Experts Put Own Spin on a Wild Ride : With grace and recklessness, they create elegant rooster tails of water at South Laguna’s Aliso Beach.

Ask people to name a sport that takes place on land, water and air, often in the space of a single second, and even sports experts might be stumped. But any visitor to South Laguna’s Aliso Beach knows the answer: skim-boarding, a high-energy pastime that epitomizes the interplay of youthful exuberance, sand and surf.

With grace and recklessness in equal measure, skim-boarders attack the Aliso shore break relentlessly, carving it up to create elegant rooster tails of water. The rides, wild but brief, last between three and 10 seconds, depending on the skim-boarder’s maneuvers and the life span of the wave.

Because the sport requires speed, split-second timing and often daredevil acrobatics (some tricks will send the skimmer 18 feet into the air), participants are rarely older than 25. Nearly all are male, and many are also skateboarders who have adapted their street maneuvers to the wafer-thin board that goes in the water.

Skim-boarding is a genuine product of Southern California, and it has evolved along with other beach sports since the 1950s. An estimated 50,000 participants nationwide support a dozen manufacturers that produce nearly 30,000 boards a year, although sales have suffered during the recession.

Equipment for skim-boarding is minimal--just surf trunks (a short wet suit, of course, will help protect the body from the inevitable contact with the sand) and a board. Skim-board prices range from $39 for a styrene model up to $300 for a foam-core 57-inch polyurethane model. Victoria Skimboards in Laguna Beach is the nation’s oldest manufacturer and one of the few that still produces woodies, the simple Douglas fir skim boards that were the state of the art in the 1970s.

“We still get a demand for them, often from fathers who are getting back into the sport,” said Tex Haines of Victoria. “Then they buy our foam boards for their kids.”

Nearly half of all Southern California skim-boarders are from the Laguna area, according to Haines. The reason? Aliso Beach is the West Coast’s No. 1 skim spot, thanks to the fortuitous combination of sand, slope angle and an offshore canyon that causes waves to break close to shore. Aliso also is a magnet for skimmers nationwide.

Sewage problems, however, have closed the area many times over the past few years, which has prompted Haines to work with the Aliso Water Management Agency to test water samples along Aliso Creek. Barring a beach closure, the annual Victoria Pro-Am Contest, now in its 16th year, will be held at Aliso June 19 through 21.

Because waves even as small as six inches are can be ridden, skim-boarding is popular on the East Coast, which tends to suffer from tiny surf. A four-event contest series in Dewey Beach, Del., attracts nearly 400 skim-boarders each year, said Harry Wilson of Sandblaster Skimboards, the contest sponsor.

Skimming got its start in the 1950s, when beach-goers rode simple plywood disks at relatively low speeds over the wet sand at water’s edge. Interplay between skim board and shore break began to occur in the mid-’70s, when Haines and others began to design boards that allowed the rider to play off waves in dramatic fashion.

Just watching a skim-boarder can be invigorating or exhausting, depending on your point of view.

Timing his run to coincide with the wave as it nears its apex, the skimmer sprints down the hard-packed sand at an angle to the wave, holding the board ahead of him. Without slowing down or ever taking his eyes off the water, he heaves the board ahead of him onto the wet sand, hops aboard and starts the ride. Immediately he hydroplanes onto the shallow water, and an instant later, he slams head-on into the wave with the bottom of the board.

At this point, individual style takes over, although the maneuvers are always subject to the peculiarities of each wave. Typically, the skimmer twists around to ride the wave back to shore, completing an elliptical path.

Many of the advanced riders at Aliso, however, are in perpetual quest of the ultimate stunt. One popular maneuver, the Westy loop, takes its name from local skim champion Kurt Westgaard, who has perfected it. The trick involves launching off the lip of the wave, grabbing the board’s rail and somersaulting back into the water.

As with all water sports, skim-boarding has some built-in hazards, and foot and ankle sprains can occur. But most beach injuries are suffered by inlanders who come to the beach only occasionally, according to Dr. John Millard, an emergency-room physician at South Coast Medical Center in Laguna Beach and a specialist in treating beach accidents.

“I’ve never seen a serious skim-boarding injury,” Millard said. “The worst were pulled muscles in the back, caused by the twisting the skimmers do. Bodysurfers are the most often hurt, because they tend to come into the beach on their heads.”

Although in the public eye skimming has always taken a back seat to more glamorous beach sports such as surfing, the color and concentrated energy of the sport were bound to draw the attention of ad agencies. In the past year, skimmers Brad Dickey and Westgaard have shown their best moves in ads for Sunkist and Toyota, respectively, and a NutraSweet commercial is in the works.

Participants say that exposure like that, along with their own enthusiasm, will give skim-boarding some deserved recognition--even among sports experts.