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.

Ocean City, NJ

This is what we have been waiting for.

I have a personal conviction – it borders on a superstition – that one should never speak poorly of an ocean. That applies all the more so if you are planning on spending much time in that ocean, especially when it’s so much older, and bigger and stronger than you.

So I’m not one to complain about the waves.

But between you and me, the waves this summer haven’t been ideal. They were tiny, or choppy, or both. Some days they were close to nonexistent, while others broke about four feet from the beach.

The water would range from bathtub warm to icy, usually dropping quick and without warning – and then there was one day with a big, clean, heavy swell, and the Atlantic’s majesty kicked out these freight trains with a steep vertical drop that seemed designed more to snap spinal columns than to offer a fun day in the sun.

But this week – well, this week was sweet.

The weekend was a little rough. The waves had size and power, but were so choppy it was hard to get any kind of a ride. It wasn’t impossible, but as one surfer told me on the beach, it was a lot of work. Plus, she said, when you took a tumble, you could never tell where the board would land.

Cailin Callahan leads a beach yoga class in Ocean City. The class usually has a lot of surfers, unless the waves are really good.

Two traditions, both very old and each with roots near other oceans, are blending at the Jersey Shore.

It took a little while to even notice. There would be a few more guys in a local yoga class that had been almost all women, and maybe a couple of them were wearing board shorts. More telling, they would be talking about waves before class began, sometimes in detail.

Surfing, meet yoga.

Yoga began millennia ago in ancient India. It has been practiced for an immensely long time. Literally, civilizations have risen and fallen since the practice of combining spiritual practice and body postures began. What is called hatha yoga, the kind most familiar in the United States, is only a few hundred years old.

Like surfing, until pretty recently yoga had a distinctly counterculture feel to it, as if it were restricted to those who loved sandalwood and talked a lot about auras. And, also like surfing, it has gone distinctly mainstream, with yoga mats and other gear now available at Walmart and classes offered in most towns.