The Point of No Return I body surfed for a while off the southern coast of California. I lived in and managed a 24 unit apartment complex in San Clemente just two blocks from the beach. Body surfing is the easiest type of fun one can have at the beach; it’s basically surfing without using a surf board. I would like to have learned how to surf with a board, but never got around to it. I had fun just the same. My favorite thing to do when I body surfed was diving into walls of water. That’s right, vertical walls of water. To do this everything had to come together at the same time. When rip tides would form, there would be a sweet spot… out past the breaks, just before the point of no return. I would swim out beyond the normal breaks, where the swells at their low point would just about let me touch the bottom… six to eight feet deep. This is the spot where two opposing waves would converge, effectively canceling one another out. If I went any further out the rip currents would grab me, and I’d have to start all over. Timing was everything. I would feel an enormous tug, pulling me outward. That was it, what I’d been waiting for. As I was pulled outward, the water beneath me was getting shallower very rapidly. At this point, it took everything I had to get in the sweet spot, the spot where I could stand up. From the beach, all you can see are two waves coming together and the white caps that are formed. You can’t see the hole that is formed just in front of the waves. Just like surfing there would be many false smaller waves, but if you wait… the big waves eventually hit. Standing in this hole formed by these two converging waves, if you could freeze this moment and look around you would see… A huge vertical wall of water in front of you, you would see hilly swells of water behind you. You can’t see the beach because you are standing in a hole. Looking down you see the floor of the ocean underneath your feet, a lot of crushed shells, sometimes a seaweed or two. When these big waves converge, sucking all the water out from around me, permitting me to stand in water only inches deep, I’d have a three or four second window. The wall of water would form about fifteen to twenty feet out, ten to fifteen feet high… I would run as hard as I could toward that vertical wall of water, if my timing was right I’d dive in, punching my way through. Once I hit that wall, I wasn’t done… once inside I would have to swim as though my life depended upon it… because it did. If I couldn’t swim fast enough and that wave got ahold of me, which it did on occasion… that fifteen foot wall of water would thrash me, bouncing me on the bottom over and over… and if that wasn’t bad enough… then came the bubbles. You can’t swim in bubbles… no buoyancy. All you can hope for is that the last breath you inhaled when you hit the wall, was enough to see you through it. Did I mention this was during rip tide, once through that wall, I was then in the rip currents, a very strong current pulling me out to sea. Sometimes it was difficult to get back to that sweet spot, you can’t swim against the current, the current moves outward 5 to 10 feet per second, so to get back to the sweet spot, I’d have to swim perpendicular to the current, then inward toward land, then I’d swim back toward the center of the rip tide looking for that sweet spot, that one point on Earth like none other. The point of no return.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 01:38:56 +0000
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