Surfing in Interesting Climes: Cold
Winter surf gallery
W inter Gallery: '00-01 Surf Picture Journal
Winter
Surf
Skate
History
Home
Winter Gallery: '00-01 Surf Picture Journal
An unusually cold winter
Due to a weather cycle influenced by the La Nina year, the ocean in the North East Atlantic never got too warm in the summer of '00. There wasn't much hurricane surf to speak of. The water was cooling off fast in October.
In late September there was already a cold nor'easter type storm that brought bigger waves than most of the hurricanes of the late summer.
Head high surf from early nor'easter, September 2000.
September 26 didn't seem to be a swell that came from a tropical storm, it was a strong low pressure system that passed to the south of us; in other words some locally generated storm surf, but the type we usually get only from nor'easters in winter. I went in the late afternoon, right as the hard rain and wind passed. I got there and the weather was horrible and there were already a bunch of guys out. Although it was September and the water was in the high sixties, full wetsuits were on already.
I guess I knew it was going to be an early winter, but I had no idea it would turn out to be the longest in memory.
Rockaway Beach Gets Dredged
After Christmas it got really cold. Still, I wanted to get the first surf session of the new millenium, if you start counting at 01. I headed out to the Rockaways on January 8, '01.
As in the past year, I stuck to my tradition of taking shots from the train as it passed close to the water over Jamaica Bay. There were plenty of signs of cold. Here a pattern of ice floes forms near the trestle.
I wasn't surprised to find the beach covered with snow, but I didn't expect it to be covered with pipes. Dredging was well underway. Huge rusted pipes were lain in a line down the beach.
The pipe was coughing sand into the shorebreak and a sand pile was forming a ways down from the jetty. Flocks of birds were feasting on the upturned shelled life.
The beach wasn't too inviting, and neither was the surf. The whole point of winter surfing is to get uncrowded, unspoiled conditions on a nice beach with no footprints. I decided to bag the idea of surfing and go home.
I took a last look down the boardwalk and headed off back to the train.
I found someone to take a picture of the off season boardwalk and beach.
The Dredging Completed, February '01
When I came back next in February, things were very different. The dredging was over. The beach was uniformly wide from the jetty all the way down into the Beach 100s. The surf will be greatly affected, I thought.
The old pilings that mark the breaks at the usual spot were completely buried. The inside section is gone. It had been an eroded jetty pointbreak, but they've really made it a beachbreak now.
At least I got to see the winter footprintless beach.
Montauk, February '01
I got one day of surfing in mid February in Montauk. Then it got really, really windy. The windchill was some of the worst I've seen, going below zero at night. The sights of the off season, the clear sky with no hotel lights, and the purple sand of the beach made up for any discomfort I might have had.
Purple sand among the rocks past Ditch jetty.
Ditch Plains tries to organize itself in stiff quarter offshore breezes.
