Surfing Rhode Island, especially on a day such as this, is not for the faint of heart.
Bob Mancini and Andrew Wright were at Narragansett Town Beach on Thursday at the crack of dawn, hoping to ride the waves without so much as a surfboard.
“This is the World Series of bodysurfing right here,” Mancini said.
They were nervous at first, and the waves tossed them like corks in the water. But by the end of their dip they were already determined to come back later for more.
“What, is there a hurricane coming in?” Mancini wondered, ironically.
Wright said, “You know it looks worse from the seawall than it does from the shore.”
Mancini agreed, as he dried off with a bright red beach towel.
“Like a big washing machine,” he said. “We didn’t go in too deep — just up to our knees. We caught a couple of low-riding waves. It was good.”
Hurricane Erin moved slowly out into the Atlantic on Thursday. But forecasters expect the seas to keep churning into Saturday morning. In some spots, the average height of the waves has been 7-to-10 feet. Overnight Thursday, they could get as big as 15 feet.
Laura Fontaine of Burrillville was content to watch from the safety of the parking lot at Camp Cronin, iPhone in hand, struggling to capture the spray as the big waves crashed onto the rocks.
“I love the ocean like this — so angry!” she said. “It’s fun to watch.”
Stephanie Gomes-Ganhao of Long Meadow, Mass., just arrived in town with her kids for a weeklong summer holiday, unaware of what the weather would bring.
“Every time I come to Rhode Island, there’s a hurricane off the coast,” she said, laughing. “But my kids love it. My daughter says she’s going to be a surfer someday.”
Her 5-year-old might want to get some pointers first from somebody like Joe Noonan of Marshfield, Mass. He first got up on a surfboard when he was 8. He’s been hooked ever since.
His strategy?
“Just grab rail,” he said. “When in doubt you just got to grab your rail.”
“I mean, this kind of swell is not much. This is easy stuff. But when the top dogs come out to play and it’s shmacking — it’s big and hollow and steep, just grab rail immediately. Tuck in there. Get all covered up. Pop out. Woopah.”
(If you need any help decoding that lingo, you can find it here.)
Narragansett’s surfing coves may not feature in any Beach Boys lyrics, but he’d just as soon keep it that way. The last thing most surfers want is a crowded break.
“I think we should keep it a secret,” Noonan said.
But as his fellow surfer Thomas Murphy pointed out, the secret seems to be out. He counted a dozen or so surfers in the water when he put in his longboard WHERE. Murphy triumphantly quoted from a 2017 National Geographic article that identified Narragansett as one of the top 20 surf towns in the world.
“It kind of makes me proud to be from here,” he said.
He added: “When waves are like this down in Narragansett, you always see a lot of people come out. It’s a great culture. And it’s a fun time.”
