No Sun, No Spring-Break Party

Spring break came to Newport Beach this week, but Newport Beach went to Palm Springs.

“You can only take so much of Newport Beach,” said Mike Leventhal, Orange Coast College student and manager of a bicycle and skate rental shop near the Balboa Pier. He had just returned from a sunny weekend in Palm Springs, where much of the Newport Beach crowd remained, he said.

The first official day of spring break was marked Monday by a meager shoreline crowd in Newport as fog hugged the coast and brought out goose bumps on die-hard beachgoers. Air and water shared a chilly temperature of 60 degrees.

Under a sky the color of a scoured aluminum pot, Dawnella Vickers, 14, and her friends packed up their towels and beach chairs after 45 minutes on the sand early Monday afternoon.

“You can’t even see the water from here,” said Dawnella, who lives in Orange, as she squinted at the ocean, about 100 feet away. “We’re going to Palm Springs tomorrow.”

Palm Springs appears to be to Southern Californian students what Fort Lauderdale is to their Eastern counterparts. It’s where the in crowd goes to party.

What does Palm Springs have that Newport Beach doesn’t?

“Sun and people,” said Dawnella. “It’s a big pick-up spot,” said Matt McLaren, 18, who was spending his spring break from Newport Harbor High School sitting in a Newport Beach lifeguard tower. Lake Havasu, he said, also is in with his friends this year.

“Saturday (in Palm Springs) was a zoo,” said Leventhal, 22. There were so many out-of-town visitors converging on the desert town that “it took me 2 1/2 hours just to drive around a single block,” he said.

By contrast, the Balboa boardwalk was clear sailing. The most excitement it saw Monday afternoon occurred when two eye-catching models--their tiny tropical-print bathing suits topped by Carmen Miranda-style fruit-adorned headpieces--walked along the stretch to the heckles of a convertible full of young men.

Even to party-loving young Newport residents, the beach town “gets so monotonous,” Leventhal said after the models walked by. “You need to just get away.”

Still, Leventhal said, if you have to work, Ocean Front Wheel Works--the rental shop--can’t be beat. Business was slow Monday because of the fog and the cold, he said. “But I still meet girls.”

But according to Dawnella and her friends, who were leaving the beach near the Balboa Pier, the best place to meet boys is up the coast a bit, near the Newport Pier.

“This is where you go if you’re white (untanned) and ugly,” said Dawnella, a ninth-grader at Santiago Junior High School. When they’ve tanned themselves to a presentable brown, the girls usually go to Newport to meet boys, she said. The beach around Balboa Pier is more popular with the “white-skinned fat old ladies with their kids, or the punk rockers,” she said.

Newport lifeguard McLaren observed that the people who came to the beach Monday obviously lived inland, where it was sunny, “because the people who live here knew what the weather was like . . . . But now that they’ve spent the time to come down here, they’ve got to stay.”

Up and down the coast, city and state lifeguards went on “spring schedule,” opening some of the towers normally closed for the season and calling in extra help as needed for the anticipated spring-break crowds.

Lifeguard officials placed the Newport and Balboa crowd at about 35,000 Monday. Up in Huntington Beach, about 18,000 turned out at the city beach. Officilas put the number along the 11-mile stretch of Bolsa Chica and Huntington state beaches at about 70,000 Monday, whereas there were about 120,000 there Saturday, which was sunny and hot, said lifeguard John O’Rourke.

“They all came down (from inland areas). They just didn’t stay,” O’Rourke said.

Judging from the litter, the favorite beach lunch fare in Newport consisted of a wine cooler, cookies, chips and bean dip. The crowd, what there was of it, was well-behaved Monday, said Officer Mark Hassell as he walked his beat along the beach and business district in Balboa.

“But today’s not a good beer-drinking day,” Hassell said.

Police have returned to walking beats in the area, he said, to increase their visibility and thereby discourage unruly behavior.

“If we’re here and the kids are here to make trouble, they’ll knock it off,” Hassell said. The presence of the police keeps things in control “so people aren’t intimidated to bring their families here,” he said.

But after seven years with the department, he has seen the spring-break crowds decline.

“It’s getting smaller and smaller every year,” Hassell said, surveying the shore. “Apparently everyone either goes to the (Colorado) river or to Palm Springs.”