Catching a Wave to the Beach

Some of the best professional surfers in the world were in Huntington Beach Sunday, bobbing and swaying and leaning and weaving.

After that, they put their boards in the water and started surfing.

The offshore swell Sunday morning was nothing compared to the onshore swell, the seismic waves that had Richie Collins and Gary Elkerton pulling floaters in their bedrooms, jarring them out of sound slumber two minutes before 5 a.m.

“It scared the . . . out of me,” said Elkerton, a native of Mooloolaba, Australia, where time tends to stand still, along with the earth.

“I’d never been through an earthquake before. At first, I thought it was the people upstairs partying. They’d been going at it all night. I woke up and the walls were shaking and people were screaming.”

Elkerton’s hotel room was adjacent to the outdoor swimming pool, which was rocked so hard by the temblor that the lapping water splashed through his open sliding-glass door.

“Half the pool must’ve come through the door,” Elkerton said, exaggerating only slightly. “A half-foot of carpet was completely soaked.”

A few miles away, Collins lay in the bed of his Newport Beach home, praying for the rumbling to stop.

“I just laid there, staring at the ceiling and saying, ‘I hate earthquakes, I hate earthquakes,’ ” Collins said. Within minutes, he was out in the street with Sheala, his pet Rotweiler, huddling with neighbors while they watched sparks fly off a quavering overhead fuse box.

“It was radical,” Collins said.

Before noon, there would be another quake and, undeterred, the Op Pro championship final would be half complete. It was a fun activity on a frightening day and during the break before the tag-team competition, the inimitable Collins was asked to paint some perspective.

As is his custom, Collins turned in a fingerpainting.

“If you look down the beach,” he told reporters, “I don’t think anybody really cared about staying at home. If they’re going to die, you’d think they’d want to die on the beach.

“Actually, I think the beach is the safest place to be right now . . . I mean, what’s going to fall on you here, except that thing up there?”

Collins pointed to a hydraulic lift supporting a television cameraman and his equipment.

Collins’ mind started racing, which is to say it began backpedaling.

“That thing could go boom,” he surmised, “and take out 10 people at once.”

Fortunately for Collins and Team USA, his actions were more graceful than his words. With two artistic runs through barely churning water, Collins set the stage for teammates Kelly Slater and Todd Holland to finish off Australia in the tag-team draw, culminating in an 18-6 victory and a five-way split of the $20,000 winning purse.

Collins considered it sweet revenge for last year, when Australian Barton Lynch blasted the field and then lambasted the site, describing Huntington Beach as “a dump” and “the desert by the sea,” to quote two of his kinder assessments.

“I was very, very disappointed by that,” Collins said, shaking his head slowly. “I just don’t see how anybody can say that.

“I mean, if I went down to Bell’s Beach (in Australia) and won Bell’s and after I won started writing off Bell’s, saying, ‘This place (stinks) and this and that,’ those guys would have shotguns and be waiting to shoot me when I came back.”

Besides, Collins has seen Lynch’s hometown of Manly, a small coastal town just south of Sydney, and he says, “Barton tries to raze on over here, but Manly is about 100 times worse. It’s so polluted it’s incredible. The water bubbles because it’s so polluted. It smells. It’s really bad.”

So there.

Elkerton said he could see Lynch’s point and basically concurred, although unlike Lynch, he kept the lighter fluid politely packed away.

“You have to realize that Australians look at things differently,” Elkerton explained. “Most of California is not natural, it’s man-made. Almost everything along Australia’s coastline is natural and Australians make laws to keep it that way.

“The people are trying hard to make it better here, but look at that oil rig. There’s no way Australia would allow an oil rig off its coast. What if there’s a spill? Where does the oil go?

“With California, you see offshore oil rigs all over the place.”

Or maybe Californians are the ones who look at things differently. Where Aussies might wince at the sight of a peach-tinted strip mall across the street from Huntington Pier, Collins sees an entertainment wonderland of unimagined beauty and promise.

“If you’d taken this place 50 years ago, it was mostly just desert,” Collins said. “Now they’ve turned it into a really nice-looking place.

“I mean, 10 years ago, this place looked hideous. You look at the new buildings. Unreal. You’ve got the Hilton over there, you’ve got the shopping place, you’ve got Edwards Cinema. It’s like a park you come to.

“Instead of coming down to Huntington Beach, sitting on the beach and going, ‘Unhhh,’ you can come here, hang out on the beach for a while and then say, ‘Let’s go see a movie and then go to a nice restaurant.’ There’s plenty of things to see.”

Last year, Lynch wanted to bury the city.

This year, Collins says, “I dig this town. I live in Newport Beach, but I grew up here. The people here are like my second family. This is my hometown.”

Earthquakes included. Quite simply, Collins says he loves the place, faults and all.