My buddy, Matt, and I paddled out at lunch into small, low-tide sets at The Point. Despite the conditions, the crowd was ferocious; People beating themselves up over junk waves. I made the most of a couple of small ones, but the sets were just filled with the overly-aggressive.

After about an hour of this nonsense, Matt and I were starting to get giddy from the cold and with just how nutty it was out there. Still, people kept dropping off the cliff like lunch-hour lemmings. In frustration, Matt finally caught a small set in. And coincidentally, almost everyone seemed to go in on Matt's set. I looked around and the crowd had thinned from 20 surfers to 8 in what must have been less than five minutes. Odds improved dramatically, I figured that perhaps now I would catch something decent to go in on.

Suddenly, a relatively large set for the day appeared out of nowhere. I began scratching for a peak so much bigger than anything else we'd seen that it had already shifted to the left of where the pack was sitting. Right to where I was sitting on the inside.

A guy sitting on the edge like I was, but further outside, spun and caught the first one.

I paddled over the shoulder of that one and was staring face-to-face with another peak, even larger than the first. Way up the line, another guy started paddling. I knew that he was way too deep, but I'm sure that beautiful wall was just too much to let go by without a fight. I paddled too, watching him up the line, as I balanced in a semi-pushup position perfectly perched on the feathering lip. Suddenly, the wind let go and the section between me and him just heaved. I saw him go down under the lip like a rock. I got to my feet instantly and dropped straight down into an overhead bowl, cranked a big, smooth bottom turn, and ripped a huge cutback into the whitewater. I came out of that cutback and the wave had lined up perfectly for me to rocket into a clean, vertical snap. I was stoked!

Finding deeper water, the wave started to back off, but I stayed in perfect trim, either stalling or lining up soft little turns, and made it gracefully through into the reform peak at Indicators. Finding the reef at Indicators, the shoulder thinned, the bottom dropped out and I was treated to a long racetrack section through the bowl. It kept going and going all the way into deep water where the swell finally disappeared. Time to go in.

I climbed the stairs and realized that Matt's truck was gone. I'm thinking, "The wave of the day and I know he's NEVER going to believe me." I was heading for the shower, still ready to explode with pride and grinning like an idiot when I heard a horn. It’s Matt, driving by with the biggest look of disbelief on his face. I yelled across the road, "Did you see that?!?!" He just nodded and kept on driving. 

- Ryen Phillips