Surfing Lake Tahoe 4-27-10
Monday night, a ferocious storm blew in from the Pacific Ocean, and battered the Tahoe area with 50-100 mph winds. 80 foot tall ponderosa pines were swaying like twigs, and one a few streets away snapped in half and narrowly missed crushing a house. The storm raged on overnight, and we woke up Tuesday without power. This could mean only one thing – surf’s up at the lake!
I called my friend Scott Gaffney, a veteran Tahoe surfer, and sped over to his house in Tahoe City. We suited up, and I realized I was lacking a hood…this time I had gloves and boots, but my head was going to suffer. The wind was howling, and it was starting to snow steadily, punctuated by bouts of frozen ice and graupel.
We made our way around the north shore to Scott’s secret surf spot, and things were looking good so we decided to go for it. This was the first chance I had to use the underwater housing for my Canon s90 and I was beyond fired up. I totally hate cold water, so it had taken me some serious internal convincing to get to the point where I was ready to go swim in 40 degree water for an hour, in a snowstorm, with 50 mph winds.
Despite my reservations I dove in and tried to get positioned in a spot where I could try and get some action shots of Scott. Every five minutes or so, a “set” would roll in, and I would be forced to duck dive, which brought on an intense ice cream headache. I started getting some decent shots though, and I was pretty happy with the camera. I definitely could have fine tuned the exposure settings, I think I needed to be using a faster shutter speed, and I could have set the ASA-equivalent a little higher. It’s extremely difficult in those conditions to bob around and edit the shots I was getting, so I just kept shooting. Lesson learned though – take more time to fine tine while in the water, and experiment a bit more. I ordered a hood yesterday, so hopefully next time my brain’s a little less frozen. Enjoy.
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