DEAR PRUDENCE

With Nicole's departure, Katie and I not only lost her bright presence and a cornerstone of our rare reunion, but also her forthright voice of reason. With amazing consistency, Nicole can present you with factual evidence regarding the dangers of almost any and every activity on earth. Over the years of our friendship, she's probably saved me from a considerable amount of adversity due to her mass of knowledge about everything from Yellow Fever to Yellow dye no. 5. Despite surfing's inevitable dangers, Nicole can hardly claim innocence when speculating the ridiculous amounts of time we'd all spent hunting down waves in our lifetime, but she does have an internal alarm that generally keeps her from straying too far from the limits of reasonable discretion. Separate of each other, I think Katie and I both maintain a decent amount of this self-preservational instinct, but uniting us seems to sanction otherwise outlandish ideas.

With good waves as a possible result, Katie and I have repeatedly proven to lack sensibility and experience a greatly increased tolerance for pain. Since that fateful April when we met, this phenomenon has found us in some bizarre, frightening, and hilarious situations. We'd spend 12 hour days in our wet 4/3s, huddling for warmth between sessions in a soggy little inflatable at the Ranch. We slipped down the muddy Jalama trail in fog so thick you couldn't see the surf from the cliff. I'd watched her tow-in into a massive set behind a jetski on the West side of Kauai, as I waited for my turn out the back. She'd stood by me through a hellish night at sea on the way home from surfing the Islands (before Swell even had a spray dodger or an autopilot). We'd slept in the back of our equally ugly station wagons or in board bags to be first in the water, been chased by elephant seals and sniffed by sharks, humbled by an occasional rogue wave, or sprinting across a blistering hot beach without shoes. I clearly remember one howling offshore morning at Oxnard Shores when I truly thought we might freeze to death there on the sand--neither of us could open the car door with our numb hands.

Although there's something rather masochistic about our relationship to surfing, in the end it somehow always seemed worthwhile. Even when the waves hadn't been good enough to nullify the severity of the day's discomfort or extent of our efforts--when it was all over--when we were dry and warm and inhaling whatever food was available, the pressures of the world always seemed lighter.

Thus, it wasn't surprising that in the absence of Nicole's sound logic, Katie and I found ourselves miles from medical assistance and overwhelmed with the primal fear of sharks and the jagged reef, staring down a grinding, empty righthander. It was big and heaving, and we were undergunned...but we'd come all this way.we HAD to try.

That evening, back in Swell's cockpit, I smiled at Katie over a plate of canned lentils and diced tofu. Streaks of sunscreen still clung to the corners of her face. There were no words necessary. We didn't need showers or fancy food. We giggled through dinner like two kids that had just pulled off a marvelous prank. Likely thanks to Nicole's lingering influence of sensibility, we'd pulled back on the waves we knew we couldn't make and returned with only minor reef scratch souvenirs. (Sorry, Nikki, I would have attempted a 'going-straight-double-railgrab-soularch' in your honor, but the dry reef made me decide otherwise.) In the dim light of the solar lantern, the gleam in Katie's sun-fried eyes, that gap-toothed grin and her crispy blonde hair swirl said enough...we'd scored.

MULTIMETER DETECTIVES

"Okay, go ahead!" I called to Katie from my contorted position in the starboard quarterberth. The solar panels had mysteriously stopped charging. Three sunny days had passed since, and it was time to address the problem. Katie had been roped into 'Phase 1: troubleshooting', which required her to get entirely inside the back lazerette hatch to touch two wires to the hot posts which live in the highly inaccessible back corner.

"Ahhhhhhhhhhhh! Pincher bug! " She yelled.

By the time I wriggled out to see what had happened, Katie was out of the hole, hopping around the back deck in pursuit of the rogue insect. I made it on the scene to see the oversized pincher bug crawling deeply into the new white loofa body scrubber that Nicole left onboard. Its long black body was woven well into the mesh. We finally extracted it with the wire cutters before making it walk the plank.

Okay, back to our respective positions.Half the day had passed when we eventually got it working, but shortly after repacking all of the goods, it mysteriously quit again. Another day went by before I amassed the energy to pull out the contents of the quarterberth once more.This time it was just the fuse. I must have unknowingly shorted the wires when reconnecting them.

It's been working for two weeks now.but this morning, again, nothing?.Time to fish out the ol' multimeter...Katie, betcha wish you were here to crawl in that hole again, eh? Nicole, you sure you don't want me to mail your loofa back to you?