So… enough about wetsuits. How about another example of how well the universe took care of me on my trip? After I left Montana de Oro State Park (largely because the campsite was fully booked for an Australian documentary crew — seriously) I made my way back down to
(music cue: dun daaahhhhhh!)
JALAMA
I emphasize Jalama because, to me, the name is legendary. Look, I realize that to you the name means nothing. That’s why I’m explaining it. And also why I added the sound fx. Sheesh!
When Bob and I surfed the coast of California in 1992, we surfed Jalama. We had just done enough surfing to be able to catch some good rides. And we knew that we were fit enough to handle some big waves. Well, more accurately, we knew that we were fit enough to handle getting held under the water and scraped across the bottom of the ocean floor for 30 seconds. Multiple times in a row.
So we hit Jalama.
And we got beaten up.
Badly.
I will never forget one time when I first attempted to “drop in” on a big wave. Only I wasn’t actually good enough to “drop in” yet. (Quick explanation: If you don’t quite catch a wave properly, you can get caught on top of the curl of the wave, instead of on the wave face. If a) you’re good b) you time it right and c) you’re surfing a benevolent wave, you can sometimes “drop in” off the curl of the wave onto the face of the waves and still catch a great ride. Now, if you mistime it, you’re fucked.) Like I said, I wasn’t good enough. I tried to “drop in” late. I missed. And I got fucked. My board went nose into the wave. My feet followed my board. And somehow my body got caught in the curl and snapped backwards. Really badly. And, after I washed up onshore barely able to move 5 minutes later, I spent about 15 minutes trying to recover. I described the experience to Bob as “being snapped backward like a popsicle stick”. Luckily, nothing actually snapped. It just felt that way. At the time, I was 19. And stupid. And so after my brief rest, I got up, paddled back out into Jalama once again and sometime thereafter, I caught the best wave that I had ever surfed. A sweet, long, cruising ride on a great wave that started way way out and took me all the way into the beach. It was the ride of my life to that point.
Hell, it’s been so built up in my mind since then that it’s still the ride of my life.
So now you see the legend of Jalama.
Pleasure. Pain. Great waves. Sometimes at a great cost.
And I was back.
Yes. I am an idiot.
But I was talking about the universe taking care of me.
So I arrive at the Jalama Beach County Park. It’s part of Santa Barbara County. A 20 minute drive from highway 1 through the hills. There’s nothing nearby but cattle ranches and Vandenberg Air Force Base.
Jalama Beach Park is an RV and tent camping park. And it’s first-come-first-served. Which means that some days, like Monday and Tuesday, you can find a campsite. But try and get a campsite on the weekend in the summer? Forget it. And try and get a site leading up to July 4th? Not a bat’s chance in hell. People come out from the local cities and “reserve” a site for a week by paying the fee for the days leading up to Independence Day – sometime using up the “14-day maximum stay” rule and booking 2 weeks in advance. So there weren’t a lot of sites available when I arrived on Thursday, June 22. I had called earlier in the morning (8 am) and found out that they had 3 sites available. When I got there at 11, there was just one. An RV site with a full hookup, overlooking the park.
Here’s a shot of the view.
Not bad, eh. But, all things considered, it wasn’t awesome. I had to spend a bunch of extra $$ for an electrical hookup that I didn’t need. (I was running lean and mean, needing no power at all since, for once in my life, I was using neither a computer nor a television for two whole weeks…) My site was on a concrete pad and wide open to the baking Californian sun. On the left side of me I had Randy & Mr. Lahey on their summer vacation. And on the right side two families, with a sum total of eleven kids, jammed into what appeared to be the Super Sized version of the Toyota ShitBox.
So I talked to the park rangers about getting a tent site lower down. I was hoping for something with a little shade and maybe even some grass or some sand.
And, about an hour later, I saw that another site down below had opened up. I went down and talked to Ranger Rick.
RANGER RICK: Yeah, 44’s a pretty good site. But if you come into the back of the shack and let me show you something special, I might let you into site 52 on Sunday…
After I went to see what exactly Ranger Rick meant by special, and then promptly ran out of the Ranger Shack screaming and threatening legal action, I ran smack into the Santa Barbara Sherriff. Turns out that dude wasn’t Ranger Rick at all. He was an escaped con who had made a run for it from Lompoc Penitentiary earlier that day. [Lompoc is, in fact, the closest town to Jalama. The only thing I knew about Lompoc prior to this trip was that it is home to a nasty penitentiary. Which I have learned about in such movies as Out of Sight…]
Apparently, the real Ranger Rick was tied up in another room in the Ranger Shack. Now, I didn’t bother to ask whether the real Ranger Rick was also forced to see something special, because the Sheriff was so happy to have my assistance (and signed agreement not to sue to county, state and the US government) they gave me the best spot in the park. That minute.
The fact that the previous tenants of campsite 52 had moments earlier vacated the site had nothing to do with it.
See that “ride” there. Dead centre of the photo? In between those huge hedges. THAT was my campsite. For a whole week.
Yes folks, I can honestly say that during most of my Sleep/Surf Extravaganza, I slept on the beach.
And as you can guess from many of my stories, I don’t “honestly” say much.
Now, it wasn’t all puppy dogs and cupcakes living in el primo campsite #52. Well, to be fair, it was mostly puppy dogs and cupcakes. Or whatever the proper metaphor would be – chilling out in the privacy, the sun and having an awesome time – you get the picture. There was one big problem.
The late night hurricanes.
If you take a closer look at the above picture you will notice that the hedges around my site look remarkably similar to the walls of a wind tunnel. Sadly, I didn’t realize this until about 3 am on the morning of the first late night hurricane. OK, hurricane isn’t quite true. There was no rain. Or flooding. Or tsunami. But there was a hell of a windstorm. Apparently, June in Central California gets really windy at night. And when you’re sleeping in a cheap assed tent in the middle of a wind tunnel, with nothing to block the wind whipping off the water, a windstorm can really suck. It’s loud and it whips your tent around. And it can get cold. But what they don’t tell you about in grade school, children? The sand.
That’s what sucked most of all. ‘Cause I was sleeping in a cheap-assed tent that was more mesh window than actual fabric. And although those mesh windows keep out the bugs, they do not keep out the sand. And by about 4 am that morning, every gust was dropping about two pails of sand right on my head. But I was tired. And like I said before, stupid. So I just threw a towel over my head and rolled over – awakening every few hours to dig an air hole through the sand pile accumulating on my body.
You’d think that I would have learned my lesson that first night. Nope. Not me. I thought, heck, I’ll turn the tent sideways – the mesh was smaller on the side of the tent – and I’ll sleep fine.
Let’s just say that about 6 am the next morning, I ‘decided’ to get up to go surfing, partly in an attempt to get all the sand out of my ears.
The rest of the trip I slept in the back of my ride.