Sunday Bean Hollow 5/6

glad you had fun, and all came out OK.


Allen

It's much better to jump out of the kayak than to be rolled.  Jumping out you're at least sending your feet down into the potentially rocky unknown, not your head.

I learned much of my surf skills at bean hollow and my second round of serious practice was on a day with 15' combined seas.

Oh My God!! 

    My jaws dropped when I saw the above picture with you in front of the breaker,  promethean_spark. 

I would never beach launch there on a day like that.   The swells often do not break at the same place at BH.  With mixed swells, worse.  Be Careful ! 

Looking forward to seeing you guys out there on my inflatable some time.

Gordon

JEZZZZUS.... I didn't notice the "tiny" yaker in the middle there till you pointed him out. Now I don't feel crazy at all!

That actually wasn't me, it was my buddy Ethan - I took the picture.  However I proceeded to go out and do the same thing shortly after that.  This was after launching with all our gear and even caught a few fish before getting seasick.  Ethan biffed it on the launch, but I launched fine and we both landed okay.  We launched from the south, I landed on the south side and he landed on the north side.

His kayak was flung end-over-end when the wave hit him, sort of like a bowling pin.  Surf can be kind of scary, but if you're wearing your PFD and keep away from the rocks it's not really all that dangerous.  Surfers do it all day long...

I'd happilly repeat the above, it was fun.  Certainly more fun that practicing in little stuff.  It was a fairly long swim back to shore though...  Dispite the size of the surf, we still had about an 80% success rate of launching and landing.  We were purposefully sitting where those big breakers occured to see how the boats would handle that, those sets were far apart.  We thought we might be able to paddle into them and squirt out the top intact.  I actually survived some that were almost that big and had to sit through several sets before one could unseat me.    Usually the surf was more like this when you timed the set right:
  I think the swells were something like 12' with 3' wind waves, or 12-15ft or something like that, there was a small craft advisory.  That made me feel that the conditions last weekend weren't all that bad.  Likely to dump, that's for sure, but if you're only practicing then that's the whole idea.