Hurricane Beulah

On the Port Aransas South Jetty, 1967

As Hurricane Beulah churned in the Gulf my friend Cliff Schlabach and I decided to ride some "big waves" in Port Aransas.
The beaches were closed and under water so we parked on the road next to the jetty and carried our boards out nearly to the end of the jetty and prepared to jump off into the raging surf which was towering over us and washing across the jetty into the ship channel.
I was getting a little apprehensive since I had never seen waves that size before, and they were not clean, peeling waves but churning, choppy monsters with no discernible shape or form to them.
When Cliff went to his knees and made the sign of the cross I got worried. I had been surfing not quite two years and wasn't that skillful and had never ridden big waves. Cliff was a real surfer, he had been surfing for about four years already. We had surfed together many times and I knew he was skilled. But this was ...
We leapt off the rocks, timing the waves in the same way an Acapulco cliff diver might, and paddled for our lives as a huge set moved through the raging seas.
The currents were strong and conflicting, moving us around like corks in a rapids. We soon lost sight of each other, something I didn't really want to happen.
I finally stopped paddling and I realized there was no outside. I decided to try to ride one. A big, ugly, grey green peak soon swang towards me and I thought "this is the one!"
I turned my old, longboard towards shore and started paddling. The wave quickly lifted me up into its crest and suddenly I was descending towards the pit of the abyss at an unimaginable speed. I sprang to my feet and did my utmost to keep the nose up and not pearl up to my neck on this treacherous, moving mountain!
Somehow I made it to the bottom still on my feet but I had nowhere to go. The lip was falling fast and there was no shoulder, no channel, no refuge. This was long before we had surf leashes and it occurred to me I didn't want to lose my board out here!
So I proned out on the board and took the falling lip on my back as it came crashing down. Somehow I was able to squirt out onto the flat water and head towards the beach at a great speed until I was finally caught up in the reforming wave as it pushed a huge bounce of white water over me.
I was thrashed around, spun over and over, held under water and it seemed the water was doing its utmost to rip my board from the death grip in which I held it with my arms and legs, wrapped around the board for dear life.
When the wave let me loose I was closer to shore but not safe yet. Another wave took me for a similar "ride" and then another and at last I washed up on the beach. I was never so happy to reach land!
I met up with Cliff after a while, he had had a similar experience and had also made it to shore safely. It was a lesson learned. Though I still wanted to ride bigger waves I learned a lot about when to say when and to have much more respect for the sea and that her waves were not always just playthings!