WELLFLEET – For the most recent five days in a row, Ryan Garcia has thought about waves and his surfboard and, walking on Marconi Beach after surfing for the fifth day in a row, he said, “I have asked myself, ‘Do I really want to go out?’ ”
Ryan Garcia of Wellfleet catches a January wave at Marconi Beach.
Garcia, 33, of Wellfleet, has been surfing 15 years. He is the owner of Cape Side Surf School, as well as a house painter, and an artist. But even with 15 years of dedicated surfing, he admitted that for five straight days this week the thought has occurred to him that, well, it is the middle of January.
Still, he said with a smile, “I have never regretted going out.”
Ryan Garcia, of Wellfleet, finishes a day of surfing at Marconi Beach.
At first, from atop the dune and few hundred yards down the vast beach, Garcia appeared as one of two black specks on the endless gray January sea. The bobbing specks were winter surfers in full wetsuits, actually close to shore. While the other surfer waited for a particular wave, Garcia was riding a wave, all the way to shore.
Later, as he walked past the dunes, dripping wet, he said, “If it gets down into the teens in degrees, it gets cold,” he said.
But the weather this day hovered around 50 degrees. Garcia walked along the windy beach in his soaked full body wetsuit and he said to someone who was dry, “I’m warmer than you are.”
— Brian Tarcy
