Santa Barbara County The father of surfing in Santa Barbara was a lifeguard named Gates Foss, who started surfing a plank in 1929, then went south to meet with Pete Peterson to get blueprints for Tom Blake hollow-board construction. Foss pioneered surfing at Three Mile (now called Rincon) back in 1934. He and other lifeguards were also first at Jalama, Refugio, and most of the other Santa Barbara area beaches in the ’40s and ’50s. Gates (appropriately) had keys to the Ranch gates, and surfed the spots out to Point Conception with his friend Ken Kesson as early as 1957. Story is, El Capitan Beach was first ridden by Paul Hodgert and Tom Lenzie (also Santa Barbara guards) in 1958. In the mid-1950s, Rincon and the other Santa Barbara spots, become the winter escape for wave-starved Malibu surfers like Mickey Dora, Lance Carson, Dewey Weber, Kemp Aaberg, and Bob Cooper. After glassing boards for Hobie and learning the art of shaping from Velzy, Reynolds Yater came north and opened his Santa Barbara Surf Shop in the fall of 1959. Soon after, Cooper moved up and stayed until highway expansion buried his beachfront house and a surf spot called Stanleys in 1969. In 1962, a Montecito kid named George Greenough built a 7’8” ‘baby’ surfboard, but never rode it much, as he took up knee-riding instead. In 1965, he created his first flexible fiberglass spoon (the revolutionary Velo), which he took with him to Australia, where he met Bob McTavish, thus initiating the cross-pollination that led to the shortboard revolution of ’67-’68. An asocial, mysto character who flew under the radar, Greenough epitomized an individualistic, non-commercial approach to surfing that inspired other local surfers, as reflected in Santa Barbara’s reputation as a “black wetsuit” zone. It follows then, that SB’s most famous competitive surfer, Tom Curren, proved to be one of the most private, low-key champs of all time, with a penchant for riding logo-free surfboards. Another product of Al Merrick’s Channel Islands Surfboard dynasty, SB’s Kim Mearig was an equally straightforward champion (’83-’84), adding more proof that the area’s waves are capable of producing top talent. Santa Barbara surfers – and therefore the range of surfing experiences here – vary widely. North county surfers tend to be more hardy and prone to ride big surf, while south county surfers are more accustomed to smaller, mellower waves in tamer surroundings. North county is harsh and unpredictable, precisely the opposite of the sheltered south, where the ocean can honestly look like a lake on any given day.
Ventura County Sandwiched between the glitz of Los Angeles and downtown Santa Barbara, mostly-rural Ventura County is a melting pot of SoCal and CenCal surf mentalities – surfers of all ages, races, and sexes, the vast majority friendly, down-to-earth types. But, as you may have heard, there have been a few bad apples. Territorial enforcement has resulted in near drownings of non-locals, a few cars burned, a number stolen, numerous boards broken or fins busted out, wetsuits ripped off, considerable theft of personal possessions from cars, etc. Occasionally, this xenophobic Silver Strands mentality oozes onto adjacent beaches. In September 1995, Oxnard’s David Ortega head-butted Mark Aaron in the chest, breaking a rib, after claiming Aaron wasn’t allowed to surf at Port Hueneme pier. Ortega, then 21, later pleaded no contest to the misdemeanor assault on Aaron, 41, a Santa Monica junior high school teacher. “We went to Hueneme for the first time,” Aaron told the Associated Press. “We pulled over just north of the pier, and we were putting our wetsuits on. Within a few minutes, this guy gets out raving, asking, ‘Where are you from? You can’t surf here.’ We said, ‘We’re from LA.’ He said, ‘Get out of here.’” In May 1996, a Ventura County judge ordered Ortega to five days in jail and banned him from surfing Port Hueneme for three years as a condition of his probation. A few days after the sentencing, Ortega was caught surfing Hueneme, netting him six months of jail time. Of course, such cases are isolated; although certain spots (like the Santa Clara River mouth and Silver Strand) don’t put out welcome mats for strangers, you’re generally safe anywhere in the county. What you might find lacking in friendliness will most likely be made up in wave quality. Surfing has come a long way in Ventura County since its breaks were first ridden in the 1930s, Rincon by Gates Foss and other Santa Barbara guys, the Overhead by Santa Monica surfers like Porter Vahn, Joe Quigg, Tommy Zahn, Bob Simmons, Buzzy Trent, and Matt Kivlin, Point Mugu by any number of LA explorers. While Rincon, the Overhead, and C Street had considerable caché in the ’50s and ’60s, Oxnard attracted notice in 1972, when locals Malcolm and Duncan Campbell invented the “Bonzer” surfboard – a three-fin configuration with twin-concaves in the tail.
Los Angeles County Aside from the three visiting Hawaiians who may or may not have stood to ride the surf in Santa Cruz in 1885, Los Angeles County is where California surf culture all began. The founding padre of the tribe was George Freeth, the 23-year-old Irish-Hawaiian brought to Long Beach by Henry Huntington to wow the crowds at the terminus of his new rail line, Redondo Beach. Tom Blake was a Santa Monica lifeguard in the 1920s and was the first to surf Malibu, along with Sam Reid. Duke Kahanamoku acted in Hollywood and could just as well have been first, since he gave an exhibition of surfboard riding off the Hotel Virginia in 1922 (before a crowd of some 5,000 persons). At the time, Freeth’s influence had already spread. “Local boys held their own with the Duke when it came to riding the boards,” the Los Angeles Daily Telegram reported. Los Angeles was the seedbed of California surf culture; these were the beaches from which emerged Pete Peterson, Bob Hogan, Bob Simmons, Joe Quigg, Dave Velzy, Greg Noll, Miki Dora and Dewey Weber and a thousand other notables, not to mention the all-but-forgotten discovery generation of the ’30s and ’40s: Haig Priest, Chauncey Granstrom, Marian Cook, Johnny Dale, Marold Eystone, Mel Crawford, Hoppy Swarts, and Mike Stange. This is where surfers got a look at themselves through the lenses of Doc Ball and LeRoy Grannis, where there were surf clubs and where the first surfboard store was established (Velzy with Hap Jacobs in 1950). The contrast of contemporary Los Angeles with the world these surfers once knew could scarcely be more extreme. By Y2K, LA boasted the largest urban surfing population in the US and was the nation’s most populous county. As you might expect, the line-ups in LA are almost always crowded; there are no secret spots. If you’re seeking solitude and tranquility, LA is not advised. But if you do surf here, you’ll find a most diverse group of surfers, generally all urban folk accustomed to surfing in smoggy air and semi-polluted water at spots with a backdrop of noisy streets, tall buildings, condos, boardwalks, restaurants, dense tracts of beach homes, with the occasional natural outcropping of rock or reef. Tensions run high in many line-ups; longboards and shortboards collide along with the young and the old. Such is the habitat of the modern LA surfer. A few places are particular ‘hot spots’ for bad vibes – you’ve got the renowned Lunada Bay, a rocky horseshoe cove on the Palos Verdes Peninsula with a pretty epic righthand reef at its north end. Capable of holding up to 20 feet, Lunada is one of the few bona fide big-wave spots in Southern California, and it’s also one of the few places where the local surfers manage to make the six o’clock news. For years, a victim’s code of silence protected the already-sheltered “Bay Boys,” an odd clan of affluent surfers who live in PV Estates, an enclave of affluence in this relative wilderness area. All apparently grown men, they had a reputation for harassing visiting surfers – hurling rocks, waxing windshields, deflating tires, flapping their mouths, and worse. It has generally had the desired effect, causing outsiders to simply surf elsewhere to avoid possible hassles. After a particularly egregious period of harassment, intimidation, vandalism and physical violence, the South Bay Chapter of Surfrider teamed up with the PVE police, the LA County Sheriff’s Dept, Surfline.com, and a coalition of surfers and other beach users to make the area safe and accessible to all. The anti-localism effort involves a “call before you surf” check in with PVE police, a waterproof camera loan program for documentation of incidents, web-camera monitoring, and so on, along with beach clean-ups. The hope is the program will serve as a pilot for other beaches. Pity it’s needed.
Orange County Just about the trendiest, flashiest, most image-driven surf culture in California, Orange County is the epicenter of the global surf industry. It’s the birthplace of contemporary surf style, ground zero for most of the great surfboard design and technology innovations, and the headquarters of the world’s leading surf magazines. Surfer magazine was founded by John Severson in 1960 and still collects its mail at the Dana Point post office. Surfing (the mag) started a couple of years later and is now headquartered in San Clemente, right across the street from the offices of The Surfer’s Journal. And LongBoard is just one exit down the I-5. In fact, much of what you see in the worldwide surf marketplace comes out of Orange County – the place is the surf biz Mecca of North America. As with many of America’s prime areas, surfing was carried into Orange County on the broad shoulders of Duke Kahanamoku himself, who first surfed at Corona Del Mar on his grand tour of America’s beaches following his Gold Medal performance at the 1912 Olympics in Sweden. In 1925, Duke demonstrated the surfboard’s utility as a lifesaving device by rescuing 8 of the 12 survivors from a boat that was capsized by a big set off Corona. The following year, Duke surfed Huntington Beach for the first time, and the locals quickly took up the torch. The first surfing club on the mainland, the Corona Del Mar Surf Board Club, was founded in 1928. The same year, Tom Blake dominated the paddle race at the First Annual Pacific Coast Surf Board Championships (held at Balboa) on his original 1926 Hawaiian Hollow Surfboard. It was Matt Brown, Harrison, and the Corona crew that first surfed Laguna Beach in the late ’20s and Dana Point in 1935. When the channel at Corona was dredged to 60ft (18m) deep in 1935, effectively killing the surf spot, San Onofre (just over the San Diego County line) became the getaway of choice for Southern Orange County surfers. Fed by the frequent migrations of Harrison and others to Hawaii, San Onofre became the prototypical Polynesian-inspired California bohemian beach scene. Meanwhile, the San O crew explored the cluster of South Orange County pointbreaks to the immediate north – Church, Lower Trestles, Upper Trestles, and Cottons Point, one of the best S-swell spots on the coast. Today, vacant line-ups are virtually unheard of anywhere in Orange County. What was once a tranquil farming and orchard region with a bucolic necklace of quaint coastal villages is now an unfortunate example of rampant suburbia, cookie-cutter housing tracts, spotless luxury cars, a seemingly endless stream of new residents who come for the business opportunities and undiluted sunshine, and freeways as jammed as the line-ups. If it is serenity coupled with epic surf you seek, you will not find much of it in Orange County. Expect plenty of surfers with rude attitudes, likely due to the hustle-hype pace of the area and the lack of high quality waves. Localism is hard to pin down here, since it’s virtually impossible to tell who’s local and who isn’t. Although it’s generally accepted that keeping any spot exclusive and uncrowded is hopeless, many spots have pecking orders, notably the fickle reefs of Laguna. It’s easy to blend into Orange County – simply follow the herd, and make sure you bring enough quarters for the parking meters. If nothing else, visit Orange County for its surf history, and for a first person look at what you’ve been fed by the magazines and videos all these years.
San Diego County The history of surfing in San Diego County is a deep, rich vein, starting in 1916, when Duke Kahanamoku demonstrated the Polynesian rite of walking on water off Ocean Beach in San Diego. It was here that the great George Freeth expired in April of 1919 of influenza, contracted after strenuous lifesaving work in storm conditions off Oceanside; he was just 35. Then in 1933, Bill Sides, Lorrin Harrison, Willy Grigsby, and Bill Hollingsworth checked the waves at San Onofre, surfed all the breaks, and finally settled at the spot where a Hollywood movie crew had built and abandoned a nice palm-thatch shack to set up their perennial surf camp. Other early San O players included Ethyl Harrison, Mary Ann Hawkins and Barney “Doakes” Wilkes. In 1937, freshly arrived from flying Jennies over Long Island and helping Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic, Woodbridge “Woody” Parker Brown III paddles his home-made surfboard out at Windansea in La Jolla and rides the first wave there. Woody also was the first to launch his glider off the wind-blown bluffs of Torrey Pines. In 1947, modeled after San Onofre’s, the first palm-roofed shack was built at Windansea, the first luaus are held there, and the San Diego (later Windansea) Surf Club began (Hoppy Swarts was first president). A large storm swept away the first shack in ’49, but was soon rebuilt and the luaus resumed, eventually attracting huge crowds. It was here, in June of 1950, that a gang of Malibu guys arrived with their new rockered Joe Quigg balsa boards, which the San Diego guys tagged as “potato chips.” About that time, Mike Diffenderfer shaped his first surfboard out of balsa in the street at Bird Rock, because his father wouldn’t let him mess up the house. And it was at Windansea, on Sept 26, 1954, that Bob Simmons drowned in good-sized surf. His body was found three days later by Bob Ekstrom. Ten years later, Skip Frye and some Windansea friends made the first documented surf trip to Isla Todos Santos in Baja. In 1966, Nat Young upset the surfing universe with his World Contest win at Ocean Beach on the radical surfboard known as “Sam.” The following year, the Windansea Surf Club traveled en masse to Australia and was shocked to discover the Aussies riding short vee-bottom surfboards, thus bringing first word of the revolution back to the States. Five years later, the World Contest returned to town, a miserable event that plunged competition surfing into a malaise. That was about the time “Rus” Preisendorfer’s Canyon Surfboards wanted to “Put a little music in your surfing!” And on and on … yes … San Diego has surf history. Even today, this is a great place to be a surfer, as thousands (millions?) have discovered … a great place if you don’t mind sharing the water with 50 of your best friends at any given spot during any decent sort of swell. North county especially has seen a sharp increase in surfing population due to runaway development, mostly east of the eight-lane I-5 freeway. Nevertheless, San Diego surfers are typically a friendly breed, many of them newcomers to the area; but there’s also a longstanding history of surfers claiming rights to certain spots, notably the Sunset Cliffs area. Still, localism lays quite low save for the random incident. San Diego County is the essence of Southern California, and flavors of nearby Mexico abound. Surfers are accustomed to drive-up surf spots, with some of the best spots right in front of major roads or housing developments. Much of the coast is shoulder-to-shoulder with expensive homes, as basically all of the county’s beach towns are affluent to some degree here, where rain is rare and sunshine is the rule. Cloudy days keep a lot of people away from the beaches, indicative of the SoCal mentality. There are so many surfers in San Diego, it’s impossible to tell who is a local and who’s not, or who has been living in the county for more than two years, so the traveling board-toting soul shouldn’t have a problem fitting in. It’s not called “America’s Finest City” for nothing.
