San Luis Obispo

San Luis Obispo surf travel guide

Kicked-back San Luis Obispo County or “SLO” for short, does not have a pointbreak along its' bucolic, 85-mile stretch of coastline, though connoisseurs of fickle beachbreaks and quirky reefs might find SLO intriguing. Rocky inlets and heaps of seals, sea lions, and elephant seals are hallmarks of the shore, as are excruciatingly slow tourist traffic, bitter onshore wind, and velvety-green marine terraces. Random, medium-quality reefs and spotty beachbreaks line the Highway 1 coast down through Cambria, where tourists are the norm and B&Bs rule the roost. Few secrets remain, as far as SLO surf spots go. Since Morro Bay’s beach faces due west, any and every kind of swell hits the sandbars there, occasionally converting an ordinary California beachbreak into a magical mile or two of feathering A-frames and vomiting tubes. Besides Hazard Canyon, Morro Rock is the most famous spot in SLO County, and it’s usually crowded. Below Morro Bay is a big knob of earth best known for the lovely Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant and Hazard Canyon. A 24-karat spot and one of the most well-known breaks in California, the Canyon is a serious righthand reef with a legendary local posse. Neither Avila, Shell Beach, Pismo, or Oceano offer much in the way of perfection; rather, it’s whole tractor-trailer loads of beachbreak after beachbreak after friggin’ beachbreak, but for a few quirky reefs below the bluffs at Shell Beach. One of the more consistent and shapely of all Central Coast beachbreaks, the Pismo Beach Pier is the hub of south-county surfing. North of Pismo, Avila Beach can have something during large swells and bouts of that pesky NW wind, but don’t get your hopes up. The area just north of Cayucos can be semi-offshore during N wind, and San Simeon Bay, although not really a surf spot, can prove valuable in times of true desperation.