California’s best surfing is clearly, absolutely in the South (if you live here) or North (if you like dying)

Few people appreciate a sunrise like the dawn patrol surfer. Just

offshore from the concrete treadmill, while the snooze-button masses rub dream-boogers from their eyes, the sky blooms deep purple, gets tangled up in orange and then electric blue. Maybe dolphins commute through the breakers. Maybe the wave face refracts golden spirals as you barrel down the line of your last ride of the morning. And then, OK, maybe just one more. Familiar faces straggle into the lineup. So you’re a bit late for work. A bit salty. Sand between your toes. Perfumed in Sex Wax and Zinka. No worries. This is Southern California.

In the near future, when the parks and rec departments in Detroit, Chicago and other cities commission artificial surfing waves in giant indoor gymnasiums, they will model them on Malibu. On Rincon. On Trestles. They will model them on the waves of Southern California. Long, racy point breaks. Warm water. Easy paddles. Gentle take-offs and playful sections. Lifeguards watching. Bikinis baking. Concessions open. This is the dream. This is what the Beach Boys went platinum over.

While the tropical, stand-up tubes of surf meccas such as Hawaii and Tahiti will always remain the purist pinnacle of surfing athleticism, the best place to simply BE a surfer is the stretch of coast between Santa Barbara and San Diego. Here you can cruise five-star dining in your flip-flops. High schools offer surfing as a team sport. The evening news provides tomorrow’s surf report. There are long summer days and big winter swells. You can surf any time of year, often without a wetsuit, at a value menu of breaks. And if the plague of fun-boarding newbies gets under your hard-core-guy skin, you can lash your shred-stick to the roof and bolt toward Baja, where’s there’s plenty of machismo, empty waves and off-road shenanigans to tote back to work on Monday.

Ah, work on Monday. The swells fade, but the grind marches on. Which is the beauty of being a surfer in SoCal. You can live and thrive amid all this urban McTopia, you can punch the clock at your Costco nightshift or crack the whip at your billion-dollar Velcro Triangle conglomerate, and then, with one step, enter the sudden wilderness of the ocean. Just man versus nature. The rips and currents. The waves and critters. The city and freeway may never leave your sight, but the moment your feet hit the water, you’re gone as gone gets. Which is the one thing those wave gyms in Boise and Minneapolis cannot replicate. That, and the silent symphony of a dawn patrol sunrise.

--By Nathan Myers

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The answer to why I turned down two Orange County job

offers this year comes on a Tuesday morning, after the runoff from a month of rain stops and the weekend warriors have gone back to work. It’s 50 degrees and windless, finally. The sun edges above the rotund windmills of Golden Gate Park, commuters race eastbound on Fulton Street and I’m cruising south on the Great Highway, sipping coffee, snug in a zip hoodie, 6-foot-2 squaretail lying in the back of the car.

I stop at the cross street where last week’s sandbar was, hoping it’s still there and cranking out waves. At this hour, 8 o’clock, Ocean Beach is sparsely populated with dog walkers, Filipino fishermen wading with long poles into the soup, a cluster of Asian women doing tai chi, a couple of washed-up telephone poles poking out of the dunes and a homeless man who curses loudly at joggers as he plows his shopping cart through the sand.

The waves are head high, with bigger sets rolling through every 10 minutes or so. Peaky. A little warbly, but hitting the sandbars with enough force to throw the odd blast of spit from inside a tube. A dozen guys out. I tug on the thick wetsuit, yank on the booties and wax up. Back over the dune and into the water. I get hammered while pushing through the shore break, slammed to the bottom by way of a rag-doll cartwheel. The current sucks me down the beach apace with the dog walkers. By the time I get outside, to the takeoff zone, I’m comfortably winded, with a slight ice-cream headache.

Although mild by local standards, the waves are punchy, hollow and raw--disorderly. The peaks shift up and down, dispersing the surfers into a democratic lineup. On SoCal’s predictable and easy peaks, I know from experience that it’s the grumpiest guy or the guy with the longest board or the hottest young ripper who gets the best waves. Up here, from Santa Cruz’s Steamer Lane all the way to the state line, everyone gets a crack at catching a gem.

Which brings me to the point I make to the head hunters who’ve tried to woo me south. Southern California’s tidy maze of freeways, mini-mansions and strip malls extends to its surf breaks. Sure, there’s plenty of parking and fewer sharks, but even for a big-wave wuss like me, there’s no wildness in it, no sense of being immersed in something bigger than me. Afloat off Ocean Beach, looking north toward the untamed possibilities of West Marin, east toward the city and south at a really good wave, I dig in and start paddling.

--By Marcus Sanders