What's the oddest thing you've encountered on the way to a surf?
Unsettling is a term that best fits when you ding your new Cordell.
Unsettling is when your dad tries to get on the undercard for Mayweather-McGregor fight (Sorry, Mr. Medina).
But finding a dead body en route to your session?
Apparently, a lady from Texas took a moonlit stroll down at Ocean City, Maryland, right there at the front of my house, at 2:30 am, and fell into a hole for the rest of her life.
Here’s the scoop from CBS News:
The death of a 30-year-old Texas woman found buried on a Maryland beach has been ruled accidental.
Citing a ruling from the state’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Ocean City police said in a statement Wednesday that Ashley O’Connor of Plano, Texas, who was found buried in the sand, had suffocated.
Beachgoers discovered the body Monday morning. Police spokeswoman Lindsay Richard says only O’Connor’s arm was visible above the sand.
Richard says O’Connor got separated from her family about 2 a.m. Monday and walked onto the beach alone. She was later found in a hole covered by sand.
Police say it’s not clear whether she fell into the hole or climbed in on her own. Richard didn’t know the exact depth of the hole, but said it was significant.
While crews worked the scene Monday, people were sunbathing right next to it, CBS Salisbury affiliate WBOC-TV reports.
“I guess it was shocking just seeing all these people just kind of moving around and vacationing when there’s someone that’s deceased right behind us,” said beachgoer Kim Dugam.
“It’s a little unsettling.”
Now, I’ve surfed in Ocean City before.
Winter brings solid swell, for sure. And I suppose I could endure hooking my leash – however off-putting – on a dead arm as I walked to the shoreline.
But what makes me curious is “beachgoer” Kim Dugam’s remark that a dead body buried in the sand nearby is “a little unsettling.”
How selfish of the deceased. Sorry the whole ex-person-in-the-hole bit interrupted your Pennsylvania sunburn.
To review:
Unsettling: Derek’s intimate description of the contours of a bullfighter.
More than unsettling: lady in hole.
Tell me: what’s the oddest thing you’ve encountered in the sand on the way to a surf?
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What’s unsettling is the laziness of the PD here. Fell into a hole? Couldn’t get out? Buried completely but ruled accidental?
A Sydney beachie with no one out
Sorry, I made that up
there’s a reason they call it thrashers fries
A sheep. They’re as spongily pliable as you’d imagine them to be when stepped on. I tried to get emotionally involved but, fuck, who really can care about a sheep
In East Java, rode past 3 guys, each transporting a 10′ diameter satellite dish tv receiver, on becaks (3 wheeled bicycle with a bench seat up front) and about 1 kilometre later, a bloke with a frozen 50-60 kilo Marlin held across his back by a backpack.
Used hypodermic needles. More than once. Some people in SC step on them on accident. The homeless trolls/drug addicts frequent the beaches at night to arrange rock formations and enjoy the plush bedding of sand. Well, those who sleep rather.
Where I live it’s fats with tats. I often see elderly obese people waddle into knee deep water and get knocked down in the shorebreak unable to get themselves back up. They end up being involuntarily rolled around by the whitewater until a crew of people come to their aid.
Currently there is a beach renourishement project happening at my break. Huge steel pipes, Cat D7s waist deep in the surf, sandy water geisering up, tugs, barges, pump rigs.
Couldn’t they just bed the elderly obese people into the beach to provide a holding point for the sand? The tats would give the appearance of coral, but wouldn’t be as violent to land on.
Ahh, if only it were a perfect world.
Venomous snakes and spiders, dingoes, huge fucking goannas and bin chickens. Don’t visit, the wildlife will get ya.
Wait, what’s a bin chicken?
An ibis. Like an ugly goose but a bit slimmer with a long curved beak. Also known to have fairly erratic feather covering. They have evolved to feed only from garbage bins.
See David Attenboroughs take on them.
https://m.youtube.com/watch…
Crazy. I was guessing it was a buzzard. Have those in Oz?
Nah, buzzard free zone. Bin Chickens do look like skinny buzzards though. Fair guess!
Ahem…
https://australianmuseum.ne…
I stand corrected. They sound pretty cool, soaring here and there, taking out unsuspecting bunnies there and here. Can we introduce them around these parts to feast on the Bin Chickens?
I must say the Bin Chooks look a lot shinier and better groomed in the less metropolitan areas. Our local’s iridescent feathers are really pretty when seen in the right light. The ones I once saw in Sydney botanical garden were utterly foul (no pun intended). Sums up Sydney really…
(edit: I just googled it and found the ones I’ve seen here are the ‘Straw-necked Ibis’… much prettier but still leather-faced freaks. dammit)
Ha! I saw some at my son’s footy game yesterday at Maroochydore. I was going to take a photo for posting here, but they were too good looking. Argree the rural ones are in much better condition than their urban cousins. Maybe the featherless patches are a hipster thing?
Damn millennial ibiseseses. With their ironic leather gimp masks and bin-juice maggot moustaches. Greasy patches of missing feathers curated with artful insouciance. “Got any fuckin chips mate?” they ask with inky black beads for eyes. The tone is hard-knocks, the phlegm artisanal, but their school certificate says 50k per annum in fees from Mummy and Daddy. The mouldy fag-end stuck to the side of their head with a grey fleck of ancient chewing gum took them half an hour in the puddle mirror this morning to get just right. “Authentic yeah?”
I wouldn’t say I lol, More of a cackle. 1 up vote not enough.
What do you think we partner up in a business making ironic gimp masks? I’m thinking white, with Nirvana style smiley faces hand stitched onto the vinyl at $50 and leather ones for $180. We can buy the leftover Clockwork Orange style long beak ones and repurpose them as Ibis masks.
Next time you’re up Newy way, let me know and we’ll have a business lunch about the proposal.
an informative song also
“Police say it’s not clear whether she fell into the hole or climbed in on her own.”
Some police are just plain dumb
*all police
Blue lives matter
Said no one with an IQ over 100.
Sanitary pad in Cangu. Probs sailed down a stream from Ubud.
You live in Maryland and write surf? Is that like a deaf guy writing reviews for Rolling Stone? Just a bit like it?
Not really, it’s my first time reading his stuff and it’s pretty good. Better than Jen See, who apparently has legit writing chops but comes out of the gates with an article asking what she should wear on a SUPing trip – real shit article. This article was good.
Yeah, it’s not bad, I agree. I was just throwing up a lazy stereotype. My world view is rather limited.
It’s a legitimate perspective (wtf does a MD person know about surfing?); many people in Hawaii think California waves suck, but I went there, and they’re awesome (not Pipe, Honolua, etc., but super fun, i.e., trestles, blacks, etc.). It’s all relative, especially when you know/have the right board for the right wave. One last thing, some of the best writing about surfing was written by people that weren’t surfers; I guess that is more where I was going. Aloha.
And some of the best writing about people was not written by surfers. Aloha to you Sir/Madam.
I used to live on the east coast. and as i said its not california but it gets waves. and just because writer is there now does that mean he has never left there or is from there?
Who cares; but we can all agree that MD is not a surfing hotspot . . . which makes me want to go there!
Let’s ask him.
wrong. have you surfed on the east coast? It’s not Cali, but MD, NJ, NC get real surf all the time. Quite a few ‘QS guys come out of there. Don’t bash MD or anywhere else. You probably live in Montana.
I don’t even know what a Montana is.
That perspective serves those of us on the east coast well. Most people won’t travel here to surf and all the Type A surf fuckheads congregate in California where they act like assholes to each other in the water while trying to impress each other out of the water with shallow shit like tattoos, facial hair and expensive leisure wear.
So you should secretly thank Nik Karol, and keep the “cover” going. In any event, it’s hard to get to the east coast, especially for us that live in Polynesia – I’ve always thought there must be fun waves on the east coast, and great seafood, cool cities, and beautiful forests/nature. Damn, I have to go to Niagra falls in October for work; I was planning on road tripping to to Quebec City . . . maybe I should go to Maryland instead? Haha.
He he he, it must be amazing living in a place unfingered by mainstream surf douchery. Sincerely.
I stumbled into a porn shoot on a more secluded beach/secret spot once but against all porno plots I’ve seen I was not asked to join in
Also saw two dudes hack sawing a dead donkey’s (which was in the middle of the road and fully in rigor mortis) neck off on the way back from a surf. Actually stopped and went back to check I wasn’t seeing things. Wanted to ask them what they were doing but they were engrossed with the task at hand
Probably one of the best comments ever.
Chicka bow bow.
A boot with a severed human foot inside was found washed up a few hundred yards from where I usually surf each morning. Supposedly it’s a phenomena, speculations are that they come from suicide jumpers. Something unsettling I see at the beach almost daily is a feral “Cat Colony” (What the deranged women who ‘maintain’ it refer to it as) directly across the street from where I surf. Really weird and wealthy middle aged women with “Coexist” and “Aloha” bumper stickers administer canned food to these homeless cats multiple times daily. There’s probably 10-20 cats present at any given time. These women talk to the cats in unnatural and manipulated voices that are incredibly unsettling, even more so than all the sandy shit on their beach litter box and the diseases they’re incubating.
Fucking gross.