“I’ve pulled dead guys out of the water here,” Richard says. Richard loans me a board, some booties, and warns about the currents and how hard the paddle out to the lineup is. “Best sand bars!” We meet and drive a minute or two further down the coast to Sloat (the breaks are named for the adjoining streets). “Meet me at Noriega and Great Highway, on the inside,” he texts me. Later, I meet up with an old high school buddy who has been living and surfing here for the past twenty years. It’s in the head high range and A-frame peaks span up and down the long stretch of beach. The waves are not as huge as the stories might have you expecting, though. “I’ve pulled dead guys out of the water here,” my buddy Richard says. It split my wetsuit, I thought that was all, though.” “Stitches? Damnit,” he says, more annoyed about the inconvenience than the injury. “It’s pretty bad,” I tell him, “probably needs stitches.” “Nah, did it myself, went over the falls and landed on a skeg,” he says. He seems unperturbed, though, as if he doesn’t notice. Surfing OB for the first time myself, the first thing I notice as I pull into the parking lot-apart from the cranking surf-is that a surfer de-suiting two cars away from me has a six inch gash on his back.

I came close to drowning at Noriega, got washed into the big rock at Kelly’s, got a black eye at Sloat when my board snapped back and hit me square in the face, almost drowned again in the heavy undertow at Montara.” “Sometimes, especially on empty, unruly days at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, my inelegant yet committed surfing could elicit a nod of approval from salty locals. William Finnegan devoted a few beautiful chapters to the place in his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. Ocean Beach, San Francisco, February 2017.

William finnegan surfing