Funny surf stories

[2na]

The freaky one:

I’ driving the beach one afternoon and I see two of my buddies parked at the end of the beach where the signs are up marking the end of the drivable area. I pull up to my friends and I sense uneasiness. I say ‘what’s up guys?’ and they say ‘look on the other side of the truck’. Sitting on the sand with his back up against one of the posts is this guy (in his late 20’s?) and he has what is left of a dead seagull on his head. They tell me he came walking out of the dunes minutes before I showed up, picked up the bird on the way, sat down and put it on his head. He’s rocking back and forth a little, muttering, then he gets up, walks to the water, starts doing pushups followed by sit-ups…. we leave. The next morning I’m driving maybe 4-5 miles down the highway and see someone walking down the side of the road with a huge backpack made of a blue tarp. As I drive past I see it’s him - and he’s taken the bird feathers and made an Indian style headdress out of it (pretty good one, too.)

The crazy one:

We’re on the beach, middle of July middle of day. Trucks up and down the beach, bumper to bumper (the good old days before plover infestation!). About 100 yards to our left we see rising into the air 7-8 weather balloons and below it is this woman in a lawn chair eyes and mouth wide open. She’s 20 yards up, 30 yards up - we can’t believe she hasn’t jumped. 40 yards, 50, 60 up up and away. Then a couple of hundred feet in the air, a couple of hundred yards out to sea. I call the Ranger Station and get a ranger (Bob). He shows up less than 5 minutes later. By now she’s a speck in the sky, starting to get close to the flight path headed into Logan, we’ve got the binoculars out and on her. But in the time it takes Bob to show, other people are talking to us about her. Something’s not right – we can’t figure out why she didn’t jump? We point out the general vicinity of the launch point, and Bob goes down to a bunch of trucks with bumper stickers IDing them as Shriners. No one will fess up. Finally, Bob lays down the law: He’s got to call the Coast Guard to get a chopper up - peoples lives are at stake – last chance. They fess up: It was a blow up doll.

[JohnR]

I was fishing in Chatham during Tri-State - around 2000/2001 - when we walked the hard packed sands and easy strolls of South Beach fishing the inside towards Morris. Still a short bit before sunrise and in deep fog, our group was into a fairly steady pick of school bass and decent sized blue fish so we are all wading fairly deep to get decent casts out to the fish.

I started to hear an outboard motor out in the fog. For 20 minutes it was slowly getting louder and louder until sounding as if it was going to appear out of the fog at any moment in front of me. Sounded like one of those one or two cylinder popping outboards that make a tinny ringing noise. Caught & released a fish. Noise getting louder.

I asked out to the people around me if they could see the boat. "What boat?" or "Ain't no boat" and the like. Sure enough though, I could hear it and I was even thinking about backing up. Close enough I can almost feel the vibrating of the engine. I asked again. "No Boat! Shut up & fish" was probably the reply. I'm tired but not that *&#%(@ tired.

I pull my bag around to swap out a plug and the noise got really loud, like an outboard with loose nuts and bolts. My plug bag was vibrating? What The Bleep? Open the bag and the looser hooks on my plugs are all vibrating as my cell phone is partially soaked inside a ziplock. Enough water got in to send it into continuous vibrate mode (and cook the phone too) and make all the hooks resonate. No wonder nobody hear the noise, it was all coming from my bag.