Hurricane Rita Photo Gallery
Rita With Red Tide
story and photos by C.Turkington

Thankfully, the red tide was mild and had only recently appeared. It wasn't strong enough for a fish kill, at the time, but definetely worked it's way into the sinuses after an hour. A larger problem , was that while this storm was brewing another seemingly endless summer of storm surf, the chance of Galveston taking a direct hit was sobering. Very few upper coast surfers were showing up for this swell. They were obviously busy moving their families from the path of this latest tropical monster. Things were quiet down here, except for the impact zone.

Shawn Cooksey, rail set and speeding toward a bottom turn.

9/23 Friday morning starts shining on the horizon. Hurricane Rita has grown overnight into another chubasco on crack, and the people of Galveston have run to the hills. The winds are stiff from the NNW and not working with the waves out front. The air is hot and the red tide is loving it. A visit to Boca shows a much cleaner wave, but considerably smaller than the north side. It is breaking a few feet overhead, with an occasional long period set wave rolling in at DOH+. The wait for the sets is long, but eventually it starts getting shorter. Some photogs are working from the rocks, shooting Boca, and every fifteen minutes their small chunk of space gets smaller.

Unknown takes one on the head.

Around noon, the sets start to push into the channel and continue to increase in frequency. The outer rocks just disappear as each bump rolls in and pushes toward the bay. Once it gets into the cove, it hits the shallow bottom and jacks, heaving a thick lip to crash in the flats. As each wave gets bigger, the price of wiping out gets heavier. But even with a juicy wave grinding through the cove at almost DOH, somehow a few people still manage to drop in on each other. Pretty sketchy thing to do on a sizeable wave.

By late afternoon, the cove is simply turned on. Unreal, awesome, gnarly, epic are words that are floating around in the water and along the edge. Personally, I've never seen the cove break like this before...ever. I've seen bigger, much bigger but not the grinding, spitting barrels. It is all well worth the red tide sneezing and coughing spasms. Each set comes in bigger than the one before. The crowd is seriously thinned out and only those able to handle the juice are left in the line up. The rest are scraping themselves from the rocks and at least one guy looks like he might be thinking about the old adage " a stitch in time, saves nine".

The remaining light of the day is filled with haze and mist. It's almost like the red tide is starting to grow in the air. Breathing continues to get more difficult but the waves just keep coming in. The entire bottom of the cove is getting tickled and it stirs up a murky mess. It's finally showing that there really is sand in just the right places because at this size all the sections of the wave are connecting. I shot one DOH set wave for the entire duration it broke clean and information from the camera shows 32 seconds between the first and last frame. Insane!

Sunset arrives and the day is over. The surf is still growing but the size will not be here by dawn the next day. Sometime during the night, the waves will peak at an unkown size and leave behind distinct markings in the parking lot from the surging water. It'll still be almost head-high in the morning, but nothing like what we had just seen...

Rita...nowhere to go, but inland!