Not All Surfers Over 40 Are Silly ‘Salty Dogs’

Re “Old Pals--Still Surfing After All These Years” (Aug. 26): According to the story, surfers over 40 are arthritic beer guzzlers who are lucky to be standing on a board.

I’m a 42-year-old surfer who surfs with a bunch of guys around my age. We surf nearly every day at Huntington State Beach, Tower 11. We don’t have silly nicknames and we don’t play silly pranks on people. If we see bicycles speeding on the bike path, we tell them to slow down. (We don’t chew a bunch of bubble gum and throw it in their path.)

We are all in good shape, and we surf at dawn every day, before even the younger guys get there. When the waves get bigger and more serious, most of the younger guys aren’t even out there. We all have jobs or businesses that allow us to surf every morning. We don’t do a lot of watching. We surf, we get out of the water, we go to work or we spend the day at the beach with our families.

These guys that hang out at “Beer Belly Point” are a bunch of kooks and don’t deserve an article in The Times.

Ricky Gregg and a few of his friends are approaching 60 and they still surf 25-foot waves at Waimea Bay in Hawaii. I think Ricky would be disgusted with these “Salty Dogs,” and he wouldn’t even consider them surfers. I don’t!

Maybe in the future you could do an article on surfers over 40 who are really surfers. Surfers who love riding waves and being a little closer to nature.

JEFF BROWN, Fountain Valley