NO-NAME NUGGETS With Colin Long Forgotten And All Eyes On Soon-To-Be Danielle, Off-Season Northeast Surprises And Satisfies By Nick McGregor
If an unnamed swell shows up in the middle of hurricane season, with thousands of surfers amping to ride it, should we still call it “fun”?
I know, stupid question… any time chest- to head-high surf turns up unexpectedly in the middle of August, non-discriminating East Coast surfers are gonna milk every drop, whether they know what to call it or not. Non-tropical surface low? Whatever. Out-of-season frontal trough? Sounds good. Freak prelude to the juicy mega-swell forecasted for next weekend? Killer.
See, however you slice it, dice it, or butter it up, waves are waves during the summer — we don’t turn our noses up at light onshore winds or “walled up” beachbreaks, much like some of our surfing compatriots. And everyone knows only science geeks and weather gurus spend time trying to calculate a swell’s exact source (not to discount those geeks and gurus’ efforts to keep us all perpetually stoked). But after a string of dismal months on the homefront, East Coasters are still hesitant to take this summer’s smorgasbord of fun little swells for granted. No questions asked, no explanation necessary. Just paddle out. Catch wave. Have fun. Repeat.
So we’ll keep waking up at 6:00 a.m. to get the tides, wind, and crowd factor just right — even if the waves are only topping out at an inconsistent four feet. We’ll gladly drop in to block-long closeouts, if only because it keeps those fast-twitch muscles primed and ready. We’ll greedily gobble up all the photos we can of these weird little no-name nuggets, all while keeping an obsessive watch on soon-to-be Tropical Storm Danielle, currently forecasted to barrel through Hurricane Alley and meet up with an exiting non-tropical low sometime around the evening of August 28th, producing a “wave-generating scenario that we have not seen in years leading into the last weekend of August, possibly providing a sizeable/wedgey multiple-day groundswell of near epic quality,” according to notoriously conservative The Surf Station forecaster Dean.
Not to get too exact or scientific or overexcited or anything, but like all good aquatic addicts, we just want our next fix, named, unknown, overhyped, or anything in between. Leave the details to somebody else — we’ll take care of the shredding.
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