Surf Trip to Oregon

I've already sent this link out to a few people, but I tend to miss addresses often.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimmygordon/sets/72157606460499995/show/with/2721227934/


Here are some pictures Michi took from this past week, where my old friends from High School - Dax, Dirk, Roosey - and Michi and myself, rented a beach house in Pacific City, Oregon.

We mostly just spent the time either surfing or lounging. I'd never been to Oregon before, and Michi and I wanted to check the state out, and the city of Portland specifically.

Most of the surf pictures are from Kiwanda Shores in Pacific City, OR.



Which can be found here:


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The last set of surf pictures are taken at 'The Boy Scout Camp'. I don't know if this is a secret spot or what...



It can be found here:


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Oregon is essentially a secret spot on it's own from what I can tell. Whenever I told people here in LA that I was going to take a surf trip to Oregon, the response was unanimously "Oregon???". With the exception of my friend Evan who said it would be huge, windy, cold and sharky (he wasn't totally correct, but I could see how it could get that way), no one seemed to know that Oregon is surfable. You can chalk that up to either typical Angelino ignorance of any geographic location that isn't, LA, SF, NYC or Vegas, or the fact that Oregon is not typically featured as a hot surf spot ever. I imagine Oregonians would like to keep it that way - sorry for this blog dudes.

The surf was uncrowded, and the surfers I encountered were not aggro like you'd find in Ocean Beach, San Diego. I'd heard they hate CA surfers, but I didn't speak with any of them. As far as I'm concerned, surfers hate other surfers in general. All that brotherly love talk is just that, talk. You love your surfing friends, but any douchebag that paddles over to the peak you were alone on a few minutes ago, is the enemy. The average surfer skill in OR reminded me of what you'd see in LA at El Porto, but not on the level of Orange County or San Diego, so I felt pretty comfy as my surfing skills have rusted tremendously since I've left San Diego. The water was freezing cold. It was as cold as it gets during a SoCal Winter. The first day, I got ice cream headaches so bad from the water, that I thought I was going to puke. The days after that, I just timed my paddle out to the set intervals, in order to avoid duck diving. The wind was pretty intense one day, enough to blow us down South, but it never seemed to destroy the wave shape. The waves were thigh to shoulder high pretty consistently over the trip. Despite any wind present, the waves always seemed to keep their shape, until the last day where it had rained over night. The ocean all up and down the coast was very stormy and messy.

The best part of the trip was reuniting with Dax, Dirk and Roosey.



Roosey and I live in the same city, and have been around each other consistently for the last 23 years. So it wasn't a reunion so much as another trip out of town for us. However, Dirk and I only see each other once every few years, and I haven't seen Dax in somewhere around 15 years. It's great to reunite with people and see how they've changed, yet how core elements of their personalities still remain. I'm mostly happy to see how many of my friends have done very well for themselves after leaving High School: Dirk has a permanent exhibition at The Smithsonian and continues to work as a fine artist, Dax is a product pipeline manager for Dakine, Roosey has a sweet job at Yahoo!. I especially love it because all of us were either held back, or failed one grade in the public school system in Huntsville, AL. Clearly we are not the retards our teachers thought we were. At one point on the trip, we all copped to having the same thoughts of "Would you ever have thought, 20 years ago, that we'd all be together, surfing off the coast of Oregon??"



My only regret is that I was so tired from the surf sessions, that Michi and I didn't get a chance to go looking for Bigfoot. Next time Sasquatch....next time.