March Sandsness
by Paul Costales

Photos in todays column are from sunset at Sands on Tuesday March 3rd. The swell had slowly been rising over the last 24 hours after a dismal weekend. In addition to our few grainy surf photos, we thought we'd touch on the winter so far.

In a Santa Barbara winter devoid of any truly "drop everything" swells, there has been a bunch of decent utility class swells. Just as the National Weather Service hasn't quite been able to get a handle on predicting our rain, the surf forecast sites haven't quite nailed some of our more fun days. Early in the winter we were getting passed over by super steeply angled swells giving down south decent waves and Santa Barbara and Goleta nada. Then some super west and close range swells were predicted which came in, but not to expectations.

Besides the fun swell that showed up the weekend of the Rincon Classic, the weekend of February 7th was one of the better swells of the season. Local surfers have had a few Saturdays of surf in a row from the Classic to the 7th actually.

So far the favorite surf day of ours this winter was on Friday, February 20th. The days before that were small and tiresome, trying to make something out of not much, which should seemingly be reserved for the summer months. A dawn patrol for Sands was planned, with low expectations of getting much out there. We figured we'd be drinking coffee by 7:30 at Java Jones after getting a big bagel in the wave department. After suiting up and jogging down the beach, the feet started to freeze. Besides this frozen foot day, it has been a rather warm winter in the water, not requiring booties unless surfing north of Point Conception or a rocky low tide point break. Feet or any other body temperatures were quickly forgotten, as we soon saw what appeared to be Deveraux on fire. It was tough to tell, because no one was surfing it. When we trotted up to the point it looked surfable on our shortboards, but why was no one on it yet at 6:33am? Was it backing off more then we could see? Smaller than it looked? We headed out anyway, thinking we'd soon learn the error of our ways and be paddling over to Sands. Not so.

What followed for the next 2 hours was one of the funnest sessions of the winter. Surfing with one buddy for a good half hour before a few local faces came out to join us. Bobby Morris paddled out on his yellow shred stick and put on a clinic of vertical surfing. Kevin Lafferty was out on his hand shaped Agave fish. There were plenty of waves to go around as the wave treadmill pumped out set after set. Exhausted and exhilarated, walking back on the beach, from this perspective its been a great winter.

Saturday we had a duplicate session at Deveraux, with a bunch more crowd on it, and Callie Bowdish has some great photos from that session.

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