Yes, this should be against the law. Probably always. Photo: JP Van Swae
I just had to laugh. I was recently reading an online lament by a young, top-ranked pro surfer from San Clemente, California. With a palpable tone of anguish, he decried overcrowding in the Lower Trestles lineup, pointing to the crush of surfers who currently pack the famous Lowers peak during anything even resembling a pulse of southern swell. So sad, he asserted, harkening back to golden days of yore, when a tuned-in San Clemente local could cruise down the trail and enjoy the fruits of the fabled cobblestone reef alongside a tight squad of fellow Trestles regulars, unhindered by the hordes of outsiders fighting for parking up on S. El Camino Real.
You know, like, back in 2017.
I mean, who is he kidding? In 1971, President Richard Nixon (with the help of Governor Reagan) facilitated a 50-year lease with the U.S. Navy, designating the whole Trestles region as a state park. This being decades before the internet, it probably took many months before the news got around, even more before it was proved to be true, and so I’d give it about a year before the waves of Trestles would’ve been considered crowded by any surfer who used to sneak in back when it was off-limits Camp Pendleton property; I first surfed Lowers in the early 1980s, and it was already really crowded, many years before the young San Clemente pro in question was even born.
To be fair, however, it’s understandable that the latest generation of surfers, and even some from the one before, despair at the current level of attendance at virtually every surf spot on Earth. Recent video clips have shown lineups at premier breaks like Spain’s Mundaka and Sumatra’s Lagundri Bay appear as if in the midst of a fiberglass salmon spawn; I saw a photo of an e-bike thicket at Lowers that resembled an IKEA parking lot on a busy Saturday. And it’s not just these prime surf spots — just about everybody’s waves seem more crowded these days. That fact is undeniable. But is our pervasive culture of complaint — the collective whining and gnashing of teeth over crowded surfing conditions — justifiable? The question I’ve been pondering lately might help provide an answer: How old do you have to be to remember uncrowded waves?
(A caveat: I’m talking about surf spots accessible to, and surfable by, the general surfing populace, which excludes certain mega-waves, dangerous slabs and extremely remote “dream waves.”)
I’ll use my own experience as a point of reference. I began surfing in Hawaii in 1967, at age 11. Queens and Canoes, where I learned to surf, were already crowded. So was Number Threes, Kaisers, Ala Moana, Kewalo Basin, Ewa Beach, Makaha, Haleiwa, Chunns Reef — all breaks I frequented between 1967 and 1970. By looking at photos and footage of those breaks, and many others on Oahu, at least, I’d estimate that to have surfed them uncrowded you would’ve paddled out at least five years before I did — 10 years, if we’re talking about Makaha, and 50 years for Waikiki. Meaning that very few surfers my age, at that time, surfed any of those breaks uncrowded.
I moved to Northern California in the summer of 1970, where I rode my first Mainland waves at the Wild Hook, in Santa Cruz. It was crowded. Pleasure Point was crowded. Cowells and Steamer Lane were really crowded; in 1974, a friend and I stood on the bluff above the Lane and, counting from the Point through the Indicator section, tallied 220 surfers.
I first surfed Huntington Beach Pier in 1972 — packed. Ocean Beach and Fort Point in ’73 — bunch of older guys ruled. Rincon in ‘75 — banging rails. Tortola, in the Caribbean, in ‘78 — East Coasters galore. Queensland’s Gold Coast, Sydney’s beaches and Victoria’s Bells Beach in ‘79 — crowded, crowded, crowded. Durban and J-Bay in ‘81 — man, you should’ve been here yesterday. Sebastian Inlet in ‘83 — don’t even think about First Peak. You see where I’m going with this? To have surfed any of these spots uncrowded, you would’ve had to be there at least 10 years ahead of me. Meaning that even first surfing them as a pre-teen, you would’ve had to be older than me.
Legendary surf stalwart Mickey Muñoz once told me how back in the late 1950s he and fellow teenager Mickey Dora used to lug their big balsa boards up the beach to the zone we now know as Trestles, just to escape the crowds at San Onofre. About the same time, Floridian surfing pioneers Dick Catri and Jack “Murph the Surf” Murphy were exploring the coastline south of Cocoa Beach, in an effort to escape the crowds at that nascent East Coast epicenter; by 1975, Australia’s performance pace-setter Wayne Lynch had essentially quit surfing Bells Beach and retreated to remote, sharkier points south, citing over-crowded conditions.
Taking all of this data into consideration, it’s pretty easy to conclude that in almost every circumstance, surfers my age and younger have grown up surfing crowded waves. Just how crowded — well that’s another issue, although the term “relative” comes to mind. A surfer sitting in a scrum of 90 others at Pipeline might be forgiven waxing nostalgic for days past, when one only “shared” the lineup with 60. But I’m ready to posit that to legitimately bitch about crowded surf “these days,” at just about any surf spot you can name — and I’m being generous here — you’d have to be at least four years older than me. Which puts your age at 72.
Anyone younger than that, quit your yapping and just paddle out and have fun next to all your brothers and sisters, everyone of them out there for the very same reason you are.
