I was flipping through my eBook tonight looking for a photo and ran across this sequence from December of 2008. I remember this day like it was yesterday.
Paddled out at HQ with (back then) the local crew I'd surf with daily there. Conditions at HQ were kinda funky, with a decent sized south mid winter mixing with a moderate NW swell. SteveH and I got a wild hair and headed North mid session.
Up through HB, TB reef caught our attention and we flipped a beyotch and parked southbound on PCH. We checked it for a set or two and opted to paddle out. The lefts were running cross grain and were much better than the rights. SteveH, not being a big fan of lefts decided to man the camera, and even let me take out his fresh 7'2" bonzer pin barrel hunter. I was more than stoked, cause all I brought a beater 6'6" Rick swallow from the 70's, single.
I worked my way into the lineup, saw a couple sets roll through with guys either too deep, or would pull back the reins at the last minute. I was 2nd in line on a beauty, ready and waiting and the guy in position pulled back at the last minute. I wasn't gonna wait around again for that to happen.
Next set rolls through, the same guy was in position, abit deep, and I said..f'ck it...I'm goin. You can see in the 1st frame that he was in fact too deep, and his buddy was paddling back out seen in the 1st three frames.
He added salt to the wound cause I overheard him telling his buddy how slotted I was, cause he was front row.
Also thinking back to the camera used in the photos. It was an old Sony DSC-H1 that my dad sent me. It had to be a couple years old back then. The specs are listed below, and am grateful that I even had this camera with me to document that magic session.
So there's the flashback, stoked to be a photog, and keeping special days like this not only on the hard drive, but in the knoggin as well..

Introduced in February 2005 (pre-PMA), the Cyber-shot H1 is Sony's attempt to win a share of one of the fastest growing digital camera market sectors, the 5 megapixel 'super zoom'. Although Sony has produced big zoom cameras before (the F828 and its predecessors sported 5x and 7x optics and there was a 10x zoom floppy disk Mavica a few years ago), the H1 is the electronics giant's first foray into compact, big zoom image-stabilized cameras. As well as a huge 12x optical zoom the H1 is a real treasure chest of photographic control, offering a wealth of automatic, semi automatic and manual exposure modes, a big 2.5" screen and captures VGA/30fps movies in space-efficient MPEG format.
- 5.1 effective megapixels
- 36-432mm equivalent (12x optical) F2.8-3.7 zoom lens
- Super Steady Shot optical image stabilization
- 2.5” LCD (115,200 pixels)
- Full photographic control
- Real Imaging Processor & 14-bit DXP A/D Conversion
- Optional wide and tele lens converters
- Scene selection (7 modes)
- Histogram indication
- 32MB internal memory, plus a Memory Stick/PRO slot