The forecast wasn't good. The light is flat, the sky has nothing in it, and the swell looks like it might not hold for another hour. They went anyway.

Nobody else is on the beach. Two people carrying boards across the wet sand, already committed, already too far out to change their minds without feeling foolish about it. The headland sits in the haze the way it always does, unbothered.

Some days you wait for the conditions. Other days you accept that this is what you get, and you get in the water.