I joined Sid Wolf for a day of surfing at Bolinas. Sid suggested that the swell was going to be pretty large and it would be a good day for a “short board”. So I brought my used Pirouette river boat to go surfing in. The tide was high and waves were breaking onto the boat ramp at the end of Brighton Avenue so we launched at the end of Warf Road next to the mouth of the lagoon. Both Sid and I caught one fantastic ride on our first try! Sid says this is bad luck and joked that the rest of the day would not be as good. Unfortunately this sort of came true.
The waves at the mouth of the lagoon break over the edge of a sand bar and are pretty dumpy most of the time. I fell over the edge of this break a bunch of times and had to roll up. I wasn’t wearing my nose plugs most of the time and got my sinuses so well irrigated that it hurt to breathe. I put my nose plugs on at this point to keep air from blowing over my poor sore sinuses.
After getting beat up for a while, Sid suggested that we paddle over to the “kayak surf spot” on the north side of Brighton Avenue . We went over there and spent a long frustrating time trying to catch waves. The board surfers had beaten us to this spot and we had to stay away from the steepest part of the break to avoid running into them. Out at the edges we could rarely get our short kayaks up to speed in time to catch rides. We landed at a sandy beach for lunch, then paddled back to the mouth of the lagoon for a short while to catch some more exciting rides before we quit.
Sid landed way down the beach and started dragging his boat up along the edge of the water. I figured “why walk when you can fly?” and tried to paddle up the entrance to the lagoon. I surfed across the entrance and tried to work the waves upstream against the outgoing current. This worked for a while but soon I was paddling hard and not making any progress. When Sid caught up with me and trudged past me I gave up and joined him carrying my boat on land.