It’s not uncommon to step out in the middle of the afternoon on St. Patrick’s Day and see people filling into bars. It doesn’t matter the city, it doesn’t matter the time of day, people are downing their green beers and Irish whiskey dressed in funny hats, fake red beards, while wearing cheap plastic pots of gold around their neck. There’s no need to wait for Happy Hour on March 17th. Hell, with this year’s holiday falling on a Monday, most people didn’t even wait for the 17th anyway, they just sent it into a four-day bender and treated the actual St. Patrick’s Day as the final quarter of a solid binge.
There were likely a lot of empty lineups as a result. While diehards wouldn’t miss a solid swell for anything, let alone a drinking holiday, you were still likely to find thinner crowds everywhere this past weekend. On Monday, New York-based photographer Tredd Smith spent his afternoon documenting the waves hitting Long Beach shores. And there were surfers, you just wouldn’t know it based on a few glorious pics Smith was able to snag during golden hour.
Smith told The Inertia there were surfers both east and west of him along this particular stretch, but none of them stumbled on this pot of gold.
“I found a peak nobody was on because I wanted to shoot empties,” he says.
Smith won The Inertia’s Film and Photo Challenge Short Film category back in 2022 for a beautifully shot documentary highlighting the work of shark-diving guide Alexandre Carrier, so he’s no stranger to sniffing out breathtaking imagery.
No rainbow. No leprechauns. But empty waves like this are better anyway.
