I was born in San Francisco. One day after a high school swim meet at Fleishacker Pool (out at Ocean Beach) a guy named Jim Fisher* got me to swim out into the surf with him. I was stunned. The blue (cold) water, the waves, it was sunny afternoon, it was paradise. That clinched my attachment to this powerful body of water. I’m so in love with the Pacific Ocean.
I’ve travelled the coast from Vancouver Island down to the tip of Baja California, and found a similar spirit, brothers and sisters of the beach (you know who you are) everywhere along this coastal waterway. We share a lot. There’s a theory that the coast was settled by Indians in canoes. Could be. After all, the First Nations people speared whales from canoes made out of hollowed-out cedar trees.
*A powerful swimmer, Jim went to Hawaii in the ’50s and rode some of the biggest waves ever at Makaha.
