Two weeks ago, the first good swell of the year arrived on our shores at last. Lucky me, I was in Seattle, Washington, at the time, packing my mother's apartment into a truck so I could drive her stuff to Berkeley (where she had decided to flee from Seattle after we left for Sayulita). I was also up there, at long last, 18 months into our life here, to put the Seattle house up for sale. In April, our long goodbye to the USA will enter its last phase.

Meanwhile, I was watching the lovely swell roll through - on my computer screen. This is what you do when you are out of town and yearning for waves - watching colored bands of digital information as they move down the page, delivering waves several thousand miles away. Here is the site, should you want to have a look: http://magicseaweed.com/Mexico-Pacific-MSW-Surf-Charts/19/. There's a sample illustration above.

What I've noticed this year, as opposed to last year, is how the storms coming down the coast off of Baja are breaking up, rather than arriving full force out west of us. The dark blue of tiny swells has hardly ever lightened up to the lighter blues and greens that indicate, on the computer, that a swell of decent size has arrived. Hello, La Nina.

I got to watch the little colored bands moved down the screen. My friends and neighbors, meanwhile, were bagging some excellent waves here in town, as you can see in the pics.

I finally got back on a Sunday, got some fabulous waves all week long, and my fabulous photographer wife Donna Day finally found time between days spent putting her cool new Sayulita photo book together to take a picture of me surfing on a wave at one of my favorite nearby breaks on Thursday, by which time the swell had nearly faded away. Her book is really great, and yes, I'm going to promote it here: http://www.blurb.com/books/1961922.

Since the little swell, of course, we have had that crazy windstorm and accompanying crazy waves. There have been intervals, here and there, during the winds, when the waves here in town were pretty good. On the other side of Punta Mita, on the other hand, this smoking onshore wind was blowing offshore, creating some epic conditions and near-great days at La Lancha, and especially at Burros.

You never know what's next, surfwise, but one unfortunate thing seems fairly certain: we are not going to get a lot of great swells this season and the water is as cold as I, personally, have ever felt it around here. For those interested in the science behind the lack of waves and the cold water, this site-- http://www.stormsurf.com/page2/enso/current.shtml -- is chock-full of hardcore information. Have a look. There's a lot of bad news here, my friends: short term, La Nina, long term, global warming. We just have to roll with it, do what we can to slow down the warming (and its attendant inconveniently cold water) and grab those waves when they show, because they aren't going to show as much this year as last year.