Clouds Eclipse County Beach Attendance : Spring-Break Trips Out of County Also Cited for Low Turnout

Bret Haslip’s head snapped toward the girl in the bikini as she walked through a melange of surfers, skateboarders and bicyclists at the Huntington Beach Pier.

Another girl passed, then another, as Haslip’s head resembled someone watching a tennis match.

“My wife wanted us to come to the beach,” Haslip, a 21-year-old Irvine resident, explained with a sheepish grin. “She wanted to get sunburned.”

But as Easter week vacation dawned on Orange County’s version of the Gold Coast, large crowds failed to materialize over the weekend along the 42-mile shoreline as young people swarmed to Palm Springs, the Colorado River and other resort areas, lifeguards and police said.

More Clouds, Fewer People

Or perhaps the morning cloud cover and cool breezes kept people inland or relaxing at home, lifeguards said.

That meant all the more elbow room for Haslip and the rest of the relatively small crowd of 16,000 people who sunned and surfed in Huntington Beach once Ol’ Sol popped through the gray clouds about 1:30 p.m.

Even the city’s Main Street Festival attracted only 25,000 people over the two-day weekend, police said.

Police in beach cities had been prepared for a busy start of Easter vacation. Huntington Beach and Newport Beach police said they added extra officers on foot patrols, and additional patrol cars, but there was little, if anything, for them to do among the sedate, moderate-size crowds.

“Hey, it’s dead here,” said Huntington Beach Cpl. Robert Ritchie as he monitored the festival crowd. “We’ve just got a lot of people, the weather’s nice and cool and not a whole lot of people are drinking. We’ve had no incidents,” he said.

The mercury topped out at 63 degrees on the coast in Newport Beach Sunday. Inland temperatures hovered in the low 70s, with El Toro and Santa Ana posting highs of 71 degrees, up from nighttime lows in the mid-50s, according to the National Weather Service.

A cooling trend forecast for this week was not expected to improve beach attendance. But fair weather and temperatures of 68 to 75 degrees were expected to prevail through Friday, except for the usual night and morning low clouds. Low temperatures were expected to be from 48 to 58 degrees.

Ocean temperatures on Sunday were a surprisingly mild 63 degrees, up from a chilly 57 degrees only two weeks ago, said Huntington Beach City Lifeguard Steve Reuter.

The surf, which ranged from one to three feet from the west, attracted surfers, who donned colorful wet suits to brace themselves for winter water.

“Hey, we didn’t need our full wet suits! The water is so warm, all we needed (were) our short spring suits,” said Roger Hudritsch, a 17-year-old Torrey Pines High School student from Del Mar.

“We would have gone to Palm Springs, but it’s a bust with all the police there,” Hudritsch said.

“It’s not so bad here,” added Hudritsch’s companion, Timothy Sears, 18, who also is from Del Mar. “The weather’s nice, and the surf’s not that bad.”