Blood from head to toe

I met Chris Duenas and his son Jonah on the north side of the Imperial Beach Pier.

Before our interview, the waves were about three feet, and Jonah just wiped out on his boogie board while Chris barely got up on his surfboard.

"I just started surfing last summer," Chris said. "I can understand the science behind the wave, but getting on your feet is pretty different than just lying down on it."

Chris, 35, has been boogie boarding for more than 15 years, and because he likes to drop knee on his boogie board, it helped out his transition to hopping up on a surfboard.

He and his family moved from Guam to Imperial Beach two years ago.

"The biggest wave I caught was back home in Guam," he said, "it was a ten-footer but that's just the face. The energy behind it is how they really measure the wave so it was really like a five-footer. In Guam it's different because there are reefs and here it's like beach breaks, so its a lot more safe here."

"I got fokai-ed (slammed) real bad a long time ago in the early 2000s," he said. My buddies were gung-ho and they took me out there to Rock Bottoms (in Guam) and when you're dropping in you can see all of the coral reefs. I wiped out and when I barely stood up, I had blood all over me from head to toe — I got washed up on all of the coral."

Chris said, he learned how to boogie board by watching No Friends Productions VHS videos from the turn of the century — in which some of the footage was allegedly filmed in the same spot where we interviewed.