Stay Away From Orange County’s Beaches in Summer? Not Anymore

Last weekend, I shot holes in a whole bunch of Orange County beach stereotypes. They were my stereotypes; I don’t know whether anyone else believes them. But I did.

I believed, for example, that:

* Our beaches are much too crowded to visit in the r, that just finding a few square feet is a major achievement and therefore a foolish expenditure of energy for those of us who live here and can enjoy the beaches year-round;

* Most of the people who fill our beaches in the summer are tourists who will go back to Iowa and Canada in September;

* Those of us who are able to find a patch of sand during the summer season will be subjected to ear-splitting rock music on multiple portable radios, small people having sand fights and teen-agers engaged in mating rituals.

I believed these things so implicitly that for two decades I hadn’t gone near our beaches in the summer. In winter, when the tourists are gone and kids are back in school, I hang out at the beach whenever I can, enjoying the solitude and the frequently angry skies, and even the cold. But in the summer, no way.

I liked to pontificate about this at cocktail parties, showing what a really cool and savvy dude I am. But recently, a man I knew only slightly told me after one of these declamations that he didn’t give a damn whether I went to the beach--he would even prefer that I didn’t--but that what I was saying was baloney. Orange County beaches, he said, are delightful in the summer.

I didn’t believe him, of course, and told him so, and he shrugged and joined another group. But I kept thinking about what he said, wondering if it could be possible that I was missing a good thing. So last weekend, I decided to go have a look--mostly, I’ll admit, so that I could prove the guy wrong.

Well--judging from one weekend’s experience, anyway--he was right.

I picked Corona del Mar for my test, because it has the amenities that tend to draw crowds. I went on a Friday and a Saturday. And I may do it again.

On Friday at noon, there was ample parking. The paid parking lot was never full during the time I was there. And there was plenty of room on Ocean Avenue above the beach for those who, like me, didn’t want to pay.

From above, the beach looked like an attenuated poppy field--multicolored beach umbrellas stretched from the jetty to the sheer cliffs, but they only extended about one-third of the way back.

There were three distinct groups in the water: Boogie-Board surfers were the deepest group; dilettante swimmers made up the second, and scores of little people playing on the wet sand made up the third. No one seemed to be getting in anyone else’s way.

The first lifeguard stand was manned by Scott Corngold, a laconic blond young man wearing dark glasses. He told me he had been working as a lifeguard for three years and that this was a normal, summer weekday crowd. He suggested that the main beach in Laguna tends to be the most crowded in Orange County but that Corona del Mar probably runs second “because it has a parking lot and concessions.” He said that his biggest problems are caused by people with Boogie Boards who don’t wear fins. These, he explained, can be picked up by a vagrant current since “they can’t paddle upstream without fins. But overall, this a well-behaved beach. People are pretty mellow here.”

And that’s precisely what I found. There were no blaring radios; the few people who had radios were listening on earphones. The sand fights were mild. The teen-agers were buoyant but restrained. The whole atmosphere was, well, mellow.

An earnest, friendly Newport Harbor High School swimmer named Edward Slick was in charge of the second lifeguard station. He corroborated most of what Corngold told me, and added a few details of his own: The lifeguards get few complaints about loud radios because local noise laws are enforced and beach visitors tend to respect them; drinking is not a problem because violators are ticketed.

“This is a good place to bring the family,” Slick told me. “Most of the problems we have come from ignorance of the water, especially when there is a heavy surf and people can get pitched on their heads.”

He said that crowds are much bigger on weekends but that there is still room on the beach; that the parking lot will fill up relatively early on Saturday and Sunday; that the weekday beach crowd starts going home about 4 p.m. but that a whole new shift appears an hour later, coming from work, and that fire rings have to be claimed by mid-morning and sat on all day.

I came back on Saturday and found he was right on all counts. Parking was more difficult, and the beach was more crowded. But there was still room to stake out a place, and the beach-goers were still mellow.

Oh, yes, I searched the parking lot both days for out-of-state license plates. I found only two on Friday and a few more on Saturday. So much for the tourist myth.

One other thing. I looked and looked for a string bikini. Purely in the interest of research, of course. I didn’t find one. Not a single one.

That’s one reason I plan to change my summer beach habits and go back. I won’t feel a sense of completion until I see a string bikini. But I’m going to be mellow about it.