Springtime. The sun hangs longer in the sky, the air warms slightly and the “rainy” season fades away. Normally, spring is cause for celebration, for rebirth, for anticipation of the long, warm days ahead. This year, however, many of us bid adieu to winter with lingering melancholy. We say goodbye to an old friend, a friend who showed up in October bearing the sweetest of gifts, never wearing his welcome. I speak, or course, of El Niño (Spanish for “The Niño”). For the tourist and the precipitation-averse, El Niño’s arrival was a poop in the proverbial punchbowl — dousing sunny San Diego with consistent weekend showers through the month of February. For the surfer, however, El Niño furnished an embarrassment of riches not soon to be forgotten. Aside from supplying our parched state with badly-needed water, our climatologically-constructed guest ushered in the greatest winter surf season in recent memory. A seemingly never-ending line of meaty, long-period swells queued up in the North Pacific window, marching one after another southward before detonating on the sandbars and reefs (especially the reefs) of San Diego. Wave Christmas (or Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa, or Festivus — whatever your bag) started in October and cranked straight through the winter. Pros canceled trips abroad, opting for the superior confines of home. Groms frothed rabidly. Competent riders reconciled fear and bliss. Big wave hellmen studied charts and struck gold. Most beginners sat out. Others were forced out via Neptune’s trident. Some riders came of age. Others faced the reality of age. The rippers, the committed, the weekend warriors, the hobbyists, the boys and the girls, the women and the men — everyone got a taste. Cleanup sets materialized intermittently, but lurked in perpetuity in the psyche. The rooster-tailed peaks of offshore mornings glistened with head-high perfection. Boards were snapped, new ones shaped. The design innovations of last winter’s mediocrity underwent quality assurance testing. It’s overhead again? What else is new? Coffee-surf-burrito. Life fulfilled in simplicity. The oh-nine-oh-ten El Niño: The stuff of legend. To be fair, it wasn’t all glory. The tides and wind often ran interference, the rain ran poison into some of our favorite peaks and many of us spent too many hours locked in 9-5 prisons, trying to get a fix squinting at grainy cams. But these aren’t the things we’ll remember. We’ll remember the fleeting moments of adrenaline — and most likely embellish them. Twenty years from now, standing in some parking lot sipping coffee on our creaky knees, we’ll still be talking about the 09-10 El Niño season, boring some kid to death with stories about that “sick drainer” we caught at the reefs on our old school P/U boards. Adios El Niño. Regrese pronto.