The First Miki Dora Shove at my Homebreak
Posted Saturday, January 28th, 2012 at 11:52 pm by admin
It finally happened: the Miki Dora shove, at my local, mellow-vibe break.
Three, sometimes four people taking off on the same wave, something I’ve never seen here. It’s starting to get uncomfortably crowded. Seems like it happened almost overnight, just two years ago. Although the alpha-male competitiveness of several surfers paddling for the same wave isn’t something I’m used to at my worldclass-point-break spillover spot, up until this incident, everybody had been respectful in kicking off the wave if they didn’t have inside position on the takeoff.
Thankfully, the first hour of my session was uncrowded as I was in the water early on this epic offshore, Saturday, Santa Ana conditions, summer-in-January kind of day. A half-hour later, a horde of partiers from the evening before paddle out, partaking in this ever-increasingly fashion trend called surfing.
A 20-something catches the inside on a shoulder-high, bowl section. On the shoulder a mere 5 yards away is a bald man in his 50s. The younger surfer hoots to make his presence known, ready to break loose on a 100-yard ride all the way past the abandoned staircase. The older surfer, who’d you have to assume was deaf–or an ******* (ad Lib your own obscenity here) cuts back towards the inside. The younger surfer cries out in disbelief, “Dude!”
Older surfer makes no attempt to cut back away. Younger one extends arm out to execute the Miki Dora stiffarm. Younger surfer whiffs, failing to knock off older surfer. All this is happening in slow motion. I can’t believe what I’m seeing. The contagion has spread from the ridiculously crowded point break 300 yards away to my beloved, pristine, magic break.
Younger surfer falls into the soup seconds after trying to knock older surfer off. Older surfer gets a ride all the way to shore. Did he have prescience knowing that this would be an epic ride? No amount of ESP should entitle anybody to drop in on someone that egregiously.
I can’t see what happened between the two. Older surfer didn’t paddle back out and I lost track of younger surfer as I quickly had to snap myself back to my needs: catching a wave; with the inconsistent peak more crowded, it’s been several minutes since my last quality wave.
‘Dismiss now any negative energy you just witnessed. You can’t do anything about your break getting so crowded. Do the best you can and enjoy the experience,’ my Godhead tells me. ‘Be in charge of your own energy bubble. Don’t let anybody or anything burst it,’ says my intuition (closely related to my Godhead; they’re like first cousins).
So now what? I’m concerned that this first Miki Dora shove I’ve witnessed here, a west-facing soft reef break I’ve been surfing for 10 years now, is a portend of things to come. In that case, I ‘put it out to the universe’, vowing to continue my path of never ‘working for the man’; I schedule work when I want. After all, being stoked Monday through Friday isn’t so bad now, is it?
Tags: crowded surf, Miki Dora, Miki Dora shove
