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	21 Feet, 17 Seconds (7-30-02) A couple of winters ago, I was in the zone. My friend Craig Shuman had a boat and I was on the VIP list for trips to the Hollister Ranch. Or, you could say he was a bad influence, dragging me out of lab when I should be making grams and grams of little powders, and coercing me into perfect waves. Who knows what groundbreaking discoveries worthy of high honor went undiscovered due to my glaring lack of a Protestant work ethic? Who knows how far inland the coast of Santa Barbara would be pushed if the Channel Islands would just get the hell out of the way each summer? Or who knows how many hot chicks wanted to learn how to bodyboard but had some lame surfer boyfriend once that forbid the practice, thus denying the line-up a boost in aesthetic appeal? Can't we all just get along? So one day a few winters ago, before Craig landed a position as Reef Check coral expert on the Indies Trader, the swell was... UP. Way up. The Point Conception buoy was having its chain stretched by brutal ocean swells. The reading was 21 feet, 17 seconds. Now I am not going to reveal all the details of how to predict when the Ranch will be breaking, but we will all agree that if this swell wasn't hitting we might as well stop trying and go home. The place is not magic. There are many times when it is better at Sands than at Big Drakes. Nonetheless, today was a 'no-brainer'. Despite the fact that the wind was cranking out of the northwest, we rallied the gear and headed out at about 2 or 3 for a quick sesh. My main hesitation was that we would have to beach launch because the crane was busted, as usual. The beach launch can be trivial or traumatic. Gaviota is in the wave shadow, of the wave magnet spots a few miles up so it is usually much smaller. Today, since the spots further up were huge...do the math. We pull up and this 8' wave explodes, right where we need to go out. Some other guys are already sizing it up. They ask to borrow our fantasy '2nd anchor'. We don't have one. We team up with the other guys and all push their boat out through a 2 second lull and swim back. He can't get his engine started. I yell, "Use your oars!!". No oars. We get our boat out without incident and blaze up to Razors after the standard high-5's, following the cheating of death. We get Razors in view and it is HUGE. Brian remarks that it looks 'mushy', which, despite the urge to slap him, does look a little mushy. This we all know is the Razors optical illusion, like the Sirens leading sailors into the shoals. Craig and I am not so easily fooled by their song. We park in the middle of the ocean and start paddling. The set waves are nearly triple overhead and perfect shape. The wind is blowing at a crisp 20kts side offshore making the spray off the top of the waves stream upwards into the sky. Hardly anyone is out. We each get about 4 or 5 waves. Each one is over 100 m long, balls out, down the line speed. I come off the top on the inside and a gust of wind nearly peels my squid lid off. As with most of the sessions at Razors, it is exciting but not fun. The sun is getting low so I head back to the boat. The chop is nearly 1' high from the offshore wind. The scariest part of the whole trip was sitting in the little boat with 8' swells going underneath in that deep water. Sure, we could have fought it out with a bunch of kooks at El Cap for some 'fun' shoulder high waves. Or I could have even stayed a work! The idiots in the SS Disaster ended up tying their boat to the kelp (at least they had rope) and surfed Rights and Lefts. We clearly survived the trip back and the beach landing, boards and bodies intact, ready to give it a go, the next time the buoys read 21 feet, 17 seconds. more stories >>