Date: Monday 1/6/2025

Location: Dockweiler Beach – Gillis Breakwater

Greetings, hodads.  As you might have heard I’ve been away from my beloved Southland for a while.  There’s been a lot of gossip about my absence and how I went into witness protection, which is so much bullshit. Newsflash to anyone who got busted in my absence: witnesses have to testify.  And also get provided with free housing and jobs and stuff like that, and do I look like I’ve been living in comfort on the government’s largesse for the last six months? The truth of the matter is that I was in the high desert.  Needles, specifically.  Those of you with perforation problems will be disappointed that it doesn’t quite live up to its name, but I guess it was an alright place to spend a few months in a shed made out of corrugated metal doing…stuff.  And then riding shotgun in a van making a monthly trip down to Yuma to…unload said “stuff” at wholesale prices.

As you can imagine, that place is as dry as all get-out, so once I was no longer in arrears I announced my intention to go back so SoCal and get wet.  And also go surfing.  My, uh, employers weren’t too keen on me bailing and made up some bullshit about how I had to pay off some batch of chemicals that spilled, so I ended up leaving without really saying goodbye.  So do me a favor and if some bald guy with a tattoo covering half his head (he calls himself “Half Dome”) turns up asking about me, tell him last you heard I took a job as a custodian up at the Space Force base in Lompoc.

Anyways, I finally did manage to get back into the water, and it was something of a disaster.  I caught my first wave of the year – the very first wave I went after, as it happens – and then was completely useless after that and caught nothing else.  I almost wish I’d caught zero, so I could say that it was completely unrideable – it was deceptively bad, good size but breaking super heavy and everything was closed out – but no, I managed to prove that waves could be caught, so I ended up feeling even worse.  I guess I shouldn’t be kicking myself or surfing so poorly though; I should give myself a pat on the back for getting out there at all.

Today’s post-session shot was a tribute to those fine folks in Canada who sent down some planes to help fight the wildfires.  Bums me out to think about all the boards in Pacific Palisades that didn’t make it out. This one’s for you, brothers.  Marinovich out.