Few things are tougher than hopping out of a warm bed before the sunrise, only to have no waves waiting for you. Don’t get me wrong, if there’s a reason to hit the ground running any day of the week, it should be in the pursuit of barrels. But what about those days you wake up early and the ocean herself is still fast asleep? What about those days when blanket barrels just seem so much more inviting, and so much warmer?
During the month of May the crew at Urban Barrels threw 30 days worth of DAWN patrol parties. The campaign was for little more than simply making the most of each day by waking up with the sun and some saltwater. And as you can imagine, 30 Days of DAWN was a pretty straightforward task. They surfed at the end of Ocean Street in Santa Monica, the Venice Breakwater, Malibu, the Venice pier, the Manhattan Beach pier, Zuma, and the list goes on. And for anybody who isn’t familiar with Los Angeles’s surf scene, I should point out the significance of some of the previously mentioned waves on their list: they aren’t exactly world class. Some of them are places you go to when you absolutely have to get in the water, when you’re frothing so much that any dose of saltwater will suffice. It takes a special kind of stoke, and it’s something we all wish we’d let out more often.
Urban Barrels co-founder JP MacDonell compiled his own list of life lessons taken from mornings like this. And one of them simply says “embrace the element of surprise.”
“One of the great things about dawn patrol is you never really know how the waves will be until you show up. There’s no looking at cams.” he says. “There’s something super rad about committing the night before and showing up to see what the ocean and waves are doing. Whether it’s flat or firing, we’re still out there.”
Needless to say, some of these dawn patrols didn’t pump out the perfect, glassy, overhead, hollow waves that we’d all expect when pulling into the Ocean Street parking lot at 6:30 am (see what I did there?). So they took their own advice, and rolled with the punches. They took recycled sails that the company uses to make some of their bags, broke out the skateboards, and everybody still found a way to get barreled.
If you’re not gonna get barreled at 6:30 am, you might as well get barreled.
