Bodkin was getting a huge kick out of Mark’s ordeal. Watching with me was Tim Bodkin, a hydrogeologist, surfer, and Mark’s next-door neighbor. Each time he seemed to be making headway, a new set of waves would appear on the horizon, bigger than the last and breaking farther out (the biggest were breaking perhaps two hundred yards from shore), and drive him back into the area that surfers call the impact zone. Getting out looked impossible, and the waves looked not worth the effort anyway, but Mark was out there, a small black-wetsuited figure in a world of furious white water, throwing himself into the stacked walls of onrushing foam. The waves were big, ragged, relentless, with no visible channels for getting through the surf from the shore. That morning, I had stood on another overlook-a sand embankment at Ocean Beach, in the Sunset District-and watched Mark demonstrate some of the qualities that gave him his peculiar status among other surfers. Since these guys were not, I knew, San Francisco surfers, of whom there were only a few dozen, their remarks meant that Mark’s notoriety was no longer confined to the city. “Doc’s probably out there.”Īctually, Mark was working that afternoon at a clinic in inner-city San Francisco, but the kids on the cliff were not misinformed: Mark had tried to surf the Potato Patch-an idea so farfetched and scary that those who knew the area, but had not talked to the witnesses, invariably refused to believe it. “Hey, give me your binoculars,” one of the young guys said to the other. Although they were several miles from where we stood, and wind-ripped and horribly confused, the waves had, because they were so big, the three-dimensionality of waves seen from much closer. Across the Gate, which is a magnificent stretch of water running from the Pacific Ocean into San Francisco Bay, giant waves were breaking in a shipping hazard known as the Potato Patch. We were watching surf break against the base of the long black cliff beneath us-the spot down there is called Dead Man’s, and the tide was still too high for surfing it-when one of them pointed north and howled. And so were two young guys I overheard a few days later at a windy overlook on the south side of the Golden Gate. Wise was talking about Mark Renneker, a family-practice physician and surfer who lives in the Sunset District. So Doc says, ‘What did you expect?’ Turns out that when Doc says it’s interesting, that means it’s worse than terrible.” “So I keep asking him, ‘But how is it?’ And he goes, ‘It’s interesting.’ So I go over there and we go out and it’s just totally terrible. “So Doc, who can see the surf from his window, calls me up and says, ‘Come on, let’s go out,’ ” Wise said. Bob Wise, the shop’s proprietor, was talking to a small group of local surfers one winter afternoon when I stopped in. I’ve done it with a friend in SF since we had already been multiple times, but if it’s your first time, we recommend staying much longer to fully enjoy the views.Wise Surfboards, the only surf shop in San Francisco, is a bright, high-ceilinged place flanked by a Mexican restaurant and a Christian day-care center out in the far reaches of a sleepy working-class seaside suburb known as the Sunset District. Present day, everyone is making their way there as it is one of the most beautiful places in the US, if not the world. It was mostly California locals visiting. The first time I visited was in 2009, and we didn’t see many people at all. Otherwise, expect this trip to be a splurge. If you want to save money, you can pack some snacks. Everything in the area is pricey from food to hotels.Check current road conditions since there are landslides and fires that can close the roads.I was looking up dates for the summer in spring, and I couldn’t find anything available. Download your google maps ahead of time so you can have offline access. If you need wifi, stop in at a restaurant or hotel. There is no service in Big Sur, so plan ahead.The weather is the nicest but it’s also the most crowded. The most popular time to go is from April to October.
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