Pete's Arboblog

  I tried to access the Idaho site to get the same thing, but it’s not up yet.  I did go to through the fun task of setting my TiVo for the Thursday, Friday and Saturday college football games to watch, mostly featuring Pac-10 teams.  

Thursday’s show featured a couple of guests, then PC came down after some coaches meetings that ran over, and we pre-taped a piece with him that ran on Friday’s show.  

I missed Friday, the first show in 18 I missed, as I was speaking to the Trojan Club of San Diego.  Tomorrow, I will fly with a co-host and an engineer with whom I have never worked, and we have Mike Garrett among the guests (along with FB Ops Director Dennis Slutak and the MVP of the women’s volleyball tournament of the weekend.

Before the meeting, Jenny and I got up early and headed down the coast so I could get some pre-contest body surfing in at Oceanside.  

The waves were crackin’ at 3 feet, with some 4 footers—bigger than the waves had been since July 4th just about anywhere in SoCal.  

I had a really good session and felt very confident heading into to Saturday.

The Trojan Club meeting was overflow, so much so they expected the big crowd for the kickoff lunch and moved it from the Hanalei hotel to the Marine Corp training base near the airport.  After telling them how much they could possibly expect to enjoy the season, there was a long question and answer session led by president Dan Orr, who, when it was over, gave me a really awful Hawaiian shirt of pink and purple with whales on it.

Can’t wait to wear it as it goes into the lineup of game day shirts.  

We stayed locally, and went to explore Imperial Beach, California’s last community before Mexico, and one that was featured in our new favorite (now cancelled show) “John from Cincinnati”.  We walked to the end of the pier then rode the little tram back, and had dinner in the area after checking out the last beach in the USA.

Saturday morning we got up early again, and drove back up to Oceanside.  The contest was running about 20 minutes behind.  I had perfect conditions:  three others in my heat had never advanced out of the first round, neither had I.  Surf was big but not ridiculously so.  I was in good shape, and had practiced really well all week, if not most of the summer.  

Our heat went off at 8:50 a.m. and the first thing I noticed is that there was a big drift from south to north mixed up with the last remnants of Hurricane Dean.  It did not mess with the waves, but made it tougher to get out without getting sucked over into the pier as we were on the south side.  This made me work harder than I had been accustomed to, and by the time I got out, I was somewhat winded.  I had to wait a bit before catching my first two waves, which are usually just preliminaries to get warmed up, but after those two, I felt unusually gassed…out of breath.  It stayed that way the whole time, just could never catch my breath.  

I caught 7 waves, but due to the unusual fatigue, could not dance on them like I had been able to.  I knew I would have trouble advancing with a performance like that, even though I did as much as I could with each wave.

The defending overall world champ was in our heat, and won it with ease.  Second place went to Geoff Northrup with 53 points, then Brad Miller got 48.5 and I scored 48.  Missed by ½ a point of making the second round.  One more trick, one more something.  I hate leaving it in practice, but it appears I may have done my best swimming in the practice leading up to the event.  

I was fairly upset by my performance, but had a good time fraternizing with the guys and learned some valuable lessons which I can take into the 2008 season.  

24 men advanced to the second round.  I scored second out of all of the guys who did not advance, placing 26th in the world.  My placing and score are the best I have ever done.  Next year, continue to improve and see where it takes me.

Now, it’s time for some football!