Best Waves Are as Easy to Find as Dialing 976

Every morning just after the sun rises, Janice Aragon drives to the beach to stare at the waves and gauge the force and direction of the wind.

Then she goes to a nearby telephone booth and waits for the phone to ring.

From Santa Barbara to the Mexican border, 40 other people are doing the same thing. Aragon and her compatriots turn out 365 days a year, in rain and fog, high tide and low.

They are reporters for Surf Line Inc., a 2-year-old Huntington Beach-based company that is taking the hit-and-miss out of Southern California surfers’ never-ending search for the best waves of the day.

In 1986, more than 1 million callers dialed Surf Line--at 95-cents a call--to find out surfing conditions at their favorite beaches.

Surf Line receives 55 cents per call--or about $600,000 last year--and Pacific Bell keeps the rest.

For her part, Aragon--a professional surfer and former amateur surfing champion--makes an average of $10 a day and gets to go surfing each morning before sending her husband off to work and her oldest child off to school.

Surf Line came into being when three friends, Jerry Arnold, Craig Masuoka and David Wilk, heard about the phone company’s 976-line program, where callers pay for prerecorded messages. Pacific Bell, which bills the customers, began offering the 976 lines in November, 1983.

Prerecorded information has been a way of life since the advent of time and weather call-in services more than 30 years ago, says Maria De Marco, a Pacific Bell product manager.

With the 976 program, businesses can charge from 20 cents to $2 per call for prerecorded messages that last from one to three minutes.

The phone company and the business split the fee according to a formula that takes into account the total charge and the length of the call. The 976 lines in California handled 31 million calls in 1985.

Although the 976 service is not yet available in Orange County, residents can dial any out-of-the area 976 line, paying the long distance toll as well as the charge for the prerecorded information.

Wilk, Arnold and Masuoka saw the 976 line as a perfect way to a launch a surfing report, which Arnold, the only dedicated surfer in the trio, had always wanted to do.

Wilk says that the partners began in September, 1984, to figure out how they would best be able to get surf forecasts and feed the information to callers. Four months later, they began hiring reporters to observe the surfing conditions at the beaches.

From Best to Worst

“We were looking for young surfers who are accustomed to getting up at dawn to go surfing. We knew we had to have surfers who knew the beaches from their best to worst conditions,” Wilk said.

So Surf Line recruited from the ranks of the National Scholastic Surfing Assn.--the body that governs high school and college surfing teams and coordinates surfing competitions. Now, almost all the surf Line reporters are NSSA members.

After several months and the investment of thousands of dollars in a computer system and fees for their reporters, the three started Surf Line from their Huntington Beach office.

Surf Line relies on its part-time reporters to describe wind, wave and sea surface conditions. The reporters trek to their assigned beaches before the sun rises each day to check the waves and get an overall impression of surf conditions. They also do noon reports to cover changing conditions.

It is important for Surf Line to get observations as early as possible, Wilk says, because dedicated surfers--the type who are willing to shell out 95 cents a day for a report on conditions--often begin their days at sunrise.

After covering their beaches, the reporters wait at nearby telephone booths for a call from Surf Line.

The company calls its reporters at prearranged public phones to make sure fake reports are not filed, Wilk says.

Once the individual reports are filed, the information is compiled into separate scripts covering each of the three coastal areas in Surf Line’s territory. The scripts are recorded and the recordings are linked to a computer that answers up to 24 calls simultaneously.

Select the Area

Callers use a dial tone to indicate which report they want--Orange, San Diego or Los Angeles/Ventura--and can get dawn and noon reports or a surf forecast.

The surf line also gives winter callers an optional ski report. Callers can choose from a menu of local mountains and Sierra Nevada ski areas.

Wilk says he and his partners never doubted that a prerecorded surf report would work. They were only apprehensive about their reporting staff.

“There’s the surfers’ reputation of being flaky because they love to surf,” he said. “But they are serious about the sport. Our reporters are serious, and they are reliable. It’s incredible. When it’s barely light out, they are out there.”

Surf Line trains the reporters in a two-hour session, and a coordinator accompanies them once a month to their beaches.

“We ask them to describe the waves like they would to a buddy, and they come back with the most perfect descriptions,” Wilk said.

Aragon, 32, a former U.S. Surfing Federation champion and a mother of two, has been a surf reporter for almost a year. “When I was first hired, I thought, ‘Wow, this is perfect.’ I couldn’t believe they were going to pay me to do this,” Aragon said. “I pride myself on this. I give the reports as well as I could because if I was out there surfing I want to know the best information.”

Her Best Beach

Like other reporters, Aragon surfs in her best beach location after filing her dawn report.

“As I soon as I’m finished, I go surfing. I have to be home by 7:45 a.m. to take my kid to school and see my husband off. So that’s my surfing time,” Aragon said. By noon, Aragon is back again to file her day report.

The reporters are reimbursed for traveling to the beaches and are paid about $9 for each day’s reporting.

In all, Surf Line reporters cover 12 beaches in Orange County, 18 in San Diego County and 16 in Ventura and Los Angeles counties. When wave conditions are good at beaches not on their regular lists, the reporters cover them as well.

Wilk considers Surf Line to be a growing operation even though it has only four full-time employees--the three partners and meteorologist Chris Borg, whose job it is to analyze National Weather Service charts on all Pacific storm activity and forecast wave patterns along Southern California beaches.

Wilk says profits are plowed back into the company because the partners want the company to grow.

Earlier this month, Surf Line Inc. started another venture, Fish Line, which allows callers to dial 976-FISH to find out about local fishing conditions.