Surfing: The art of learning from your mistakes

The surf-break at Molasses reef:

He launched the Lucky Roller about three in the afternoon from the Port Largo homeowners park in Key Largo. The weather had been downright nasty even for late March. Though not hurricane season, he felt one was coming as for many days a hard cold-front had been blowing 25 knots or better out of the southeast and then that morning a stronger cold front began to blow down from the north. The wind slowed from a gallop, to a canter, a trot, to a crawl. The feathered clouds above seemed to want to form their own disturbingly calm vortex, like when the eye of Hurricane Irma when it went through the Keys and sucked all the water out of Florida Bay. He could feel the air temperature begin to drop.

He floated the Lucky Roller, fired her up, backed her around off the ramp and headed out. He wanted to see if the abrupt wind shift from SE to NE coupled with the surf buildup of a week’s worth of heavy winds out of the southeast might create a surf break five miles offshore at the edge of local Molasses reef. He considered that surfing the reef break might be a novel thought, and one that could change his world; for surfers are a unique clique of dreamers, willing to travel long distances and many hours to sit on surfboards in shark and jellyfish infested waters, waiting for just that one right wave so they may become one again with the force of a turbulent sea.

This is what he found.

Photo by Ian Wilson