My alarm has this horrible, syncopated beat that just makes you want to destroy it. If it was a human being it’d be that guy with the shit eating grin that you see everywhere and have never talked to but you know you hate him. Waking up to it is never fun except one occasion: surf days. These are the days where I don’t roll around in bed contemplating ways to choke to death on my oatmeal and instead spring out of bed like some cheesy ‘50s cartoon character. To my perpetual disappointment my roommate is invariably asleep. This usually makes things tense to start off but that’s the price we pay for morning trips. (I guess my parents also pay the price of the class I skip, sorry guys.)

As a bit of background, my roommate is from South Africa. Although he was fortunate enough to start out life in one of the most surf-blessed places on Earth, his parents made the executive choice of trapping him near the Great Lakes. I as well wasn’t fortunate enough to grow up near the salt water. Other than camping trips to Tofino and Hawaii, I didn’t get much of a chance to surf early on. My hometown is a small place on the prairies, where people think surfing is getting heaved into foam while standing on monstrous slabs of foam. They also think the way to “win” the “game” of surfing is racking up as many Instagram photos of it as possible (Shouts out St. Albert!).

Needless to say, neither of us are about to go pro. We surf well enough, but our relative inexperience has led us to put a premium on surfing uncrowded waves. For this reason, we decided to search the coast for a hidden spot before resigning ourselves to Jordan River or Sombrio. The Pacific Coast of Vancouver Island is pockmarked with narrow bays and fringed with towering, thick forest. For these reasons, it is conceivable to surf almost every day by yourself, even when conditions are good. On this day, conditions were very good. A couple of the spots we had driven by in the past and always wondered about were generating decent waves. Nothing tempted us to suit up and each time we hiked back through the brush with the hope that just around the corner would be our perfect spot. We finally found it by stopping at the last place we would have expected to find surf. A tiny gravel parking lot was ll that signified there had ever been any human presence here. On a whim, we whipped a nearly 90 degree turn in frontof a barreling logging truck.

The path from the parking lot was steep and wound around massive tree trunks and over bubbling creeks. Someone had carved faces in the largest of the trees, that eerily stared at us as we passed. The forest was powefully green, and rich with moss and ferns. It would have been a beautiful hike, but we were on a mission. All of a sudden we crested a bluff, and stepped onto a wide, sweeping bay. There wasn’t another person on the beach. Only us and a pair of bald eagles. And just off the headland, there was a small point break rolling in. We had done it.

The rest of the day was a dream. The surf continued all day, shifting in the afternoon with the low tide and lighting up the bay itself. We caught some of the best waves in the late afternoon, with the last bit of the light disappearing behind the Olympic Mountains. Riding ten foot shore break on a sandy bay was a welcome, as anyone who surfs on Vancouver Island’s souther breaks will tell you. It was one of the best days of surfing I’ve been fortunate enough to have. I caught more waves than I’ve caught in several sessions combined. It reminded me just how lucky I am to be able to enjoy this sport and to call this beautiful part of the world home.

We didn't reinvent surfing, perfect any new aerials, or even get barreled. Our new breaks, christened After Work and Cheerios (for the times they break) have probably been surfed many times, and likely by better surfers than us. None of this matters, however. The fact that we didn’t get on the water at dawn doesn’t matter. We had the best session in months and kept the spirit of adventure alive, if only in ourselves. It was the kind of experience you can never have before you leave the front door. So get outside, get off the beaten path. You just may find exactly what you were looking for when you get lost. At the very least it will be a hell of a lot better than English class.