I grew up on the beach. This was on the other coast, depending on your orientation. As a teenager summers revolved around surfing. If you wanted glassy well shaped waves you had to get up early. By late morning the onshore winds would pick up and before long the surf resembled a frothy soup. We didn't care much for onshore winds. Some days we'd just sit out there hoping maybe the wind would die down, but it never did. We didn't have anything else to do, other than maybe sit on the beach, so it didn't really matter. The onshore winds cut our fun short, and since wind surfing hadn't been invented yet were pretty much useless as far as we were concerned. On rare days, especially in the Fall when the hurricane swells were coming in the onshore wind would retreat in the face of an offshore wind. The offshore winds would hold up the curls making for the best waves we ever had.
50 years later I'm on the opposite coast (once again depending on your orientation) and living 60 miles from the ocean. I ride 6 miles to work in the morning and 6 miles home in the afternoon. As the days warmed up in the Spring I started noticing my old adversary in my face every afternoon. Now that its Summer that old onshore wind is my constant companion on my rides home from work. It manages to blow over 60 miles and over the coast mountains to try and beat me back. Each day I grunt and bare it, telling myself what a great workout I'm getting. But deep inside I'm just waiting for some monster wind to spring up out of the Cascades and blow that onshore wind back out to sea where it belongs. When that wind comes I'll just sit up and sail on home.
