Surfer Steph
As many of my friends know, besides music, the ocean is my life. I first started surfing when I was 14 years old in the cold water of Kelly’s Cove, San Francisco. This was before wetsuits for surfing were invented. Nobody thought anything of staying out in the surf for an hour with only a swimsuit or trunks on. The lucky ones wore a scrap of a diving wetsuit jacket.
The surfboards, like early sailboats, were heavily fiber-glassed and weighed about 40 pounds. Nobody knew how strong that stuff really was. At low tide it was a long walk and a struggle for me to get my board to the surf. You would be rideculed if you were to drag your board! Leg leashes were unheard of, so when you wiped out, and lost your board, you would have to swim all the way back to shore, retrieve your board and paddle out again.
I never got good at surfing then, but I did get strong and always had fun. There was more of social beach scene at that time. Someone would build a beach fire that us kids would stand around to thaw out after a freezing surf session, then paddle back out with renewed vigor. We would do this all day. Sometimes a surfer would steal a pie, that was cooling off on a back window from Playland At The Beach. We would eat it, by digging in with our bare hands!
When the days of Indian Summer would bless the beach with the sun’s heat, I would pour on the baby oil and fry my skin, still feeling the tingling sensation from the cold salt water. Needing extra warmth, I would lie on my stomach and gather up a mound of hot sand, hugging it to my chest. No need for a beach towel.
I surf better now do to the camaraderie of female surfers, lighter boards with leashes and having a car to drive to surf spots that are less treacherous than Ocean Beach. Oh yeah, wetsuits are nice too!
