Surfer Blog

Opinions to the Editor on Wiborg Beach in East Hampton

By Dan Rattiner

So I am down here at Wiborg Beach in East Hampton, sitting in my car watching the surfers enjoy what is probably the most amazing day of waves in the Hamptons in years. It is five in the afternoon and the sun is beginning to set off to the right. Against this, the sea is forming slow, six foot high rollers that are absolutely perfect. It is a rare, rare day. The surfers, six of them, sit in their wetsuits on their boards in this freezing cold weather just beyond the breaker line and they wait and they wait and then, suddenly, spring alive as one of these perfect waves appear. In seconds, they are up in perfect position, finding that seam and sliding down into the curl. They stay in the curl for five, six, seven seconds — it seems to be almost slow motion, as if the clock was almost standing still as they are in there — until finally they pull up and away.

What a remarkable, remarkable day. Nobody would believe what is going on here.

As for me, I am sitting in the passenger seat of my Tahoe car alternately writing a story about the Old Whaler’s Church in Sag Harbor and then looking up and enjoying this amazing day.

After a while, after I’ve written for a particularly long time, I look up to see that two of the surfers are out of the water and over by a pickup truck here on the beach, and in spite of the cold, are pulling off their wetsuits and getting into street clothes. Interestingly, both of them are older men, relatively anyway, about forty, which is pretty old for surfers in these parts, but there they are nevertheless.

I look back to my work — I am a regular visitor out at the beach writing the stories for this newspaper — and a few minutes after that I am deep in another paragraph of it and am sort of dimly aware of the fact that one of these two surfers has approached my Tahoe and is now standing about ten feet in front of the right fender a little bit off to the side. I don’t look up, but I can see him there. He’s at that distance — you know the distance — which says I’m here and I want to talk to you so I’ll wait until you’re free.

This annoys me. Obviously I am busy. People generally know I write on a laptop here and they leave me alone about it. I’ve got to find the time do to this somewhere and when I do, and I’m deep in thought writing, I really don’t want to be disturbed. Not at all.

So I pretend not to notice him. It’s cold. He’ll go away. And after a bit, he knows that I have become aware of him and that what I am doing is quite deliberate. Maybe even a little rude. He clears his throat. He wants to be sure. Now he is sure. And so, he speaks.

“You know that article you wrote about surfing at the Montauk Lighthouse two weeks ago,” he says. He says this loud enough so that he knows I’ve heard it. I don’t look up. So he is saying it to the top of my head.

“Well, you are really, really wrong about what you wrote.”

Then he walks over to the pickup and gets in and drives off.

Now what am I supposed to do about this?