"The magical wave elves shovel heaps of barrel-dust like frosty cedar chips upon the birthday cake known as Long Island, and they are called by their spritely house name Joaquin the Destroyer of Productivity, and wear robes of brown."

It's true. It happened. There have been waves for seemingly weeks. I wasn't here for all of it, but I was here for enough to remember how to have fun. I didn't see anyone break a board, but I did see some wonderful moments of balance and drive.

The thing is, while the waves were good, they weren't really, you know, absolutely mind blowingly incredible. I mean, they were good, right? But more in this kind of terribly consistent at a size and pace that isn't quite the norm here. The regularity of lines just dazzled.

And I didn't ride a real surfboard the whole time, still experimenting with the overly floaty, adjustable rockered, three inch railed nine foot soft-toboggan device. And it worked, more or less (to my amusement, anyhow). I can't say what I was doing was beautiful, more like just this side of quasi-suicidally functional. But there is some sense of style in that for me. Style in the sense really that style is the ginger-topped step child of "why the fuck not." Or maybe it's the other way around. And maybe the kid is raven haired. She looked Irish whatever she had under her bonnet and her kisses were sweeter than wine. Or maybe it wasn't a she after all? Sweeter than kefir? Who can tell these days. Who cares? Right, that's the point. Fact is I surfed some "real" waves for the first time in months (since our trip to Oz, really) and I couldn't be better off.

A couple links to photo spreads...

NYSEA
Surfline
Intertia
Whalebone
Red Bull

And a couple different ways to pair New York waves with music: