Sean Nader gets a few nice rides in Ocean City this week. Conditions improved Thursday morning, when your devoted columnist was writing this.

There’s something about surfing that lends itself to metaphor.

Sure, football and baseball figures of speech are woven into the fabric of contemporary American English, so much so that when someone speaks of striking out, fumbling or being blindsided it hardly registers as having roots in sports at all.

But surf metaphors fit well when talking about life.

I don’t mean throwing around often-misused jargon like “gnarly” or “hang 10,” although describing someone as stoked is rarely out of place. I’m talking about the way the process of waiting for a wave, never knowing for certain exactly what you’re in for, and when one eventually comes to you either finding joy in a brief ride or wiping out, well, seems like a kind of microcosm of our lives.

Oof. Even typing that out, I can hear the sitars and the southern California accent creeping in. “Dude! It’s like the wave is the universe, and we’re all riding it. But then what’s the beach?”

A surfer waits for a wave to come along. The hoods are coming down, but wetsuits are still de rigueur in the waves.

Picture yourself on a board just beyond a reef break, somewhere hot.

The ocean around you is a glowing azure, and you see rolling mountains rising out of thick, green jungle just past the beach as white pelicans drop into the water nearby with a splash. Maybe throw in a couple of sea turtles swimming under the board, because everybody likes sea turtles, right?

A surfer at sunset in the fall may seem like a metaphor for the end of summer, but it was really just a good ride.

Perfection is unlikely, but we can keep trying

Apparently, I’ve forgotten how to surf.

It’s a very frustrating situation. I got up early, put on a soggy wetsuit in the cold, hit the beach and floated around for an hour, drifting south faster than I could paddle north.

I could see waves and I could remember the process involved in catching them – I just couldn’t seem to carry it out.

It’s funny how rarely things turn out the way you expect.

That’s life.

We start out with an idea, maybe we daydream about the best possible results, and sometimes that’s all we manage. Sometimes we act on those ideas and try to work out a plan to bring that ideal to reality. Then we get to work.

One nice takeoff over the weekend. He pulled off a good long ride.

Dawn patrol is getting later, the water is cooling and the beach is emptying out, but the lineup is still packed, at least on weekends, and the waves just keep coming.

Most years September is clear and loaded with blue skies, but this year there has been a steady roil of gray overhead. But for the past two weekends, an overcast Saturday gave way to a spectacular sunset to the west and a huge rainbow over the ocean on the other side.

The rides are there, at least for those who know how and where to catch them.

There were plenty of closeout sets as well, and some rough water. Over the weekend I managed one nice long left, and a bunch of spectacular wipeouts, as I tried to find a clean line in a pretty steep wave.

Hurricane Katia threw some big waves at Cape May County on Friday

As the old surfer saying goes, September separates the kooks from the shredders.

OK, that’s a saying I made up over the weekend while trying to slog out through a whitewater blast that knocked me and my longboard over and back toward the beach.

I thought I had timed everything right. I thought I had enough speed. I thought I’d make it over, but instead, it was fins up, nose over, and me holding on as best I could before ending up back where I started in waist-deep water.

The waves were strong, but nothing compared to the Katia-powered swell on Friday, when I stayed on the beach with a camera. Those waves were big, and strong, and many slammed shut with a 20-foot-tall backwash.

Hurricane Katia threw some big waves at Cape May County on Friday. At the Ocean City Boardwalk on Friday morning, surfers had a hard time getting out to the break through powerful whitewater, and once out, currents quickly took them south, but a few surfers managed some rides. Conditions were expected to improve later in the day, and forecasts call for smaller waves over the weekend.

Photos by Bill Barlow

Sometimes dolphin come close to surfers. According to Bob Schoelkopf, the director of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center, federal law says humans cannot interfere with what a dolphin is doing, but there are no such laws about dolphin coming up to people.

… and some of them bite

The lifeguards were finishing up for the day in Ocean City. In fact, the beach patrol had packed up the stand for this beach at the south end before the start of the holiday weekend, which meant the nearest lifeguard was blocks away.

Still, there were plenty of people around on this early Sunday evening, and at this moment, most of them were on their feet, staring at the break, many pointing or gesturing, some inching into the water.

Was it a rescue, or someone who needed rescue? The waves weren’t very rough, but could someone have gotten in trouble out there? Wait a minute, the people on the beach were smiling.

Dolphin.

Sunday threw some big waves our way.

Is everybody tired of talking about Irene yet?

Did you stay, where’d you go, when did you get back? Did you surf, and when?

For the record, I got in on Monday, and was content to merely point a camera at the big swell with the curl near the Music Pier in Ocean City on Sunday night.

The biggest waves were a mess, but later, when Irene was beating up Vermont, came the cleaner, surfable waves.

It also brought in some humbling moments for us summer surfers, who are more used to easing in to ripples than suicide drops.

The paddle out was longer, and tougher, and no matter where I went or how I timed it I’d be struggling into the teeth of the next set, pushing against a wall of whitewater and arriving at the lineup gasping for breath and collapsing on the board.

Eager to conceal my innate kookdom, I’d bandy about practiced phrases like “These are fun little waves,” or “The real swell is gone, but I figured I’d paddle out tonight, too.” I don’t think I fooled anyone.

Most of us have been there, on one side or the other. It’s a big ocean, but it can be crowded, and let’s face it, surfing takes up a lot of room. You need a particular kind of wave, and if things go right, hundreds of feet of empty to make a nice run.

So sometimes there’s a certain amount of frustration when someone pops up where you don’t want them.

Seen from the other side, maybe you’re just trying to enjoy a nice time at the beach, take a quick jump in the ocean – which belongs to everybody, right? – and suddenly there’s some surfer yelling at you. He was about a half a block away a minute ago.

Or you want to get started on this whole surfing thing yourself, and what better way than to get in the water where all the surfers congregate? Only when you get out there, it becomes clear most of the surfers would rather you took up knitting and left the break entirely.

But that’s not how it always goes.