Night Pacific:
By Will Carless
The Pacific Ocean has been good to me since I landed in this country of opportunity some eight months ago. It has cooled me on those hot, languid summer days of kegs and beach parties and impossibly beautiful girls. It has provided me with the long, liquid walls of green speckled water on which to surf at Blacks Beach and Windansea and Crystal Pier. When girls didn’t call, when my car blew up, when I lost two jobs in two days, the ocean was there, timeless and grand and omnipotent, never more than a half-mile from the door of my home.
For the Summer months in San Diego, the ocean was a place to cavort and flirt under the blistering Californian sun. For every spare day there was a beach party - open invitations to join a ‘kegger’, a keg party down on the fashion parade in front of Mission Beach Boulevard. And for every blissful beer quenched day there was a long warm night, and we would go to La Jolla Cove and swim with the orange fish and phosphorescence under a platinum moon. Then we would drink an icy bottle of white wine in the caves, wrapped in fluffy towels and the warm embrace of youthful pleasure and just being here.
Even on the quiet nights, when I would simply read on my front lawn and slip quietly into bed for an early night, the ocean would permeate my dreams with its ceaseless scrubbing of waves on sand. The growling crash of surf would lift up from the white-water and blend with the heady buzz of the crickets to fall again into my grateful ears as I lay prone in my room, drifting off and imagining those waves, thinking what the next day night bring.
But now it is Autumn, and the clammy cold of Winter is already beginning to dig its fingernails into the waters around this city. We now surf in full-suits again and the boardshorts have been hung up until next June. But with the winter comes the steely resolve of the winter swells that will march across the Pacific, pounding Hawaii on their way to my beach and my reefs where I will be waiting with my new 6’9 Bessell semi-gun. Ready and waiting and urgently needing the strong pulse of those winter swells.
Last night we surfed until it was so dark we couldn’t see each other, let alone the creeping onslaught of the set waves as they hooked around the point and began to throw our way. Each drop was a leap of faith, a step into the unknown territory of a dark unbroken face. But we know this wave so well now. We know that little bump that sometimes kicks your way off the sandbar when the swells are a mixture of North-West and South-West. We know that you can get under and through the pier from the South side, but that from the North it’s near impossible, especially on your backhand. I’ve seen the blood left on the razor barnacles of the pier supports, I’ve seen the wipeouts.
But the real reason we surfed so late was the phosphorescence. The waters around San Diego are gripped in a ‘red tide’, a natural phenomena whereby algae living in the ocean make the waves the colour of ice tea. It’s like surfing in a bloodbath during the day, and the waves loom, shining like huge copper pipes in the milky Autumn sun. But at night the salty murkiness of the water gives way to a more delicate natural beauty. When the last drops of sun have spilled over the horizon towards Japan it is time for the ocean’s light show to begin.
So we wave our hands quickly under the surface and there it is. Our hands are enveloped in an eerie electronic turquoise blur of phosphorescence as they disturb the water. Each hand is like a miniature comet, swishing through the black universe of the reflected stars. Towards the beach, the spray that is thrown off the backs of the waves by the light offshores is lit up like teeth under a UV light. As I paddle out, my surfing mate Todd carves a beautiful top to bottom and hits the lip hard. The line where his fins slice up the face of the glassy wave glows, alive and terrifyingly beautiful for a second or two before it is swabbed away by the next set breaking set wave.
Tonight we want to go out at midnight, under the light of an almost full moon. We haven’t seen a cloud all day, and the good South-Westerly groundswell is still hitting the pier perfectly. I want to weave through the legs of the pier at night, to pull a floater under its rotting timbers as the whitewater below my feet turns to that iridescence that itself is indicative of the power in which this body of water is steeped. And as the whisper of the breeze flicks through my hair I will look in at the lights and mayhem of Pacific Beach and the out at the empty enormity of the ocean and think “I’m glad I came here”.
