One sunny October day (Steamer Lane, Santa Cruz, Oct. 19, 2023) #surfing

It was just an ordinary day in October. It wasn't the first big swell of the season. And it certainly wouldn't be the last flurry of big waves of the season. But Oct. 19 was a unique moment in Santa Cruz time. The hype from the initial Labour Day Weekend and September surf had died down, but the international headline-grabbing 30-foot Christmas Break waves were still a long ways off. At the time I was still out of commission due to work responsibilities and lack of a proper board to take on such conditions. But I still felt fortunate to be in the right place and time to capture a scene that I consider to epitomize some of the best that Steamer Lane in Santa Cruz has to offer: waves with a lot of body, a clean face, but just a tad of wonk to them as they pummeled their way along the Monterey Bay undersea canyon and towards the iconic lighthouse. I did manage to catch a perfect wave or two at the tail end of this swell (or was it the next one?). But I never got around to editing this footage until now, because I had both older and newer stuff to get out the door first. And by that time, I'd almost forgotten I'd even filmed this. That's what's so special about surf sessions like this. They can be the time of your life, and yet the visceral experience remains frozen in a time capsule of memory, until one day you finally decide to comb through the archives and tell the world about what you witnessed while living on the Westside. #surf #surfers #surfsup #SantaCruz #SteamerLane #SantaCruzCounty #MontereyBay #vibes #bigwave Music: Dyalla "Like it Loud" Anno Domini Beats "Skylines" Aakash Gandhi "Introspective Taal" Otis McDonald "Can't Hide"