Radio Surfcaster Rides Airwaves in the Morning

Naturally, Juan Grande is in a hurry.

He’s snagged a window table at his favorite beachside hangout and is sharking down a fish taco, one eye hooked by the crashing surf outside and the wave that could have been his.

Like most surfers, Grande’s mind is usually cast somewhere out there on the water, sizing up intermittent sets of ocean waves with the knowing, glassy-eyed gaze of some garage mechanic peering down into the greased engine of a cherry ’57 Chevy.

On this day, perched like a surf vulture with circular sunglasses, just a squawk from the Ocean Beach Pier, Grande looks ready to rip. But it’s not the white-capped waves that are his target.

Juan Grande is about to hit the airwaves.

Maybe you’ve seen him standing at phone booths up and down the San Diego coastline, always within view of the ocean, his fidgety fingers dialing the number to a local FM radio station.

Since 1982, as regular as the tide, Grande has given his morning surf reports to groggy-eyed surfers and wave-riding wanna-bes between Chula Vista and the Cuyamacas--broadcasting three times daily to the place he calls “America’s finest surfing city.”

Listeners of rock station 91X already know the rough-seas, saltwater voice sizing up wave faces, predicting the storm-whipped currents that might make that day’s boarding no day at the beach.

Reporting from his imaginary Little House on the Jetty in a “Hey dude” accent, Grande carries on a 20-year-long San Diego tradition of mostly live radio surfcasts on the ever-changing ocean conditions.

While some listeners seek the latest traffic tidbits from Interstate 5, Grande’s following wants only breaking news from the breaking waves, especially those landlocked inlanders miles from the nearest ocean.

His is an audience that thinks a current event is something that blew in off the Hawaiian coast, guys and gals whose surfing hangouts have names like cryptic spy codes: Garbage, Doughnuts, Officer’s and Swami’s.

And no one, perhaps, has given surf reporting more off-the-wall panache than the veteran surfboard maker and owner of Canyon surf shop in Ocean Beach whose radio reports are his way of living out a surf fantasy.

At 45--the age when many of his contemporaries have long ago given up demanding athletic exercise--Grande continues a boyhood dream that keeps him forever at the beach, a businessman who can still dress like a teen-ager in shorts, surf cap and T-shirt.

“I’m one of those underachievers who can’t keep his eyes off the water,” he said. “My job is to surf. And when the waves are good, that’s where I am. What I try to do is spread the word on accurate surf conditions out there. And do it with a little humor.”

His name was John Durward when the strapping Irishman from New England came to surf the unpredictable waters off Southern California in the late 1960s after realizing as a teen-ager that surfing had that one thing he’d been looking for: “athletic cool.”

Tagged by fellow surfers as Big John, the angular 6-foot-2, 235-pounder’s nickname soon was translated to Spanish as his surfing excursions knifed farther south into the uncharted waters off Baja California.

Juan Grande.

Years later, when invited to try his hand at phoning in daily surf reports for 91X, a wandering new purveyor of San Diego’s surfing subculture was born.

Still, Grande is somehow betrayed by his trademark voice, the one sounding as though shaped by too many dangling cigarettes and shots of Jack Daniels at some late-night Ocean Beach watering hole.

Because the real Juan Grande is almost the antithesis of surfer cool. He’s not the party boy for which he has been mistaken by his radio listeners--many of whom are barely half his age.

Rather, he’s a Point Loma family man with two teen-age daughters who often falls asleep in front of his television set at 7:30 p.m., his wife says--dead tired from another day of crafting surfboards--and sparring with the demanding surf.

He’s a sometimes stern father who jokes that he wouldn’t let either of his daughters date a surfer--not with what he knows about the ethics of board-riders as a whole after 28 years on the waves.

At home, he spends weekends watering the lawn like most other homeowners on his block. At work, he’s an artisan who spends his afternoons fashioning newer surfboard designs, marveling at his work, running his hands along the contours of each board as he would this year’s model in some sports car showroom.

Mostly, though, he’s also a dedicated surfer and defender of the lifestyle he believes has been mischaracterized by non-surfers as more wild-eyed fringe activity than agile sport.

“The real surfing life doesn’t revolve around going to the bars and chasing girls,” Grande said. “It’s more of a hunt for the best waves, saving your money to buy the best equipment, eating better so you can survive dangerous conditions.”

Most of all, Juan Grande surfs.

When the waves are at their most awesome, he often shows up late to open his shop--something his customers understand. “If you’re 15 minutes late for work, Big John never asks how you were, the question is, ‘How was the surf?’ ” said employee John Kerr, a fellow surfer.

“John’s a businessman but he’s a surfer first. He’s running a surf shop, not Nordstrom. And John knows that.”

Grande’s convictions about his sport have even invaded his wild-man, on-the-air persona. The hurried “Gotta go, by” one-liner he uses to end every surfcast started years ago as a way of shutting down a former deejay who constantly interrupted his reports to deride surfers.

He worries that the overexposure of his sport has turned local waters into a gridlock of surfers, who dangerously cut each other off to get on that now-cluttered perfect wave.

Every morning at 4:30, however, Durward-the-concerned-surfer puts all those worries aside. It’s time to grab a cup of coffee and hit the surf. It’s time to tune into the right radio frequency--and have some fun.

For his reports--which are aired at 6:50, 8:50 and 11:50 a.m.--he calls from phone booths along the coast, or from hovering helicopters or even the occasional land-locked golf course.

A golf course?

“Yeah,” he said. “Calling from the links are the surest sign that the surf is trashed. Because if the surfing was any good, I wouldn’t be on the golf course in the first place.”

His research has taken him to the highs and lows of the surfing world.

Once, while phoning in his report from a Pacific Beach surf shop, Grande looked on as a hurried surfer with a rip in the crotch of his wet suit used Crazy Glue and a lighter to seal it up--without taking off the suit.

Soon, the crotch was aflame in a harmless fire that was quickly extinguished. “I didn’t help,” Grande deadpans.

Then there was the Christmas morning he had his favorite surf spot all to himself when a pod of dolphins took off on the same wave. “It was a beautiful sight to see,” he said. “But I cut ‘em off anyway.”

In rip-’em-up fashion, the deejays with whom he works say Grande is always a willing straight man for their exaggerated morning material. And their jokes about Grande don’t stop when they go off the air, as they willingly describe him as a true professional recently seen loosening the lug nuts of skateboards in Ocean Beach.

“All the surf reporters we’ve worked with have been just about one sandwich shy of a full picnic and Juan is no exception,” said Mike Berger, a 91X morning deejay. “Sometimes, I think he sniffs a little too much of the resin he uses in making his surfboards.

“But generally, if he can see through the fog on the coast--and the fog in his head--his reports are accurate,” Berger said good-naturedly.

Grande is the latest in a long line of surfers who reported wave conditions on the air for fellow enthusiasts. The practice started in Los Angeles in the early 1970s and came to San Diego a few years later. But Grande is one of the few surfers left on the air in San Diego.

Times have changed. These days, surfers have much more sophisticated means of gauging shore conditions--including high-tech surf reporting companies that charge on a per-call basis for detailed information on popular spots.

Some surfers say there are better avenues for real surf information--and that Grande’s reports are really just entertainment for non-surfers, the results of somebody scouting the waves at one spot, along with a few jokes thrown in for good measure.

Grande, who was graduated from Colgate University, counters that he has his own modern surf-reporting technique--he consults the early-morning TV weather maps before heading out for the beach and his “theater of the mind,” the Little House on the Jetty.

From there, he lets rip with the most up-to-date surf reports any surfer from El Cajon could ask for. And heck, he says, they’re free.

But there are days, he concedes, when his reporting might suffer from a tinge of inaccuracy.

“White man speak with forked tongue,” he said with a laugh. “Juan Grande’s been known to downplay a great surfing day. Maybe that way, he’ll get the water all to himself.”

When the day is done, wild Juan Grande slips back into the comfortable throw-another-log-on-the-fire life of John Durward--recharging his batteries for another day in surf paradise.

“Juan Grande is having the time of his life,” he said. “And I’m gonna stick around until the day my board washes in without me.”