THE TOTAL GEEKS GUIDE TO GOING TO THE BEACH

6-13-07
By Corky Carroll

It is that time of year when zillions of inland people who may only go to the beach a only a few times out of the year suddenly realize that summer is here and decide to drag their alabaster white bodies into a bathing suit and head on down for a day on the sand.  Most of the time taking the rest of the porcelain like bodied family members with them. 

If you are in this group this column is for you.  It is my annual advice to non-beach people on the safe way to enjoy the beach.   Listen to me very carefully and obey my every suggestion.  I don't know much about most things but this stuff I am an expert on, trust me.

SUNBLOCK is your friend.  Do not wait until you get to the beach to put it on.  Use the strongest stuff you can find and start out by putting it on in the morning when you first get up.  Then put some more on before you leave for the beach.  Then put some more on when you get there.  If you go in the water put some more on as soon as you get out of the water.  Sunblock will NOT keep you from getting tan, but it will help you to not get burned.   Most no nothings wait until after they get to the beach and lay out a while before putting it on, wrongfully thinking that they will “get a little color” before protecting themselves.  By then it is too late and they can't understand why they wind up looking like a boiled lobster when they get home at night. 

HAT AND SUNGLASSES.   You have to protect your eyes from both the glare off of the ocean and also the zillions of tiny reflections off of the sand.  Sand is like snow, it reflects the suns rays.  Without even realizing it you can burn your eyeballs.  Doing this too much results in a nasty growth on your eyes that can blind you if left unattended.  I know all about this, I did it and had the growths and have had some very memorable, in the worst way, surgeries to take care of that and each one left me with less vision that I started out with.  Get really good sunglasses and use them.  Also a good hat helps out with that too.  

FOOT PROTECTION.  A pair of flaps is great for the beach.  What you forget about when you head down to the beach in the morning is that as the day heats up so does the sand and even more so the black parking lot where you left your car.   You can fry your feet like fish without even thinking about it.  This happens all the time.

If you are too lazy to take care of yourself in these matters at least do your best to protect you children.  They are more fragile than you are.  One year we had a mother drop off her ten year old son at our surf school at Bolsa Chica State Park.  She left him at 9 A.M. and was coming back at 3:30 P.M. to pick him up.  She left him with only a pair of surf trunks on.  No sunscreen, hat, glasses, shirt, food or water.  Nothing.  We could not understand what this woman was thinking and we called her to tell her that her son would be burnt to a crisp and starving by the time she came back.   We had given out a list of things to bring to the beach but she had not bothered to look at it.  She just thought she would dump him off and that would be ok.  She had no clue.  We got sunblock on him and a hat while he was out of the water and one of our teachers shared his lunch with him that day.  When she got there to pick him up we gave her the list of things he would need one more time and told her that he would not be allowed to come back to surf school without them.   It was not that she didn't care about her boy; she just really did not know anything about going to the beach.  

Think about it.  You have to protect yourself from the sun, the wind and the heat.   You WILL burn if you don't protect yourself.   Your eyes will hurt if you look into the sun all day without protection.  Besides a good dark pair of sunglasses lets you be stealth when checking out all the hot babes down there.  And, lastly, do not let your kids have sand fights.   This is the best way to get their eyeballs scratched.  Not a good thing at all.

Most of this stuff would seem to be common sense, but for some reason it isn't.  Trust me on this folks.  Sunburns and scratched eyes and fried feet are no fun.  Be smart and safe.

 

SURF TRAFFIC SCHOOL

The Wave 6-13-07
By Corky Carroll

This morning I was out surfing and witnessed a collision between a guy coming down a wave and another guy who was paddling out.  It was a pretty bad crash and the guy paddling out got three huge dings in his board from having the guy riding the wave run him over.  He was pretty angry, to put it mildly. 

What happened was a guy took off on this nice left-hand peeler and just as he dropped in another dude took off right in front of him.  Your typical Southern California day.  The guy in the back pulled up and started racing down the line pushing the guy in front of him.  He was trying to get the guy to pull out but the guy in front wouldn't do it.  It became sort of a race with the guy in the front going as fast as he could to not get run down by the guy in the back who was racing as fast as he could to over take the guy in the front.  Meanwhile there is this other dude paddling out and he is more or less right in the path of the two oncoming riders.  He can either get in the way of the guy in the front or the guy in the back, but either way….. he was in the way.  And there was nothing he could do about it, he was stuck.  So he sat up on his board and started waving his arms so both riders could see that he was stuck there and they could avoid him.  But neither of the two riders was giving ground and the guy in the front just basically ran right over the guy paddling out.  Cold turkey.  Wam bam slice the ham.  

The result was one of your all time great screaming fits and harsh words being exchanged and a period of good solid entertainment for everyone else who happened to be in the area looking on.   One guy sitting next to me mentioned that they should have traffic school for surfers.  

Wow, I am thinking this is a great idea. Surf school for etiquette and right of way, etc..   Of course the whole thing is a bit grey…. But still a class in “basic” rules of the water would be a good thing. 

That is when my memory banks kicked in and that one little flickering cell that still works kicked out the memory of a long, long, long time ago when they first started the no surfing after 11 A.M. during the summer rule at the Huntington Beach Pier.  These days they just kick you out of the water on the south side, but in the 60's they kicked you out on both sides.  

It was a hot summer day and right at 11 o'clock they called for all surfers to head to the beach.  This was never an easy deal for the lifeguards.  Surfers did NOT want to head to the beach and most did not rush right in either.  One such dude, on this day, was a great local surfer named Lee Beltz.  Lee was surfing on the north side and sort of kept going back for one last wave.   He was on about his eighth or ninth “last wave” when the lifeguard jeep pulled up next to the pier to write Lee up when he finally came in.  By the time he was really on his last wave there were a lot of swimmers already in the water in what was the surfing area but was now the swimming area.   Lee gets this great wave and walks to the nose and hangs ten all the way across the face of the inside section next to the pier.  In doing so he barely missed many unsuspecting swimmers. 

When he got to the beach the lifeguard pulled him aside and wrote him a ticket.  This was probably the most classic ticket in the history of tickets.   It read “Dangerously hanging ten with swimmers in the way thirty minutes past surfing curfew.”  

How cool is that?  A ticket for “Dangerously hanging ten.”  Now, could he have gone to surf traffic school to keep this off of his record?