Kashima-nada coast · Hokota (former Taiyo) · between headlands · incident reconstruction

Top Sante. Ten minutes, four hundred metres sideways. I paddled out from dead centre between two headlands, never got past the bar, and ended up ten metres off the trunk of the one to the north. This is that morning, drawn on the Ibaraki Prefecture headland design figures.

MechanismWhat the water was actually doing

None of this was a skill problem. Put a south swell on this coast two days before a typhoon and the geometry does the rest. Most of the explanation is already printed in the prefecture's own pamphlet.

Before you paddleThe five minutes that would have prevented this

What a friend who surfs at a much higher level told me afterwards amounts to one instruction: measure the water before you get in it. No equipment. You watch people from the sand.

1. Watch movement before you watch wavesSit down for five minutes and ignore the sets. Look for foam, weed and discoloured streaks tracking one way. That direction and speed is the longshore current, and it decides everything else.
2. Check whether the pack is holding positionAre they sitting on the peak, or paddling continuously to stay near it? Constant paddling with no ground gained means the current already matches a cruising paddle. That was visible from the beach that morning and I did not look.
3. Pick two fixed marks and time thirty secondsUse a headland, a stairway, a building. Follow one person for thirty seconds. Twenty metres of travel is roughly 0.7 m/s. That number is the line between going and not going.
4. Enter up-current, never down-currentPaddling out on the down-current side of a gap means starting from the end you would be pushed into. With a northward set, enter to the south and keep the north headland as far away as possible.
5. Assume both sides of a headland drain seawardI found this out the hard way. The far side of the head was pulling out too, so getting around the structure did not mean I could go straight in. Plan on having to travel a few hundred metres away from the structure before the water lets you back.
6. Say it out loudThree of us surfed that spot and all three, separately, thought we were going to die. Three observations shared on the sand would probably have meant nobody paddled out.

Once it startsWhat worked, and what nearly finished it

The two mistakes

Paddling straight into the current. Fifteen seconds heading south cost me ten metres northward, and a large fraction of the arms I would need later. Then trying to escape shoreward: near a headland the longshore flow is strongest inshore and the structure is closest, so going in made everything worse at once. The instinct to reach the beach is exactly the instinct that puts you into the blocks.

The order that worked

Take the seaward drain and get distance from the armour. Round the head well outside the block line where the flow is smoother. Then — and this is the part I did not expect — keep going away from the headland along the far side until the offshore pull dies off, several hundred metres if that is what it takes, and only then turn in. Counter-intuitively, on this geometry the water gets safer the further out and the further from the structure you go.

The floor

Keep the board: it is your flotation and the only thing that makes you visible. Stop paddling and breathe when you are not gaining anything; recovering your arms is worth more than ten metres. Wave one arm and keep it up. Never grab the blocks — they look climbable and they are a set of gaps with 1.5 m of water moving through them. And when you get out, tell whoever is still in the water how fast it is running.

SpeedWhy nothing felt like it was working

The sensation of paddling hard and going nowhere has a number attached to it.

Against 0.7 m/s, an all-out sprint nets 0.6 m/s — and it does not last a minute. In the rip core, no human beats the water. So the only workable plan is to stop trying to win and start choosing which way to be carried.