Rambling travelogs from a world traveler

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Turnagain, Again,

"Anything running counter to conventional wisdom is probably the right choice."
~ The Contrarian Philosophy

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

Most of us would not dream of surfing in Alaska in January in the dead of winter. This post is about contrarians who do.

Please recall that I fly out of Anchorage, Alaska. Anchorage is surrounded on 2.3 sides by water - The Cook Inlet branches into the Knik Arm and the Turnagain Arm and wraps around the city. I wrote about a day trip I took up the Turnagain here. There are also pictures of this general area in this post.

The Turnagain Arm is famous for it's tidal dynamics. It often produces a bore tide.

Please click this link now. Ann pointed it out to me yesterday and I knew my gentle readers would enjoy seeing it too. Roughly half way down the link is a video showing a group of intrepid paddle surfers out running the bore tide several days ago on Jan 13, 2011.

In the video you can see the road that runs along the north shore of the Turnagain and you can see a motorcade of cars following their progress. That is the same road I drove.

Note that the surfers are wearing dry suits - not wet suits.

I looked up the weather observation for Jan 13th and found the temperature rose to a blistering 18F for a high. For those of you who think in communist centigrade that's -8C. Both of those temperatures are below the freezing point of water.

On that happy note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

ps, I considered using this quote at the beginning here, but decided it would just confuse us.

"There are amusing mathematical relationships everywhere if you are
on the look out for them. In the ripples on the water, or the shapes of
busts - elegant fifth order functions."
"Huh? You mean 4th order."
"Fifth order. You omitted the time variable. I like fifth order equations,"
Libby said dreamily. "You find 'em in fish, too."

Robert A. Heinlein
Methuselah's Children


No comments: