Wave Slaves Wash Out : Weather: Surfers are disappointed as Hurricane Darby dwindles. The storm does sprinkle the Southland with some rain.

Hurricane Darby didn’t do it.

So surfers were making waves Wednesday along the Malibu coast.

They raced by the thousands to south-facing beaches in hopes of catching the summer’s first storm surf. Trouble is, Darby was more of a Dudley--its advertised monster waves never materialized.

Most surfers spent the day sitting on their boards, bobbing like off-shore kelp as they scanned the horizon for the signs that the Big One was finally rolling in. Those who tried to ride smaller waves needed to take a number.

“It’s like a battle zone out there,” said Topanga State Beach surfer Rich Stethem as he smoothed down a duct-tape patch that covered collision damage to his board.

“Look at all those people trying to catch a wave. It’s dangerous almost,” said Stethem, a 23-year-old Topanga Canyon feed store worker. “Boards are flying. There’s pushing and shoving. People are groveling and scraping for every little peak. Everyone’s agro --very aggressive. Surfing today’s like driving the Ventura Freeway.”

Up the coast at Nicholas State Beach, Dino Genovese, 26, was ready to head home to Valencia after a short 1 1/2 hours in the water. It was muggy, he said, and the temperature was high. So were tempers.

“Every time the news says there’s going to be big surf, everybody comes,” Genovese said, searching for a meteorological term to explain the phenomenon. “You could say the hurricane was blown out of proportion.”

At Malibu’s famed Surfrider Beach, home of the “Gidget” movies, the Great Kahoona himself was waxing poetic as he waxed down his 9-foot, 6-inch board.

“It’s not big surf. But it’s fun surf,” said actor Don Stroud, 48, who played Kahoona in “Gidget’s Summer Reunion.”

Stroud, a world-class surfer in the early 1960s, confided that movie-makers imported the big surf for Surfrider beach’s key board-riding scenes. They spliced in scenes of big waves filmed in Hawaii.

But the chance of big waves was something few local surfers wanted to ignore Wednesday.

Bill Moore, 74, a retired lumber company president from Brentwood, said he first surfed the Malibu beach in 1933. “I’m seeing people here today I haven’t seen for a while,” he laughed.

Santa Barbara market deli clerk Simone Reddingius, 35, loaded her pet bird in the back of her 1966 Volkswagen van with license plates reading SRFN GRL and headed for Malibu.

“It’s a dud,” she said of the hurricane. “It fizzled out too fast.”

Physical education coach Dave Tice, 40, drove four hours from San Luis Obispo to catch a wave. He’d heard that the Malibu surf would be up to 10 feet high. It was peaking at about half that.

“They’re not exactly monster. They’re more medium,” said surfer Joe Christie, 33, an assistant movie director from West Hollywood.

Bridge-playing beach-goers Mary Bauer, Julie Moore, Bettye Fargo and Mary Eberle also came prepared for high surf. They set up their chairs and card table a safe 100 yards from the water line. The four women said they planned to rotate sitting positions so each would get a good view of the waves.

If Darby failed with the high surf, it at least delivered a little rain, said meteorologist Rick Dittmann of WeatherData Inc., which provides forecasts for The Times.

Traces of rain were recorded across the Los Angeles Basin, including 0.01 inch in Woodland Hills and 0.12 inch in San Gabriel. By late Tuesday, Darby had been downgraded to a tropical storm. By Friday morning, it should be gone, Dittmann said.

But the hot, humid weather from the storm’s “moisture stream” will continue to keep the Los Angeles area sweating during the next few days, he said.

The Civic Center temperature at 4 p.m. Wednesday was 92 degrees, Dittmann said. But the 43% humidity caused a “heat index” that made it feel like it was 96 degrees.

Wednesday’s morning low temperature of 74 at the Civic Center is the highest low temperature on record for that date.