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Swell Five and the Marathon Man

It was o dark thirty on the second day of swell event number five on the Gold Coast, in the middle of the El Nino 2009-2010 season. I was gingerly working my way down the spiral stairway which leads down from the aerie which is the loft bedroom that overlooks one of the beaches I shoot all of the time. Under my left arm was my Macbook Pro. In my right hand my cel phone. Quietly, carefully, I padded down the bamboo shod steps, and my right hand exploded in song. Deftly I snapped the cel phone open. Chuck Patterson

The Gift

It is Christmas Eve 2009. Christmas means a lot of different things to many people. The transformative and renewing aspects of the holiday have always struck me with the most repetitive sort of impact. Each year it is the same, yet different. This season was a case in point along that theorem. I pondered that earlier this evening as my girlfriend Donna and I hummed along upcoast in our little Mazdaspeed, under the fading amber afterglow of a brilliant day, this eve before Christmas. The Channel Islands stood in purple shadow relief, as bright streaks of warm color stroked the

Swell 4

The latest in our wave makers arrived innocuously enough with a soft and barely perceptible pulse arriving late in the evening. I had watched the shoulder high lines stacking up at California Street at last light, under yet another masterpiece sunset. Yet not much pulse showed on the weather buoys. The next morning at 3 am saw the East Channel buoy climb 3 feet in the interim before dawn. A straight West swell, and not too big. It was the proverbial Goldilocks and the Three Bears storybook combination of swell angle, size and weather for the Gold Coast’s multiple breaks.

Swell 3

Just when we all thought we were safe and no more responsibilities would be shirked, the life of the California based surf community turned on it’s axis from the arrival of swell three of the 2009-2010 El Nino Season. The storm which spawned our most recent pulse, began in similar fashion to the prior. It was another early season storm. It began life as a series of somewhat unimpressive low pressures, which were all affected by a series of high pressures. The storm initiated at a latitude that gave it an ideal fetch angle for a 290 degree WNW swell

Rinse and Repeat

I have had to watch weather a bit more closely than I usually would this season, because Garrett MacNamara, K38 Rescue, and a few other pals of mine are involved in big wave events and have sort of sucked me into the preparation that goes into being in the right place on the right day. We are in the midst of an El Nino season. No doubt about that now. So when the murmers about a potential swell maker began to filter through, I forced myself to take a close look at available weather telemetry and began my process of

Repose

Our lives are a lot like that of a wave, in how we roll through the sea of life, in an ocean of existence, headed for some place. But unlike a wave, we have choices we can make that determine our final destiny. Those choices determine who, and what we are, because we learn from them. Hopefully making for a somehow “better” you and I. The ability to choose is what makes us human. The desire to select by principle, can make us something else. In the Gospel there is a key saying that has always spurred me when I

A Fall Fantasy

Nothing deep to share. Or is there? The past weeks have allowed me a lot of time and effort to delve into what many consider to be my forte, which is shooting surfing, nature, beach culture and lifestyle. So this blog is devoted to showing a few of the sights seen this last several weeks of Fall. It is a teensy sampling of over 1200 final images collected. The culmination of a huge number of commercial, editorial and personal interest projects. Thanks to the beautiful place that I live in, and all my wonderful friends, commercial clients and publications for

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