Surfer in Oily Waters Swept Away in Handcuffs

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

There was a perfect west swell breaking to the right. So Bonnet grabbed his neon-colored board under one arm, waded out into the cold waters and exclaimed, “There’s not much tar out there!”

Practically in the shadow of the American Trader, the 800-foot tanker whose oil leak has spoiled some of California’s best surfing beaches, Bonnet, 22, decided to take on the surf alone.

But his quest for the perfect wave didn’t last long. Shortly after setting out, the die-hard surfer was arrested for ignoring an order to stay out of the oil-stained water.

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

Bonnet’s saga began about 10 a.m. when he began catching waves in 56-degree waters just south of the Huntington Beach pier.

“The beaches are closed to the public,” a voice boomed out over a loudspeaker, breaking through the sounds of the surf.

Bonnet turned his board around and began paddling back to the beach. But before he could reach shore, lifeguard Claude Panis rushed up in his red Jeep and yelled: “Put that board down!”

Panis pulled Bonnet into the Jeep, telling him he was arrested for violating an order to keep off the beaches.

“He’s going to jail,” Panis told a reporter.

Another surfer who watched in awe as Panis took Bonnet away in handcuffs suggested that Bonnet was perhaps trying to send the oil companies a message.

“Maybe he’s trying to say to them, ‘Look, I go out and get arrested for your carelessness,’ ” said the surfer, who did not want to give his name.

The authorities were not amused.

“He’s told me he didn’t know the beach was closed,” Panis said of Bonnet later. “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,” he said. “But I don’t understand why they want to go out there in this stuff.”

Still in his black, pink and yellow wet suit, Bonnet was hauled down to the Huntington Beach Police Department, where he was cited for interfering with the duty of a lifeguard at an emergency scene, Police Lt. Roger Parker said. Bonnet was released five hours later, he said.

Bonnet, who is a professional surfer as well as a student at Orange Coast College, said it was not his first time to go surfing 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.”

He said he is concerned about what the spill will do to the county’s beaches, saying he surfs for a group called World Issue that is backed by the environmental group Greenpeace.

“I’m pretty much pro-ecology,” he said. “Who knows when the water’s going to be clean again.”

Bonnet, who surfs two or three times a day, said he could think of few conditions that would keep him off the waves. Not even the 250,000 gallons of raw sewage that leaked into the ocean from a Fountain Valley sewage treatment plant last month could sway him, he said.

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