Sea Caves

Last weekend I woke up desperate for waves and called Brian. He’s a good person to get skunked with because he’s already at the beach. Most people aren’t willing to drive to the coast for what could easily end up as a day spent tide pooling in the rain. The forecast was big, but shifty. High likelihood of high winds in the wrong direction.

He was down.

The spots we chose are sort of novelty waves. Not the most consistent, but beautiful and uncrowded. Around noon, we hiked into the lowest tide I’d ever seen. Reefs known for being deep were completely dry. Fine for a strong surfer like Brian, but kicking out early to avoid a reef pounding was never my specialty. I’ve never willingly given up a still ridable wave in my life. Naturally, I spent the first session getting thrashed

While waiting for the tide to turn, we noticed that a section of cliff with cave like depressions that we’d been eyeing from the lineup was finally exposed and not being battered by swell. We left our wetsuits on and decided to explore.

Sea caves are usually a tease. From a distance they fire up the imagination, but turn out to be shallow, damp holes. This time they were full Disney. The first cave began as a teardrop shaped crack in the wall, and opened up behind a curtain of dripping water into the rainforest.

I’m a freak for caves. I won’t leave one until I’ve crawled through every corner of it. But we only had so much time before the tide came in. We kept climbing down the beach until we reached the next crack. Flowing columns of rock stained pink by kelp made a feminine arch over a large entryway — it was so stunning from the outside I thought there was no way that kind of epic-ness could continue.

We waded through waist deep, turquoise water and into a dry cavern. What looked like a 20’ depression from the outside made a sharp turn to the right and opened up into an underground cathedral. A natural stone column supported one section of ceiling. I was stunned. If the last cave was “Avatar”, this was “Game of Thrones”. You could fit a fucking dragon inside.

The cave was not only deep, but had light shining from an exit in the distance. Our eyes adjusted and we started hiking. We scrambled over boulders for 200 feet to the next opening. At this end the cave was even bigger. A completely dry, underground talus field rose towards the back wall. The roof was over 60’ tall. A large, old growth tree had somehow threaded the narrow cave entrance and beached itself inside where something that size shouldn’t have belonged.

We could have let the tide come in. The cave was large enough for us to spend the night and never get wet. But we wanted to surf. The water was up to our necks by the time we waded out and the swell had started to pump.

Sets moved in and we completely forgot about the cave. Waist high peelers turned to overhead reelers, then head-and-a-half bombs. The cave was 15’ below the surface by the time we thought about it again. Our gamble paid off.