There's a few surf spots ive been to that give me the willys n u gotta be totally focused .. the wedge in newport beach ca is one .. only place you can get pitched over a 10 - 30+foot face into knee deep water .. not for the faint of heart beach goer. But damn whatta rush and a great wave.

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It may not be knee deep, but Pipeline dumps you hard onto a coral reef that is NOT skin friendly. I was lucky enough to never get rolled, but I saw people crawl out of that surf pretty tore up. And hitting the outer edges of Mavericks on a VERY. SMALL. day was enough to convince me I never needed to try it again. I'm not even sure that place should be surfed, even with jet skis.

jon1967 said:

Next year i wanna go to todos santos.. in the meantime its huntington beach ca home sweet home surf.Long beach has no wa es boooo .

I've been in the waves in Baja, but never surfed there. You still surf regularly? Ever head down to the SD area? That's where my old surf friends live. I don't surf anymore, haven't for quite a while actually.

jon1967 said:

Getn shred'd by coral is evil i. hate it.

Hells yes. Getting shredded or bashed by anything while surfing sucks (I hit a piece of drift wood once while diving off a board to avoid a bad wipeout ), and it could obviously seriously injure, or even kill you. Those thoughts were always buried way in the back of my mind, and came forward a little during a bad bail, but being in the ocean at Mavericks was just completely different. It was a soul sucking, mind numbing, fear inducing, point of view altering experience.

The ocean in that area is COLD, dark, moving in all kinds of different ways, known to have large sharks, and the surf breaks on rocks that vary in size from furniture, to small cars, to houses. And that's in your mind BEFORE you get to the point of being ready to hit the waves, which are genuinely frightening. I usually don't even mention that I paddled out there when I talk about surfing, because I wanted nothing to do with it and cut out pretty damn quick. I love the water and I would take every opportunity to get in it, for any reason, for many years. But paddling out at Mavericks and experiencing mother nature on a level where I couldn't rationalize what I was doing enough to overcome my fear was a powerful thing. And again, it was a VERY. SMALL. day when I went out. Coincidentally, or not, I didn't surf much longer after that. I never got the bug where I felt like I HAD to do it.

This...

I used to have a surfing friend (in Florida) who told me all kinds of stories about surfing with sharks. Some scary ones too. He didn't seem all that bothered by it. I would be though.

Tempest said:

I used to have a surfing friend (in Florida) who told me all kinds of stories about surfing with sharks. Some scary ones too. He didn't seem all that bothered by it. I would be though.

I think it's a visual thing. Like, seeing them while scuba diving was always a little unnerving, but it was never really frightening. Of course, some of that is just working under the assumption that you know the type of sharks you're seeing aren't going to attack humans. So for me, seeing, say, a blacktip reef shark (4-5 feet when they're big) in crystal clear water while scuba diving in Hawaii is a totally different experience than knowing there are Great Whites in the dark, impenitrable depths of the surf spots around the Bay Area and Nor Cal (seeing a school of Tuna was scarier than any shark I was ever close to, and they don't eat people! ). That being said, there are some big ass coastal shark species around Florida, so I don't know about all that not being bothered stuff.

Cerebus said:

Tempest said:

I used to have a surfing friend (in Florida) who told me all kinds of stories about surfing with sharks. Some scary ones too. He didn't seem all that bothered by it. I would be though.

I think it's a visual thing. Like, seeing them while scuba diving was always a little unnerving, but it was never really frightening. Of course, some of that is just working under the assumption that you know the type of sharks you're seeing aren't going to attack humans. So for me, seeing, say, a blacktip reef shark (4-5 feet when they're big) in crystal clear water while scuba diving in Hawaii is a totally different experience than knowing there are Great Whites in the dark, impenitrable depths of the surf spots around the Bay Area and Nor Cal (seeing a school of Tuna was scarier than any shark I was ever close to, and they don't eat people! ). That being said, there are some big ass coastal shark species around Florida, so I don't know about all that not being bothered stuff.

*

Yea, I know. He was prolly just trying to look all cool & brave & stuff.