THE DARKER SIDE OF SURFING PART 3
1-2-08
By Corky Carroll

Yesssss my pretties… this is yet one more episode into the darker side of surfing. We began this not long ago with accounts of surfing horrors such as the dreaded nipple rash, the not joys of left in the car wetsuit smell, unexpected sinus drain (more to come on that later), the always heinous rock kick when you are watching the waves and not where you are walking and of course the vicious and very dangerous bungee cord snap to the face. All dark and nasty things that go along with surfing. Continuing along, in an effort to inform and warn all of you wonderful and unsuspecting readers, with more accounts of these unwanted things I am today going to dive into possible boobie traps that can happen during surf travel.

Traveling to go surfing is always an experience. You are all excited about going somewhere and if you are like me you either wait until the last minute to get ready or you totally overpack. Actually I do both. I wait and then take way more than I need. Unfortunately sometimes even though you take more than you need you don’t take all the right stuff.

Let me recount to you one such adventure I had not all that long ago. I was taking a trip to an exotic and far away surf spot that I will leave unnamed for good reasons. It is a remote area and tropical, that’s all I will say. So I am on a nine o’clock at night flight out of LAX and going to be gone a week. At about three in the afternoon, after a full day surfing at San Onofre with friends, I figure I better throw a few things into my bag and get ready to head to the airport.

Twenty-two hours flying time, a six-hour bus ride and a two-hour boat ride later I get dropped off at a dock in the middle of nowhere. A good two hour hike through a very scary jungle and finally I am there. I am more or less expecting to see a few other surfers camping at the spot but there where only a couple of chicks from Argentina who had gone there on the recommendation of a friend who told them there would be lots of available hot surfer dudes hanging out there without girls. I’m thinking this is not all that bad a set up. And the surf is fantastic.

I unpack my board bag to get ready to surf and find that there is a huge ding in the rail right about where my hands go to stand up. Not to worry, I have repair stuff in my backpack. I thought. Oops, seem to have forgotten that along with the duct tape. Oh well, I will just have to be careful and try not to get cut on the jagged fiberglass.

Putting my fins in the boxes provided another not so good surprise. I don’t have fin bolts to hold them in. How could I make a trip like this without double-checking this stuff? I have done this enough times to know better. Oh well, I can cram some leaves and stuff in with my fins and maybe they will stay in. At least I hope so.

Then came the kicker. I did not forget my surf leash. But the little string that holds it onto my board has come off somehow in the travel and I don’t have another one. Ahhhhhh. Oh well, I can surf without a leash. The only problem with that is that if I do loose my board it will wind up on a very nasty coral reef and I will have to swim in about a half a mile and then have to climb up on the razor sharp reef to get it back. And there are sea snakes up there to deal with too. Not good.

So I decide to sacrifice one of my shoestrings and hope that it doesn’t break. This is sooo not professional. Finally I am ready to paddle out. Here I am,half way around the world in the middle of absolute nowhere. Jagged fiberglass ready to cut me to pieces, sharks ready to eat me if I am bleeding, fins held in by weeds which will probably fall out even before I make it outside and my board attached to my leash with an old rotten cotton tennis shoe lace. Surf fifteen feet and epic. And, I am sooo impressing the two very exotic looking Argentine babes with my stupidity and the fact that I put my rash guard into my bag a bit damp and it now smells like a dead rodent on a humid summer highway in Alabama. Yes folks, obviously I am a seasoned surf traveler. You can use me as a perfect bad example.

BLUE DOG VS THE SHARK
The Wave ~ 1-2-08
By Corky Carroll

I am at this moment sitting on my deck at my house in Mexico. It is the day after Christmas (early deadline) and the weather is a perfect 83 degrees. The surf is overhead and excellent, yesterday was perfect all day, and the water is a mild 79 degrees. My partner Blue Dog Metcalf just showed up and he and the Iguana, my neighbor, are just getting ready to head out for a surf. My arms are a bit tired from 3 go outs yesterday that totaled about seven hours of surfing. I had a nice session earlier this morning so I am content for the day, I think. It’s about noon right now though, so that could change if the afternoon wind stays down and it starts going off at the low tide later on.

Blue Dog just told us about an adventure he had a few weeks ago while surfing some mysto bizarre reef in Northern California. He used to hang out up there when he was a kid and seems to know about a bunch of still unknown breaks way far off the beaten path. I guess this one he had to hire a boat to take him out to and there are no roads in the area and the reef is pretty far offshore. From what he said the waves were a good twenty to twenty five feet and the water was so cold it was like melted snow. He had only been in the water a short time and was waiting for a set to come through when he was bumped by a huge great white shark. He didn’t see it coming. He said it just came out of nowhere and bumped into his leg as he sat on his board. Scared the daylights out of him. As he was sitting there he saw the thing turn and start to head back in his direction. But just as he was starting to call for his mama and warm up his wetsuit, a bunch of bottlenose dolphins came between him and the big shark. This gave him time to streak back to the fishing boat that had taken him out there. The whole time he was paddling for the boat he said the dolphins stayed between him and the shark.

I was amazed to hear this story because I remember reading about a similar thing a couple of months ago online. Somebody had sent me a link to a news story about a surfer getting saved from a shark attack in Monterey by dolphins. So I went back and found the story.

It was written by a dude named Mike Celizic who is a TODAYShow.com contributor. It ran on November 8th. It tells of how a local surfer named Todd Endris survived a vicious attack from a 12 to 15 foot great white shark after being rescued from the attack by a pod of bottlenose dolphins. He had been hit by the shark three times and was in danger of losing his life when the dolphins showed up and formed a protective ring around him. This allowed him to make it to shore where he received first aid.

The attack happened on August 28th while Todd was surfing at Marina State Park in Monterey. At the time of the story he was completing 4 months of physical therapy to repair muscle damage from the attack. It was also reported that he was back out surfing at the same spot. His main comment on the whole thing was to point out just what perfect predators the sharks are.

How amazing it is to hear two stories in the same amount of months of guys getting helped out by dolphins during shark attacks, or at least possible shark attack in the case of the Blue Dog. We are not sure that anything would really want to eat that crusty of a surf dude. But ya never know. It could have been a shark with no sense of taste or smell and no gag reflex either.

At this time nobody has figured out why dolphins protect humans. There are stories of the marine mammals rescuing humans that go back to ancient Greece. This is according to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.

Well all I have to say is I hope there are a bunch of those dudes on patrol the next time Jaws comes after me. Unlike the leathery Blue Dog I am a nice sweet meat. It sort of unnerves me to dwell on the fact that we are not at the top of the food chain.