20th Anniversary Skimboarding Season: Final Session
November 3, 2007 · Print This Article
A week delayed due to a typhoon, I closed my 20th Anniversary Skimboarding season the latest into November that I can remember. I had to don my wetsuit from the get go.
…As always I went to Chigasaki with much enthusiasm and believing conditions would be great, and as I am most of the times, I was let down by what I beheld. But first I walked one more time from my apartment to Shinjuku station, nay, strided, untouchable, thinking that for one more year, those bastards could not stop me. As always, they tried hard, but yet again one more year that could not stop me from walking with board under arm to the Sea. Fueled as always by Weezer’s first album and especially the song “Surf Wax America,” the best song about surfing not written by The Beach Boys, I blew into the station ready to make the hour’s train ride.
…After glancing over at the hole that was the former great restaurant Very, Very Strawberry, I saw the Sea unfold before me for the last time this year. It was calm. Not a single surfer anywhere up or down the coastline. And on the shore there was almost no flat to skim on. Yet, being the veteran skimmer I am, I worked the waves for what I could, and managed to get a decent, albeit “calm,” 1 hour and 20 minute session in. Not exactly the hardcore skimming I prefer or would have liked to of finished the season on, but it did end up feeling kind of appropriate. I gently glided across and over harmless waves, sometimes leaning back and just feeling my board carve into the smooth surface of the Sea. Skimboarding is, after all, an elegant sport, for a more civilized age.
…The sun sets at about 4:48pm at this time of year in Tokyo. And before the sun got too low in the sky, I made one last sprint along the shore, leapt upon my board, and glided back to the shore. I bade farewell by touch to the Sea, as is my custom, and thus ended my 20th skimboarding season, and my 5th summer skimboarding at Chigasaki beach.
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