Discovery

Hugging the world.

Before I got hooked on surfing, traveling was my hook.  I loved going to different areas other than mine.  I loved being part of a new culture, not understanding a language, enjoying the differences, the food, and the different ways of saying good morning and good night.  I enjoyed the days when I was simply lost, walking down a street that made no sense, settling into a cafe and strangely bumping into a person that I would eventually know for the next 10 years. 

For me, traveling wasn't all about going to countries across the world.  It could be going to places like Sonora or heading north to Eureka or south to Watsonville.  Drinking coffee and having breakfast at a mom and pop restaurant where people wear unfashionable trucker hats with red, thick flannels with rugged, cow hide, sharp tip boots, with so much food on my plate that the left overs were my lunch and dinner.  As long as I felt strange and out of place, I was O.K. with it.  I still enjoy traveling and continue to do it a lot, but now it's more about fitting surfing into my itinerary, which adds an extra depth to the over all experience. 

Like travelers, surfers share one very extreme quality, we are adventurers.  Part of the experience that I love about surfing is the "search".  The search for a new wave, an uncrowded break, chasing a swell or just looking for a stretch of beach that can lend some peace.  There are days when my search can go from Bolinas all the way down to Moss Landing.  I shit you not.  And I think most of us have done that sort of drive, probably not as extreme as I have, but somewhere in between.  I believe surfers are travelers in a sense, and probably in most cases are, as both communities "search", and in our case, for waves. 

Last year, around this time, I completed my first real "search".  Not knowing anything or having a plan, I packed my car with my boards and gear, threw a weeks worth of clothes and headed south to San Diego. I had no idea what I was doing other then surfing from the south end of California and all the way back up to San Francisco.  There were so many ways a trip like this could have went wrong, but some how in a strange way, it went entirely right.

On the way back up the California Coast, I surfed beaches in La Jolla, Trestles for the very first time, bumped into Rincon on a lucky epic day, Carpenteria, C Street in Ventura, Santa Barbra, Pismo, Santa Cruz and finally ending at Ocean Beach.  It was an epic trip where my back seat was my bed about sixty percent of the time, found myself befriending some great shapers in Carpenteria, slept on a couch with a dog named "Rippa", and connected with people that I still talk to today.  I found a lot of rough footage a few weeks ago and decided to make another silly video to first, share with you all, and second, remind myself that the "search" is always there.


Discovery from Kookingitup on Vimeo.

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