Two years ago I moved from Huntington Beach to Long Island, New York. I had seen photos of hurricane swells that grace the New York and New Jersey coastlines in the late summer and early fall, and I was ready to get after it. But in a strange twist of fate, 2014 was the same year Hurricane Marie delivered some of the best surf that Southern California has seen in decades. It was months before all the footage and photos taken over the course of the swell was edited and packaged into galleries and web edits. And I watched them all. It was heartbreaking.
Two years later, I sit in Los Angeles – having left New York just in time to miss incredible back to back hurricane swells deliver some of the best Long Island surf I’ve seen in two years. Damn.
If there’s a redeeming quality to FOMO it’s this: all of the video and photographic evidence to result from the incredible wave bearing temptress that was Hurricane Hermine has an element of familiarity. Objectively, much of Long Island was all time. But having been a two-year transplant, calling Long Beach my temporary home break, seeing the place fire on all cylinders (albeit digitally) hasn’t gotten old yet.
And having watched a smattering of the videos of this swell, this one is unlike any other. The VHS-quality grainy footage. The random splices of different imagery. This is a clip for the vinyl-collecting, film camera-toting, analog junkie in all of us.
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