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Chic
Chat: Assault by a kneeboarder! By Holly Beck El Porto is a quiet little beach town at the northern end of Manhattan Beach, CA. Cozy houses line narrow alleys made narrower by SUVs trying to squeeze into small driveways. My boyfriend, John, lives on Shell St. and consequently, I spend almost every Saturday in this quiet environment where most people know eachother’s names. The surf spot, El Porto, however is anything but quiet! It is arguably the best beach break north of Huntington Beach and south of Ventura, easily accessible by a variety of freeways, complete with ample metered parking. Consequently, it is impossibly crowded. On a typical Saturday, you could easily run into notable South Bay professional surfers such as Pauline Menczer, pro longboarders Tyler Hatzikian and Ted Robinson, and even Christian Fletcher. Besides pros, you will definitely see girls on bodyboards, guys in neon wetsuits complete with webbed, paddling gloves, totally clueless beginners, and everyone else in between. Not many waves go by unridden, and most contain at least two or three surfers, who on Saturdays, tyipically end up falling into each other and getting tangled up in a web of boards and leashes. The battle for waves can get very aggressive! One particular Saturday, I was the victim of a senseless act of aggression, which serves to illustrate an example of the ferocity of a crowd faced with limited resources. |
| It was a sunny
glassy morning. The surf was a fun 2-3ft, but incredibly inconsistent. The
crowd was unusually thick. John and I paddled out, along with his neighbor
"Votti", around 9am. We took our places in the lineup, nodding
"hello"s to the other locals. It was even more crowded that it
looked from the beach, with at least five people paddling furiously for
each wave. The policy of "snake or be snaked" was in effect, but
I was doing my best to be patient and wait my turn. Finally, I was frustrated. A set came in and I was in the perfect spot to catch the corner of the left. I turned around and started paddling for it. Looking to my right, I saw a pack of people paddling also, but it looked like they were all too deep. By that point, I didn’t care either way, so I took off. I didn’t hear anyone behind me, so I bottom-turned and hit the lip. Just as I was coming back down from my turn, an older man on a kneeboard came from behind me, hit the lip above me, and as I straightened out to give him room to land, he passed in front of me. It was team-surfing at its finest and I was stoked! I smiled at him and said, "that was awesome!" He must have misunderstood me. I was still standing in the shorebreak as he paddled by and angrily asked, "what did you say?" Realizing that he didn’t share in my excitement, I murmured, "never mind", got back on my board, and started paddling back out to the lineup. To my complete surprise, that wasn’t the end of it. He said something like, "just because you are a girl doesn’t mean you can take all the waves!" Before I had a chance to defend myself, he splashed me in the face! I was in a state of utter shock at this point. If I said anything in response, I don’t remember what it was, because in the next second he took a few paddling strokes in my direction and reached out and gave me a hard shove in the shoulder. Total disbelief rendered my brain useless. I may have yelled something back at him, to the effect that he must have realized what he had done, and started paddling away. I looked around frantically to see if any of my friends had witnessed the incident. No one else seemed to have noticed. I saw Votti first and told him what happened. He started paddling off after the kneeboarder to confront him. In the following few minutes, the kneeboarder was surrounded by John, Votti, and a bunch of other surfers. They berated him for hitting a girl in the water and threatened to break out his fins if he didn’t get out of the water. Reluctantly, he paddled in without even giving an apology. Lessons
learned: |
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