Underneath It All

Cyrus Sutton Surfing on a Wood and EPS Hess Surfboards Gun from www.KORDUROY.tv on Vimeo.

I been getting a lot of shit from my buddies up in NorCal over the last year.  "Dude, you are so fucking SoCal"  or "Bro, you got soft" or my favorite one when they refer to anything going on in SoCal that they disagree on, "Well, YOUR people...".  It was funny at first, but annoying since.

I won't lie, if I go back home to The Bay and look out at Mother O.B. from the dunes or standing there in front of 3 mile in Santa Cruz and it's overcast, that cold north wind is blowing and the water is just as murky as the sky, I get second thoughts about paddling out.  I have gotten use to surfing fun reefs and points where one wave can easily hand you a ride for 60 seconds plus. I won't lie that I enjoy looking down in the clear water of Scripp's and Black's and seeing the beautiful rolling sand beneath my board. But that doesn't mean that I won't paddle out in 58 degree and below water when it's pumping surf.  But if it looks like we're going to jump in to just jump in when it's ankle biting or victory at sea, I'll probably just watch it from the shore and snap some pics ;)

The fact is, I am a Northern Californian by blood.  My family is so engrained in NorCal to the fact that I saw my grandfather's picture, the same picture that hung in my father's home, in a history book in college, my grandfather at a "ticket" dance in the Valley with all his "Compadres".  And don't get me wrong, I make no apologies for my love of San Diego either.  I'm just a Californian by birth, straight up came to this earth in a town called Berkeley where I also attended and graduated college from 22 years later.  And the word "hella" will always be part of my vocabulary.  

Watching the video above gave me goose bumps.  Watching Cyrus getting spitted out of barrels at Mother O.B. over and over again was pretty awesome.  But it was the little things in the video that made me nostalgic like crossing the Great Highway at the end of of the first dune (Judah), the two story homes in the Sunset where neighbors literally share walls.  To the memory of seeing it going off from higher up the hill, and the MUNI cables above the San Francisco streets.

When I first moved to San Diego, I would refer to myself and my wife as "transplants from the Bay Area".  I continued this for a few months until I was corrected by one of the older guys I surf with at my home break.  "Your not a transplant if your a original Californian".  And I'm glad his wisdom rubbed off on me.  SoCal or Norcal, underneath it all, we are all Californians.