Strip Off Your Clothes That Are A
Nuisance In This Mellow Clime.
Get in and wrestle with the sea;
wing your heels with the skill and power that reside in you; bit the
sea's breakers, master them, and ride upon their backs as a king
should.
And that is how it came about that I tackled surf-riding. And now
that I have tackled it, more than ever do I hold it to be a royal
sport. But first let me explain the physics of it. A wave is a
communicated agitation. The water that composes the body of a wave
does not move. If it did, when a stone is thrown into a pond and
the ripples spread away in an ever widening circle, there would
appear at the centre an ever increasing hole. No, the water that
composes the body of a wave is stationary. Thus, you may watch a
particular portion of the ocean's surface and you will see the sane
water rise and fall a thousand times to the agitation communicated
by a thousand successive waves. Now imagine this communicated
agitation moving shoreward. As the bottom shoals, the lower portion
of the wave strikes land first and is stopped. But water is fluid,
and the upper portion has not struck anything, wherefore it keeps on
communicating its agitation, keeps on going. And when the top of
the wave keeps on going, while the bottom of it lags behind,
something is bound to happen. The bottom of the wave drops out from
under and the top of the wave falls over, forward, and down, curling
and cresting and roaring as it does so.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 74 of 305
Words from 19655 to 19930
of 80724
