April is the Gnarliest Month When I began surfing in New York in the mid 1990s, it was a seasonal sport, something done from late May until around Thanksgiving. Bowing to the cold each fall was hard, especially since the waves are often best at that time of year, with large, slow-moving storms sending one swell after another and the light taking on a stern, northern beauty. But if you really wanted to surf year-round, you found a way to live in California. This changed about a decade ago, when significantly warmer and more flexible wet suits came on the market. Since then, a growing number of New Yorkers have taken to scampering over snow-encrusted sand in neoprene booties to paddle into an Atlantic Ocean where temperature can dip into the mid-30s. I was skeptical at first, but couldn't resist buying one of the new and improved wet suits myself. After spending upward of $400, I felt I was ready to join the hard-core year-rounders of New York. I was wrong. I found I could set my alarm for 6 a.m. all I liked on the day of good surf in December, but when I woke in the frigid pre-dawn, I'd nestle under the down comforter and go back to sleep. I realized I'd secretly welcomed the annual enforced hibernation, the chance to devote myself to my work without always watching for the next, typically fleeting swell, then putting everything on hold to catch it. And I'd underestimated how deeply marked I was by having grown up surfing in Florida. What happens is my desire to surf plummets with the temperature. And without that urge, what's the point? So I do use my expensive, state-of-the-art wet suit, but only when spring arrives, when the air is warm but the water temperature still hovers in the 40s, and I need every millimeter of neoprene the suit has to offer. When the urge strikes me in April, I have two tricks I use to overcome my subtropical reluctance to re-entering the stingingly cold Atlantic. One: I put the wet suit on in my warm house instead of at the chillier beach. And two, I go on what Australians, those great innovators of surf slang, call a "regardo" - that is, I head for the beach committed to paddle out regardless of how poor the surf turns out to be when I get there. The regardo is a response to the fact that surfers are a fickle, indecisive species, inclined to waver and wonder whether the waves might be better in an hour or elsewhere or tomorrow, to delay and second-guess themselves out of taking the plunge and actually surfing. This tendency is all the stronger when the water is New York-cold. The route I take to the beach from Clinton Hill, my neighborhood in Brooklyn, is direct but grim. The longest leg is straight east out Atlantic Avenue alongside the sooty elevated track of the Long Island Rail Road, past grimy auto-repair garages, truck-parking lots, appliance outlets, moving and storage companies. I get through it as fast as I can, occasionally too fast: last fall I was sent a traffic ticket with a photo of my car, surfboard strapped to the roof, caught halfway across an intersection below a red light. On the day of my first regardo this April, I got stuck behind a cement truck belching foul black smoke that poured over my windshield and leached into the car's interior. It's in moments like these that I can become flickeringly convinced that nonsurfers are working to prevent from me reaching the waves. On the wide trashy median of South Conduit Boulevard, where I once glimpsed a hawk disemboweling a pigeon, a tractor-mower was cutting grass, blithely shredding the litter that lay scattered on the ground. At that point I could have cut my trip short and gone directly to the Rockaways, a strip of land at the southern tip of Queens. A generalization I heard early on about New York surf is that the farther east on Long Island, the better the waves. In my experience, that often turns out not to be the case. Due to the shape of the seafloor along the coast near New York Harbor, good, deep-reaching swells can be funneled to western Long Island beaches by a trench called the Hudson Canyon. The canyon was carved into the floor by the tides of the Hudson River 10,000 years ago, during the last ice age. This bathymetric feature is what gives the surf near New York City its powerful, barreling shape, whereas on some eastern beaches, like Fire Island, the surf is generally weaker. The Hamptons and Montauk, at the far eastern tip, are another story, with their own distinct bathymetric advantages. But I find the apartment blocks looming over the Rockaway shoreline depressing, and by driving another 20 or 30 minutes I can cross out of New York City and arrive at a beach in Long Island where there are dunes and rose hips and red-winged blackbirds. That day in April, the parking lot at my bucolic beach town - which shall be nameless due to having already become too popular for its own good - was nearly empty. Not a good sign. It was late morning on a weekday, I reminded myself. People had to work. I drove to the far corner and pulled up beside the only other car there. Its owner, a middle-aged man, walked up in a dripping wet suit with a surfboard tucked beneath one arm. In the spirit of the regardo, I had scrupulously avoided checking the webcams that monitor the surf all along the beach. How is it? I asked him. The man grimaced. My heart sank, but I held out hope that he was exaggerating, or even too inexpert to judge properly. It was O.K. when I first got out, but it's done now. He took note of the short, high-performance board I had optimistically brought. Good luck riding that! We chatted for a bit about predictions for another swell. Then I locked up the car and walked along a gravel road toward the entrance to the beach. The day had been sunny, but now a gauzy, quilted cloud-cover gave everything a wintry cast. Cresting the low dune, I saw that the surf was indeed very small and weak. There were no surfers out. I felt the terms of the regardo were being sorely tested, but the scrub flora glowing newly green lifted my spirits. I half-buried my car key in the sand, marked the spot with a piece of driftwood, waxed my board and walked into the shore break. The water, where tattered bits of seaweed swirled, was gray and very cold. I plunged in and paddled out. Thad Ziolkowski directs the writing program at Pratt Institute and is the author of the memoir "On a Wave" and the novel "Wichita."