OC Exclusives Blog

Here’s the Final Round; these are just a few late day beauties that I had to share… I love the color, the raging forms, and the raw power of the waves…

Enjoy:

Here’s Round Two of the People vs. The Wedge. Enjoy.

Every couple of sets, a few big waves would bring a roar of whitewash up the sand and it would hit the vertical sand lip and reach out and soak whoever was closest. Invariably, the crowd would get soaked, they would back off and within minutes would forget about the whitewash and press back up to the lip craning their necks for more surf. After a couple of hours of watching this happen, I saw a monster set approach, ran back behind the crowd and managed to snap a quick sequence of shots of the people who had again forgotten that the big waves crashing meant big whitewash coming.

Sometimes its hard to tell how big the waves are in the photos, but this one shows the size pretty nicely; those little specs at the bottom of the wave are bodysurfers’ heads.

I love my children way too much to be doing what this parent was doing – posing their kid in front of the sand lip for ‘fun’ photos; I hope they got the pix they wanted because they almost lost a treasure…

This guy looks like he had a nice ride

Another sequence; the guy on the right had a choice front row seat

More photos to come.

After seeing Aliso Creek do its thing on the morning of July 5th, I raced home, grabbed a couple of things and drove over to the Wedge on Balboa Peninsula to check the waves. I knew I would be fighting traffic like crazy to get down there and parking would be next to impossible but I had to check it out… I had my three kids with me (wife at home), and with the littlest one at 20 months old on my back, I had my hands full… I’ve been down there a bunch of times when I heard there was a swell in or big surf was up and every time I’ve been over the past few years, I’ve just been witness to peaceful choppy little bits of not much… this past Monday was totally different and was the surf I had been craving to see for a long time.

I’m going to break the pics up into a couple of posts; be sure to click the super-wide shots for the full effect. Enjoy:

Good vibes from the crowd present; big smiles everywhere

This was the first of many big white washes to come screaming up the sand and hitting the vertical lip

The crowd gets a dousing

This guy was great; this is the last photo in the sequence; you can check the full sequence below

Be sure to click this for the full effect

A nice wide shot of the scene

Crunch n munch on the shore. No takers.

A nice little (‘little’ is relative here) shorebreak ride with a tough landing at the end

Some heads talkin’ shop with the lifeguard du moment

Let’s see. Not going in on that one just yet.

People enjoying the free show.

I’ll post another round of pix later on.