Jetty. Shoulder-high. Still sorta junky from a week’s worth of wind. Sun shining. People looking, but only MD and I paddled out. “Did you see the whale?” someone hollered as we walked toward the water.

No, but then we did. Also, sea lions, seals, porpoises, birds… very food-chainy, as MD put it. But the bait ball floated closer to Bunkers than the Jetty proper, so I pushed all shark thoughts out of my head and just focused on catching waves in the sunshine.

Catching them was easy; what I did once on a wave wasn’t much. I fell a few times, wobbled a few times, pulled off exactly zero graceful moves – and I didn’t care at all. The day only became more beautiful as the wind tapered off and the ocean slowly glassed off and the line-up of trucks along the sand thickened. Yes, there’s something very drive-in movie at the Jetty – and when you’re the main feature, you want to entertain with some skill, not just by providing comedic moments (I would be the Chevy Chase of the jetty, I guess!), but the pleasure of being in the ocean superceded all self-consciousness. For a moment.