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SOME DAYS
Midwinter New Jersey dishes out thick, cold barrels for a hearty few |
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January 18, 2005 Some days, I know how cold it is before I even open the door. Some days, Old Man Winter seems to slide his bony hands beneath the windowsill, and tweak your nipples. A light coating of snow had fallen in the night.
My brother called with his surf alert. Doesn't that bastard sleep? I didn't have to look at the surf. I knew what it was like. It was Long Beach Island in winter. It was big, and cold, and mean. I knew, while still lying under a strata of blankets, that I would shiver through the day, that I would be beaten like Rodney King, and that if I missed so much as five minutes of surf with the crew, I would regret it.
This was the type of day where you tug on your wetsuit in the warm house, while your car is running and the ice is melting off the windshield.
Driving across the bridge, heat blaring, I took note of the whitecaps on Barnegat Bay. The wind was light offshore (only 30 knots.) During the night, a fast moving low had swung north, well offshore. Had it been closer, the pre-surf ritual would have included a snow-shoveling session.
My brother and his die-hard roommates were already out, navigating the low-tide dredgers.
The surf indeed was big, cold, and mean. New Jersey is an insignificant speck on the map of the surfing world, but the surfbreak cartographers seem to favor places where the beach doesn't freeze. They seem to look at the inconsistency, the bitter cold, the quick swell decay, and the fierce winds, and forget that two to three times each winter month - the surf becomes world class.
For us, it's a passion. I've been on long surf trips through exotic, tropical lands, and heard that the boys at home scored epic, frigid, Harvey Cedars. I would feel a twinge of jealousy, even if I had surfed a tropical reef all day.
It's all about pushing each other on a 25-degreee-winter day.
It's about Greg Cachoogian pulling into a frothy cylinder on a 7-foot, wooden, singlefin that he made himself.
It's all about Chris Pfeil, spending five hours in the water, surfing, and then taking epic water shots that make LBI look like Indo with snow.
It's all about Surf City Pro, Randy Townsend, whose spends a good part of the year traveling to warm destinations to shoot or compete, pulling into massive chambers, switchstance!
"I was out there with the people I want to surf with," said Townsend, "I was just having some fun regular and goofyfoot. It was huge and gaping. It was so wide, you could try new stuff," said Townsend.
It's all about my neighbor, Mike Roth, of In-Laid surfboards, paddling out at 'The Jobsite,' on a mini-gun, and pulling into the deepest, longest, most badass barrels possible.
"It was pretty cold, but it was real Jersey Juice. That's as real as it gets. It's home, sweet home," says Roth.
It's about epic waves with a handful of heads in the water, at the same beach that might see 85 surfers on a shitty summer day.
It's about a small crew of guys who realize that we have a little piece of frozen paradise that most of the world wants nothing to do with.
Townsend put it best: "My throat hurts so bad from screaming so loud at everyone's waves." --Jon Coen
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WHY IT HAPPENED:
A stalled frontal boundary was hanging right off the Eastern Seaboard Saturday into Sunday. On Sunday morning an area of low pressure developed off the Southeast coast along this front. This system intesified rapidly as it moved northward near the Mid Atlantic coast Sunday evening and then close
to Nova Scotia by Monday morning. This provided enough time for a substantial E/NE fetch to develop and provide solid head high+ surf for many areas in the Northeast on Monday along with NW winds 20-25kt and good, but very chilly conditions. --Micah Sklut
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NEW JERSEY SURFLINE RESOURCES:
LOLA for NJ
East Coast forecast
New Jersey surf map
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