney Spears’ bald head and probable meth addiction.

It’s a good thing that I realize I’ve only been surfing for a year and a half, and that learning to ride a shortboard is going to take time and a lot of effort, or I might chuck it all in. I don’t believe I’ve said on this blog that I’m moving to San Francisco, but that is indeed the case, and it’s going to be cold. I’d love to at least be able to ride the board I’m taking (I’ve all but decided not to leave it in North Carolina), but whatever. To get good at something you have to be willing to suck at the beginning.

The cold is going to make for a difficult adjustment. Towards the end of the session, I was struggling to get back out - arms reduced to the approximate strength of a malnourished third world orphan - and I took a flush of water down my front as I duck-dived. I wasn’t previously aware that my testicles were capable of speech, but, God as my witness, I heard them yelp. Thankfully, when I got out to the lineup, KC was shivering on his board. He went to check his watch and stopped halfway to his wrist, in a gesture that said “to hell with the watch, ‘time to go’ is ‘time to go,’” and so we agreed to catch one in and call it a morning.

Luckily, the trip was still pretty enjoyable. KC a) drove, b) didn’t make fun of me in the water and c) took me to his family’s palatial beach house, which has more square footage than the sum total of every apartment I’ve ever rented. He also told me a load of stories from his and my brother’s office, that I’m convinced are worthy of a sitcom, and I will be writing a pilot in the near future.

I leave for San Francisco in about two, two and a half weeks. I’m a little disappointed I didn’t get down to the coast more than twice while I was here in NC, but then again, it’s a three hour drive. I’m still a kook. I have my limits.