Arrest Wipes Out Surfer’s Slick Ocean Maneuvers

The waves were too gnarly Saturday for Todd Bonnet to resist.

There was a perfect swell breaking south of the Huntington Beach Pier. So the 22-year-old Orange Coast College student grabbed his neon board under one arm, waded out into the 56-degree waters and exclaimed, “There’s not much tar out there!”

Shortly after setting out, Bonnet was arrested by lifeguards for ignoring an order to stay out of the oil-stained surf. Huntington Beach and Newport Beach shorelines had been closed to discourage sightseers and prevent contact with the potentially toxic residue from the American Trader tanker spill.

“He told me he didn’t know the beach was closed,” lifeguard Claude Panis said. “I don’t know how you can be so ignorant and not know it’s closed with all this going on.

“The thing is, I like to surf a lot too,” Panis said. “But I don’t understand why they want to go out there in this stuff.”

But Bonnet took a different view.

“I surfed in sewage last month, so what’s the difference?” he said.

Bonnet was cited for interfering with the duty of a lifeguard at an emergency scene, Police Lt. Roger Parker said.

The surfer said it was not the first time he has ventured into the waves since Wednesday’s oil spill. On Friday night, he surfed north of the Huntington Beach Pier near 9th Street.

“It was way worse then,” he said. “You could smell the water, see the film. Today it wasn’t even bad at all. You couldn’t even smell it.”

Bonnet said he could think of few conditions that would keep him off the waves.

“Maybe some nuclear waste, I don’t know.”