Thank the Wind, Not the Earthquake for the Rideable East Hampton Waves

79 miles SSE of Southampton. Many of us felt it quake and shake for a few long moments. I personally had thought it must be a Mack truck loaded with concrete cesspools rolling along my street towards a construction site or something. But then, one of my friends called me up and asked if I had felt the earthquake, and if it had made any waves.

Rideable waves do not happen from an earthquake. If the movement under the sea is powerful enough, what you get is a Tsunami, which, of course, is totally unrideable and definitely not surfable. There was certainly no Tsunami, and there weren't any major waves or erosion either. If there had been there would have been a headline about the house that heroin-chic models in underwear built, the Klein house, having been swept away from its Wainscott beachfront location, long suffering from beach erosion.

No tsunami, no quake-waves, and almost no one really knew it was an earthquake right off the bat. But, it was an interesting seismological event nonetheless, a curiosity for we Northeasterners. Some hearsayers were talking about the "waves from the earthquake," but this was just simple rubbish. There were simply other weather events brewing at the same time on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Thanks to the wind, by Thursday afternoon there were some surfable waves. Montauk had the best surf because of its cobblestone reef/rock bottoms, but some points west weren't so bad either, if you knew where to look. Some sets were topping out in the head high to sometimes just-over-your-head range, and the NW winds finally started kicking in by the early afternoon The water in the low 50s still isn't all that bad, and it was sunny; so all in all it was a fun day for surfing.

The only problem at the beach-breaks was all of the current. It was kind of hard to get out to where the waves were, and then once you were out there, it was even harder to find a good one. On days like that, you have to just sit back and enjoy the paddling, the exercise, the duck diving under wave after wave in your thick winter-wetsuit, you just have to decide to enjoy the December sunshine, and relax in the winter waters. The waves do come, sometimes, right to you.

Two other guys were out surfing, and one of them was that same friend of mine mentioned earlier. He surfed way better than me. He caught more waves, got better rides, and wasted less time getting them. The other gentleman out there wasn't so lucky, it seemed he caught none at all.

And so it goes surfing at your local beach-break in the pop-up winter New York swells. Lots of luck, lots of submersion, lots of chance, and sometimes a lucky frosty barrel, when there are no tourists in sight. Just watch out for those New York earthquakes.