‘Yeah, punk ass kid.’

‘Yeah!...That’s my punk ass kid.’ And then he beat the shit out of the guy! My dad’s nuts. He just wanted to beat somebody up. He did that a lot. Needed a little aggression release, apparently.”

Another friend of mine experienced wave rage when he had a wave stolen from him. My friend informed the intense looking man—I’m sure as politely as the late Mother Teresa would have—that it wasn’t cool to snake. The guy responded, “I just got out of prison. I’ll surf anywhere I want.”

My friend insists he didn’t flinch at that, but he flinches when he tells the story now.

Most surfers agree that water battles are probably more urban legend than fact—campfire stories to keep us in line. I concur. Wave rage is similar to road rage in that people curse and feel monumentally wronged, but most people don’t really do anything about it. (Though I have seen physical confrontation, so I know it happens.)

One story that I tend to believe is about an older guy putting the fear of God into some kid still in junior high. Story goes that the kid dropped in and stole the guy’s wave. When he paddled back out, the guy asked, “Hey, don’t we go to the same church?”

The kid didn’t say anything as he tried to picture the guy humming some hymns.

Sensing weakness, the guy pounced. “Do you want me to tell your parents and everybody else that you steal waves from other people?”

The guy threw God and peer pressure at the kid, which was just wrong. But it worked. The very next wave that came, the kid said, “Take this wave. It’s going to be good.”

San Diego doesn’t have wave rage as bad as other places. We don’t have anything like the Da Hui, the Hawaiian surfing equivalent of the mafia. The white man did its best to annihilate native Hawaiian culture so I totally understand why they don’t like pale people in their waters. SD also doesn’t have a shortage of breaks, as they do up north in Santa Cruz. While SC is an intense surfing community, it’s small and logic tells you that fewer breaks create more localism. And any kook knows that when the water is as cold as it is up there, people just aren’t right in the head.

But San Zorro isn’t all cake, ice cream and balloon animals. We have a few breaks you just don’t surf without a local escort. There’s one thing to remember from all this: If a surf spot is hard to get to, the universe made it that way for a reason. Don’t go there without an engraved invitation. My friend dared buck this rule by paddling out to a break with a reputation I’ll honor by not naming. A surfer immediately yelled, “Go away!” But he didn’t. He stayed and surfed. As for the screamer, “He grumbled a lot, but what was he going to do, really?”

That’s the thing with rage. Sometimes it gets you nothing. Sometimes it explodes in your face.

“I was paddling back out and sorta got in some guy’s way,” a surfer recounts. “I couldn’t avoid it though; either way I went I was going to ruin his ride. He yelled at me like I’d done it on purpose or like I could do something about it. I was like, ‘Whatever, dude.’ Then I went back out, caught a wave and surfed right past him, smacking the lip, spraying him and yelling ‘Woo-hoo!’”

“You don’t think that wasn’t a little mean-spirited?” I ask.

“Sure, but the guy was a jerk. So I messed up his wave. Sorry, it’s not the end of the world.” Then he grins. “Besides, it was cool.”

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Elisabeth Gause is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to Vyuz.