.never turn your back on the ocean.

Well before swimming, surfing and my love affair with water began my parents warned me never to turn my back to the ocean. It seems like simple common sense, so why in the past few weeks have there been so many headlines in the local news of children swept out to sea by riptides and currents? Not just tourists, inexperienced swimmers and young children, but divers, locals, and those who have lived their lives in the water as well.

We are growing too comfortable, too at ease with our surroundings. I do it too, surf by myself, enter the water in an area I’m unfamiliar with. We forget the magnitude of nature and slip - a minor error that has disastrous consequences. In such situations there are no fingers to point, nowhere to place the blame. I love the ocean for the very qualities which I should fear it – its apathy, how it never discerns between one person or another, its power, its ability to wash things away.

“You want it/but you fear it/but you love it/when you’re near it.”