Princess of Tides
Fall/Winter 2008 Girlfriend Getaways> Subscribe Now
Launch the slide show
"You don't want to be a kook!" she says, as I glance around to see if anyone else feels the onset of kook-dom.
It's safe to say that Christy lives to surf. She taught herself to get up on a board at the age of 10, practicing for hours off the coast of Rhode Island. When it came time for college, she chose San Diego—in part for the waves. Surfing has since taken her to Fiji, Australia, Mexico, and now Costa Rica.
Christy's second in command is Jennifer Sadoski, 37, another self-taught surfer, who's getting ready to leave her job at the San Diego Zoo to become a veterinary assistant in San Francisco. She usually teaches at the Stateside surf camp. Of her two jobs, working with people is harder, she jokes, because "animals don't talk back."
Our collection of campers makes for an eclectic menagerie of single women, ranging in age from twentysomething to fortysomething (that would be Lainey and me). And we all have different goals. Paloma Nunziata, 32, is a social worker who's surfed before but wants to learn to ride the larger waves farther offshore. Christina Waters, 42, has taken lessons in San Diego, where she just quit her job as the head of a pharmaceutical firm to go back to school. Caryn O'Mara, 34, is a hedge-fund research coordinator who makes us laugh when she confesses that she hates sand—"it gets into everything"—but has a list of life goals that includes surfing. I'm instantly fond of Lori Lang, 26, who grew up in the surf capital of Huntington Beach, Calif., but never got around to trying it, and we quickly find that we have to carry our boards together because we're too short to handle them by ourselves. Last—but certainly not least—there's Nicole Skalla, an adventuresome attorney who just turned 30; her last endeavor was white-water rafting in Patagonia.
More than a few of us are accustomed to telling people what to do, but Christy knows a thing or two about instructing women who might have, uh, control issues. "We get CEOs, moms, and lawyers who are used to being in charge," she says. "For them, letting go for a week is a big deal."
Letting go—that is, learning how to fall off a board properly—turns out to be one of our first lessons. On land, Jennifer mimes throwing her hands and legs out, to keep the leash away from the board. "If you wipe out," Christy says, "keep a hand over your head to minimize the chance of injury as you surface." Jennifer adds, "Should you get panicky, just follow the bubbles—they always go up."
"What about stingrays?" I ask. I know Lainey is still smiling from the night before, when I stopped short in front of a sign reminding people to use the "stingray shuffle," the toe-dragging walk that warns the critters off.
"Do the shuffle," Christy says. "But, really, don't obsess over it."
And that's when I feel like a kook; I have been obsessing. After class, I can't help but notice that the forest we walk through on the way to the beach has a cemetery, with English names on the gravestones. Probably former students, I think.
poppin' up is hard to do
Our instructors have us lying stomach-down on the sand, practicing our pop-ups. This is surfing terminology for the single, fluid motion in which you push your feet up under your body and jump to a standing position, your feet spread apart in a relaxed stance not unlike a yoga pose. Except that most of us don't practice downward dogs on a moving wave.
We start out on the white water, which is actually the name for the gentler waves close to shore. Christy and Jennifer take turns guiding each of us on our boards. When it's Lainey's turn, Christy stands behind her, the board pointed toward shore.
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