This is the most exciting thing that has happened to me while surfing. Actually, it's the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me at the beach. Hell, it's probably the most exciting thing that happened to me all summer.
A few months ago (late May), I was surfing with my roommate at Zuma Beach, CA. We were about 100 yards offshore, and the waves were kinda small this day, so we were spending a lot of time just chillin on our boards in the water. After about half an hour, a few dolphins came over and were playing around us. They were coming closer than usual this time, and a few times I wondered if I could jump off my board and tackle one of them. After a while, I guess the dolphins started getting used to us, because they started jumping out of the water 5 - 10 feet away. Suddenly, one of them jumped completely over me lying on my board. At this point, I was getting nervous and didn't particularly feel like having a 300 pound dolphin land on me, so I decided to start heading in.
I turned around and started paddling in with the little waves, when I saw the shadow of another dolphin come up behind me. And it kept getting bigger. I slowly turned around just as it surfaced and realized that it was a 35 foot long gray whale only 15 feet away from me. But as far as I was concerned, this thing was 300 feet long. And keep in mind that those things are LOUD when the breathe. I had no idea I could paddle in that quickly.
As I was frantically swimming in, I looked over at my roommate who was downshore from me. He was panickedly yelling something about the whale having swam directly beneath his board. By the time we made it to the shore, everybody on the beach was yelling "WHALE! WHALE!" and pointing at the whale and the two of us. I was a bit freaked out at the time, but after a few minutes of people asking, "Hey, I saw you out there! Did you see the whale right next to you?" and responding with "um, yes. It was right next to me," I was completely happy with being a surfing celeb. That said, we didn't go back out that day.
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