About two years ago, I was on the beach, speaking with one of my favorite surfers, Andrew Logreco, about the repetition of surf contests and the idea for something new. Within minutes we came up with surf jousting, a primitive event where two surfers charge at each other with padded weapons and attempt to knock their opponent over. The last one standing moves on to the next round. After two years of trying to bring the idea to fruition, things finally came together this year at Switchfoot’s Bro-Am, mainly because of the efforts of the band’s drummer, Chad Butler, who built the lances and those amazingly colorful helmets. It would have been cool too, if only the surf wouldn’t have been so big, forcing Sir Justin Cote’s chinstrap into his neck after rolling an exceptionally big set. Cote’s mishap sent the other competitors into the soup for a less than spectacular spectacle. Next year it’s on, OK?

While the surf was a good size for the Bro-Am, it continued to build through the week, peaking at 4 to 5 feet for 10 days in mid-June with every break in North County firing on all eight, and boards of all shapes and sizes, including everything from sub six-footers to 12-foot stand-up paddlers making their way into the lineup. While June is generally pretty blah in the surf department, outstanding waves, warm water and a heat wave combined to make last month one of the best Junes on record.

I spoke to my buddy Jeff Dowler recently and he told me of what he described as “a massive dorsal fin” at Torrey Pines, trolling only about 100 feet from the break as he and a friend timidly paddled toward shore. Aside from Jeff’s nightmare vision there have been numerous other shark sightings in the vicinity, one surfer reporting that he was actually bumped by something that he thought was a big shark at Table Top, which is just around the corner from this year’s fatal attack by a great white. There was also a rumor going about of a diver who spotted a massive great white shark in the Carlsbad area and I heard of a mangled seal carcass on the beach in Del Mar. Yikes!

The good news is that the water has finally warmed up to a pleasant 72 degrees, and the crowds are somewhat down. The question is whether the crowd decrease is due to gas prices, predators that linger just beyond our imaginations, or a brutal combination of the two.

At this writing, there are rumblings of a new south/west swell approaching North County’s swell window. Soon that swell will be nothing but a memory and we the surfers of North County will be thinking of new boards, like the one that my pal Carl Ekstrom is working on. I’ll let you try it once I get a hold of it. I can’t tell you much about it yet, but it could just change everything. And that’s another column.