Winter surfing in Los Angeles’s South Bay isn’t for the faint of heart. The waves are hollow but the stories you’ve heard of closeouts long enough to cover a city block are real. So if you find yourself walking across the Strand while a solid January northwest is pulsing through, you shouldn’t expect to see anybody actually surfing. There’s no such thing as a channel anywhere between Hermosa Beach and Manhattan Beach and locals know the handful of places they can sneak off to for waves nearby.
Still, there’s always that itch that if you can find a corner, if you’ve been paying attention and watching for the occasional sandbar, and you can catch a lucky break paddling out, the juice is worth the squeeze. At best you can send it over a ledge and pull into a tube with a glimmer of hope for a doggy door exit. But in all likelihood, you’ll roll the dice, think you have a corner, and end up pulling into a dark, dark closeout that pushes sand into parts of your body that should be impossible to reach.
Local filmmaker Brad Jacobson has seen this play out countless times over the years. He’s on it just about every significant swell of the year and has watched more people attempt to paddle out only to give up and wave a white flag than he can remember. But a recent occurrence of this caught his attention specifically because it involved a group of seasoned watermen. Watching them struggle to navigate an overhead day at home puts into perspective just how challenging the place can be.
Shane Gallas, Matt Mohagen, Beck Adler, Alex Fry, and Chad Parks are five local lifeguards who chose to roll those same dice earlier this month and the story of their session puts the reality of South Bay surfing into perspective. They all attempted to paddle out together at a wave known to churn out some of the better rides in the area each winter. The big empty lefts were the light shining at a long, tiring tunnel of paddling out. Four of the five gave it about 15 minutes before gathering themselves and coming back to shore. They weren’t done though. They watched and picked a spot to attempt another go, probably hoping they could weave between a few corners if their timing was right. Meanwhile, Gallas had actually made it out the back with relative ease…errrr, luck.
Attempt number two for the group wasn’t much better. Alex and Chad were first to officially throw in the towel. Thirty minutes of paddling with no window to actually punch through the overhead closeouts, but Shane had pulled into one of those signature local closeout barrels while this was all going down. That was enough to motivate Matt Mohagen to keep his head down and fight his way out as well. When it was all said and done: five lifeguards, infinite duck dives, and just three waves ridden.
