SURF COUNTY, USA : THE SURF CLAN : As the First Surfing Generation Grays, Many Find the Perfect Wave With Sons, Daughters, Grandkids

Water talk: The older man, slowed by age, paddled into a wave, and with the grace of an injured buffalo , stood up. He rode the wave , grinning , while his ancient longboard glided over the ocean surface. As he approached a covey of teen-age surfers, one of them shouted: “Whoa! Geezer at 2 o’clock, dudes. Watch it!”

The white-and-blue RV is slightly battered, but it still runs. On cold mornings,Robin Rustan, 42, sometimes feels the same way.

Yet, every day, Rustan and his 10-year-old son, Ryan, leave their Midway City home about 6:45 a.m. for their morning ritual. Fifteen minutes later, they rumble into the parking lot at Bolsa Chica State Beach.

Ryan usually pops out of the RV first. Then dad, always a bit slower. Although it’s almost become habit now, their excitement mounts, and it is infectious, spreading to friends who see the familiar RV and wave.

“Ever since I graduated from Huntington Beach High School, I’ve been living the surfer’s life,” Rustan said. “I just get up and surf. Then go earn a living. If the waves are cranking, I stay at the beach longer,” Rustan said.

Rustan, like so many other surfers, grew up in another generation, an era of long boards, Dick Dale music and a follow-the-surf attitude. Some, such as Walter Hoffman and Herbie Fletcher, are famous among surfers. Many are perennial amateurs--like Rustan, owner of a motorcycle and surfboard shop--who can’t shake the surfing bug. Others, like Mary Lou Drummy, a 48-year-old grandmother, have had surfing careers spanning decades in both the amateur and professional ranks.

Today, these graduates of an earlier generation, many of them former surf nomads, arrive at beaches from San Onofre to Seal Beach in automobiles, vans and flashy pickups, with their children in tow, continuing a ritual of surfing baptism that began when they were younger.

Some are balding, and paunches often get in the way as they squeeze into wet suits, but their spirit is in the right place. Their search for the perfect wave is over; they have found it when they share the surfing experience with their sons, daughters and grandchildren.

In the 1960s, two of the most celebrated names in surfing circles were of a California father and daughter, Walter and Joyce Hoffman. Walter, now 58 and owner of Hoffman California Fabrics Inc. in Mission Viejo, was then part of California’s early crews of big-wave riders to surf Makaha and Sunset Beach on Hawaii’s North Shore.

Joyce, 43, who manages horse stables and sells real estate in south Orange County, was a four-time world champion and so dominated women’s surfing in the mid-1960s that she is considered the finest female surfer of all time. After a 10-year hiatus, she returned to the sport two years ago and has competed in local long-board contests.

The Hoffmans are one of surfing’s first families. Walter’s other daughter, Debra (Dibi), 38, married Herbie Fletcher, 41, of San Clemente, former long-board champion and surfboard manufacturer, and now surf-video producer. Their younger son, Nathan, 15, is an amateur surfer, and another son, Christian, 19, is a professional surfer with his own line of surfboards and a reputation for nonconformity.

When the Hoffman-Fletcher clan gets together at Grandpa Hoffman’s house on the sand in Capistrano Beach, it’s usually a raucous reunion representing three surfing generations, including Phillip (Flippy) Hoffman, Walter’s brother (another big-wave rider), and Hoffman’s six grandchildren.

Although Walter Hoffman now has a middle-aged paunch, it doesn’t take much goading by Fletcher, Hoffman’s daughters or any of Hoffman’s grandchildren to get him in the water. Still a purist, Walter prefers much larger, single-fin surfboards in contrast to the shorter, three-finned boards his grandchildren ride.

“Can you imagine your father-in-law calling you up and telling you, ‘Hey! What are you doing? Nothing? Good. Pack up, let’s go to Bali! I’ve got your tickets.’ But that’s what he does all the time,” Herbie Fletcher said.

Today, the clan enjoys surfing off Cabo San Lucas, where Walter Hoffman wants to build a house. Hoffman said he’s fortunate to have been successful enough in business to be able, at the drop of a hat, to take off and go surfing in faraway places.

“Yes, it’s true. If it’s good, I just phone up and make reservations,” Hoffman said, grinning.

For Fletcher, as soon as he became a father the first thing he wanted to do was take his sons surfing with him.

“With Christian and Nathan,” Herbie says, “surfing was like walking. Christian got his first board when he was 1. I made it for him when we were in Hawaii. It was a small board and I got it for him so he could have a board like everyone else. He would carry it under his arm and throw it on the ground when he was through.”

Like Joyce Hoffman, Mary Lou Drummy of San Juan Capistrano was a child of surfing’s golden era. Yet, at 48, she hasn’t slowed and is just as involved in surfing now as she was in the early 1960s, when there were only a handful of female surfers.

Now a single parent and a grandmother, Drummy sits on the board of the Surfrider Foundation, surfing’s political arm, and also is in charge of the Women’s International Surfing Assn., which holds eight amateur surfing contests a year for women aged 13 to 48.

Drummy said she was first stung by the surfing bug while spending summers at her grandparents’ beach house in Hermosa Beach.

“We used to go there for vacations, and I used to see all these guys in the water surfing. That was something I really wanted to do because it seemed like so much fun,” Drummy said.

Her son Patrick, 10, is an accomplished body boarder while son Chris, 17, is rated in the top 10 in junior men’s amateur standings for the California Surfing Assn. and the National Scholastic Surfing Assn. Drummy’s 18-year-old daughter, Maureen, competed as an amateur and has just returned from an extended surfing trip to Bali.

“With us, surfing is a family activity,” Drummy said. Like Rustan, she packs her family into an RV, but she heads for San Onofre, the clan’s favorite surfing beach.

On a recent foggy morning, Robin Rustan and his son Ryan parked at Bolsa Chica State Beach. The coastline was shrouded in clouds and a chilly wind greeted the two surfers. A west swell was producing small, 1- to 3-foot waves, nothing as pristine as Rustan’s favorite surfing experience last December.

“Christmas Day was 2-to-3 feet and glassy. A real pretty day,” Rustan recalled. “I remember taking off on one wave and I got barreled (covered). As I was coming out of it, who should be paddling up the shoulder but Ryan. He looked at me, then raised a hand and gave me the Hawaiian bro sign. He smiled at his dad. Man, that’s what surfing is all about.”