This is one of those times when you're trying to find some clever way of responding to all of the replies and likes and whatnots but all you can come up with is simply.....thank you.
Yesterday I was in a nostalgic mood and thinking about this past year, the legends of surfing who have passed recently, (seems a lot) plus losing two great friends last year and nearly another and I realized just how old I'm getting to be, hence my original post.
I've been out of the water way longer than I was surfing, being a late starter (age 28) and then having been born with Nail Patella Syndrome, a mutation with a number of adverse things to deal with basically curtailed my surfing to 15 years, more or less. Yes, I am a bona-fide mutant, which is why I laughingly claim to have once been Canada's greatest mutant surfer who lived at Jordan River. LOL
I am incredibly grateful for having discovered surfing when I did and for the awesome people I met afterwards because of that.
I had a pretty good if capricious wave with a few regulars but rarely a crowd (six people) BWAHAHAHAHA to play on plus I had a great job and enough money to travel a bit when I wanted to, although I never had much of a travel bug in reality.
I and a few old pals still always thank our lucky stars for what we had in the 70's and into the 80's as we often had great waves alone or maybe with one or two others.
This past season was a good one for my old spot with many good days and even some without the crowds that have developed over the years. It can be quite the zoo at times now I'm told, but I really don't recall many days with more than a dozen or so surfers out back in my day, and half of them couldn't surf very well anyway.
And as noted, I did contribute to a TSJ article featuring the Oke family and their lifestyle living at Sombrio, a beach with excellent surf about 16 miles west of JR. I wrote about the time Sombrio Steve and I were surfing the point with nobody else around and I told him to use the sauna the surf club had there, given none of them were there to protest. Normally he wouldn't have been allowed in.
The problem was that Steve was in a big "garlic prevents everything and if you do get something garlic cures it for you" phase and had been ingesting much garlic over a long period.
When he pulled his wetsuit down to warm up it made my eyes water and I suspect may have caused some paint to peel also.
But he never caught a cold or had the flu, so.........
The end of my surfing career came when I was 45, in 1990, and shut down the one man store I had at Sandspit, in the Queen Charlotte Islands, now called Haida Gwaii, and moved here to Campbell River. Having led a fairly active life with much physical activity despite my very thin physique, I eventually ended with degenerative discs between L-4 and L-5 in my lower spine and the attendant bony arthritic spurs that developed from that.
Periodically during my surfing years I would wake up in the morning with a major back spasm, lower left, and that would leave me in extreme pain and humped over like a monkey in love with a football.
No fun at all.
So, after moving here in 1990 and being 45 years old with a bad back and five hours away from a now very crowded break I decided my surfing career was over and I put my efforts into another aspect of my life I have really enjoyed, fishing and conservation.
I served seven years as Secretary-Treasurer of the Campbell River Branch of the Steelhead Society of BC, at the time one of the most highly respected NGO groups here in BC.
I then served five years or so in the same position for the Haig-Brown Kingfisher Creek Society who had the goal of saving the lower parts of Kingfisher Creek from being in culverts by creating a whole new creek.
I arrived just in time to administer that project and in 1998 and 1999 we literally built a kilometer of new creek bed, engineered by a local company and built by the Society, which had $169,000.00 dollars in the bank.
The City of Campbell River helped out with a great fish-friendly culvert contribution and in 1999 we had our first Coho salmon run up the new channel to spawn.
In 2002 we counted 222 adults up the creek spawning in different areas. That number includes Pink salmon, Chum salmon and Coho salmon.
After completing the creek construction, thus fulfilling the dream of Haig-Brown, we disbanded as a society and evolved into what is now called the Haig-Brown Institute. I'm not involved with them at all these days as my concern is and always has been the creek itself and the salmon therein. Here's a pic of some fry in the creek right now.
Anyway, I truly appreciate the well wishes and all from you guys and will celebrate my birthday tomorrow with much gusto and good food.
And, as is now my custom, I am counting my Birthdays using Celsius, so tomorrow I'll be 23.
You convert by doubling it and adding 30.
I'm 76 in Fahrenheit. LOL
Take care and many thanks.
