Night Shift

On Saturday night Ari and I surfed North Reef at night. It was kind of magical. We even smelled some Indian incense in the darkenss of the line-up; we had no clue where it could have come from.
Derreck Ferrar once wrote" To call the night-surfing experience “cosmic” is as much fact as it is surf-speak cliché. It is a fundamentally celestial pursuit, possible only when the moon—that cool, radiant muse of poets, shamans and lovers through the ages—is in her monthly fullness, with no veil of cloud hiding her face. And when you paddle out at night, the ocean itself resembles the void of space—a vast, enveloping blackness that renders you weightless.
Night surfing is predominantly a communal activity—after all, no one really wants to be out there alone among things that go munch in the night.
Catching a wave at night requires a kind of extra-sensory perception. You stare into the darkness, scanning for hints—the wave crest that glimmers higher and longer than its neighbors, the trough that is deeper and darker. In the darkness, sound is amplified; your ears pick up every slosh as you paddle, the wet crash of the falling lip, the satisfying swoosh of your board cutting across the face. But in the end, you feel the wave as much as you see or hear it. You just have to let go and trust your gut about where to be in order to snag it."