The Wedge

Author's Comments

A south swell in late August, just after sunrise, and the Pacific is doing something here that it does almost nowhere else on the coast. The jetty bends the energy back on itself and the waves come in stacked, doubled, rising into shapes that should not be possible from shore. I have watched a wave at the Wedge fold into a peak twenty feet tall and collapse onto sand in water that is barely waist deep. It is violent and beautiful and almost theatrical in its scale. Morning is the time. The light comes from behind you, low and warm off the peninsula, and the spray catches it in a way that turns the back of every wave into something lit from within. A long lens earns its place here. So does a fast shutter, though I have made some of my favorite frames at a slower speed, letting the lip blur into something closer to smoke than water. Stay back. I mean this practically and not poetically. The shore break at the Wedge has hospitalized people who thought they understood it, and the sand shelves off so quickly that a wave you did not see coming can take you off your feet from ten yards inland. Set up high on the dry sand and use the reach of the lens. The bodysurfers will be out by seven. They are part of the photograph, eventually - small dark shapes scaling those impossible faces, giving the wave a sense of scale that nothing else can. Without them you have water. With them you have a story.

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