You attain that superordinary condition when your faculties react
instinctively, like a machine. It is a species of intoxication. After a
time you personify each wave; you grapple with it as with a personal
adversary; you exult as, beaten and broken, it hisses away to leeward.
"Go it, you son of a gun!" you shout. "Ah, you would, would you! think
you can, do you?" and in the roar and rush of wind and water you crouch
like a boxer on the defence, parrying the blows, but ready at the
slightest opening to gain a stroke of the paddle.
In such circumstances you have not the leisure to consider distance.
You are too busily engaged in slaughtering waves to consider your rate
of progress. The fact that slowly you are pulling up on your objective
point does not occur to you until you are within a few hundred yards of
it. Then, unless you are careful, you are undone.
Probably the most difficult thing of all to learn is that the waves to
be encountered in the last hundred yards of an open sweep are exactly
as dangerous as those you dodged so fearfully four miles from shore.
You are so nearly in that you unconsciously relax your efforts. Calmly,
almost contemptuously, a big roller rips along your gunwale. You are
wrecked--fortunately within easy swimming distance. But that doesn't
save your duffel. Remember this: be just as careful with the very last
wave as you were with the others. Get inside before you draw that deep
breath of relief.
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