What Surfing and Writing Have in Common

Post surf session, I’m sitting at my “Shut Up and Write” Meetup group deciding on what to write today. I always have a ton of academic writing going on for work purposes, but I’ve decided to avoid it all today and pivot. Today is a turning point in my life. A moment in life when I woke up and asked myself “What do I really want for the next few years of my life?” So naturally, I gulped down my coffee as I started packing up my car to drive down the Ventura highway for dawn patrol duty. Someone has to represent the early-morning ladies out in the surf today! It might as well be me!

Most of my surfer girlfriends are out of town or monopolized by family this Thanksgiving weekend. It’s Saturday, and I’m getting FODO (yes, a fear of drying out). I have to get some clarity today, so of course, surfing is what I need. The sunrise over the Santa Barbara mountains on my drive down the coast was stunning. I guiltily picked up my phone and snapped a photo of the glimmering pink and orange sky. These are the early sunrise drives that I love most. It’s rare moments like this when life seems to make sense—when the beauty of nature overcomes you. That often happens when I’m surfing, and that’s also why I keep paying so much of my monthly income on rent!

“The coast heals,” Margie in my writing crew reminded our group today. We were having some moments of mutual respect for our simple Santa Barbara lives. Many of us can relate to being house-poor (for most of us rent-poor) but not looking to move or get a higher-paying job. The money is lost on the souls of those of us who are true coastal dwellers. We need vitamin sea, or we will dry out. The ocean water runs in our veins. Our conversation reminded me of something I had recently read in Paul Theroux’s “Kingdom By the Sea” about the British chilling out in tiny little seaside shanties for the day. Theroux witnessed these little sea shacks back in the 1980s when people were often still traveling to the seaside to bathe in the healing saltwater as a form of medical care. I Googled them today, and couldn’t believe that Brits are still so obsessed with tiny little beachside sheds! Could a coastal Californian ever imagine a little hillside of rainbow-colored sea shacks filled with people lounging back in front of C-street in Ventura? What a sight that would be!

This is fun, writing about surfing and avoiding my work today! I’m behind from traveling to an academic writing conference a week ago in Arizona. I have an academic journal review I didn’t submit on time. Yeah, it’s pretty bad to miss a deadline for one of those, but hey it’s Thanksgiving week! The editors will be grateful I eventually got to it by Sunday right? I have a deadline for my next Rad Scholars co-authored piece with my three women academic friends I’ve published with since COVID. I’m also behind on entering paper grades for my college students for papers I handed back last week. But just like having a good flow or being in the zone when writing, when the swell is good you gotta get out there and enjoy it!

Anyways, back to how I started writing about surfing. As I gobbled down my post-surf Caprese bagel before the start of the writing meetup, my surf friend K texted. The message came in my women’s surf group chat and it read:

“Yesterday, a whole pod of dolphins swam around me and I just about died of happiness!”

This is exactly why I surf. And this too is what made me want to start writing about surfing. I’ve written a lot. I had an old travel blog, goneseoulsearching.com in the 2010s that took off. It wasn’t that big of a deal, but it did reach over a million views within a few years—so that’s pretty cool. Ever since I left my expat life behind as an English professor teaching academic writing and English language courses, I abandoned my blog writing. I got sucked back into academia and my dissertation and scholarly writing has taken most of my time. The text in my women’s surf group chat got me thinking about how fun it is when we are all writing back and forth and sharing video footage, surf stats, and social invites. Writing about surfing via these different modalities all within the surf group chat is so damn fun! I have a blast keeping up with the conversations going on, and the community spirit is real. The writing going on in the chat starts to pump everyone up, and holds many of us in the group accountable for showing up to our early morning surf meet-ups! I know once I text in the group, "see ya'll manana," I usually don’t hit my 5:30 am snooze button the next morning!

For a brief period of time in life I stopped surfing for the first time ever. I was consumed by my academic career. Yet, the biggest deterrent for me was the icy central California water. Even in the summer, it was shocking for my San Diego blood. I couldn’t wrap my mind around getting in 50-degree water.

But a FODO eventually won out. And I took my COVID economic impact check (thanks Trump for my wetsuit!) straight to the Ventura surf shop and bought a 5/4mm wetsuit with a hood. I started teaching some friends free surf lessons here and there all up and down the coast between San Diego, L.A., and Santa Barbara. One of my wonderful friends noticed my white, frozen toes and we headed over to a local surf shop and bought me my first O'neill surf booties as a thank-you present.

Ever since then, I’ve been back in the water. As cold as the Central Coast gets, it no longer phases my South Mission Beach blood. I’m like a happy sea lion, floating around, warm as can be.

I announced my plan this morning to write about surfing at my writing meet-up, and it caught some of the group by surprise. It was not my usual writing update, and everyone got excited and shared more commentary than usual. I hope that’s what this blog will continue to feel like for me and others each time we return to it—a place of excitement where writing and reading about the surf community is a welcome enjoyment for those of us water enthusiasts during our dry days stuck on land.

*The image in this post was created by the author with AI