Points of Contention : With Installations Along the Coast, the Military Must Deter Surfers in Search of World-Class Waves

During the Cold War, a small group of men reportedly infiltrated Point Mugu Naval Air Weapons Station and bivouacked on the beach under cover of night.

The next morning, the Navy took them by surprise. In a textbook two-pronged assault, an amphibious landing craft crashed through the surf while jeeps rolled across the sand. Outgunned and outflanked, the men surrendered.

And the base was once again safe from surfers.

Up and down the California coast, high-security military installations with world-class point breaks seemingly have had more success deterring spies and terrorists than surfers: In the last five years, the Navy said, Point Mugu security personnel have issued trespassing citations to 201 surfers and not a single spy.

Emboldened by their belief that free access to the waves is their inalienable right, “surfers are notorious trespassers,” said Sam George, one of the five surfers caught in the Mugu raid in the late 1970s. “It never occurs to them not to surf a place that’s off limits.”

Although surfers revel in their cavalier disregard for military security, the military does not regard surfers as harmless interlopers.

“If I was a surfer dude, I’d try to take advantage of the waves too,” said Capt. Paul Valovich, base commander at Point Mugu. “But I am responsible for security. I don’t know who these guys are. They could be Abdul the Mad Bomber of Beirut for all I know.”

Over the years, surfers say, hostilities between them and the military have ranged from guerrilla warfare to armed confrontations. Before Camp Pendleton opened Upper and Lower Trestles to surfers in 1973, Marines standing onshore reportedly threw baseball-size rocks at surfers and even fired bullets over their heads. Surfers responded with rock-throwing counterattacks.

“It’s an understatement to say we had a conflict with the Marines,” said Barry Berg, 46, design director of Surfing magazine. “It’s like we lived our life during wartime. It got pretty intense. Just to surf at Trestles, we had to come down a river on our boards and go through this jungle where the Marines would be hiding in ambush.”

Pendleton, Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County, Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station in Orange County and San Francisco’s Presidio all have opened their breaks to surfers. But Point Mugu still takes a hard line on surfing at its two breaks, Pelican Point and Calleguas Creek.

“I’ve got to take precautions,” Valovich said.

Although a trespasser cited for the first time is merely photographed and not fined, the Navy can get tough. Since 1988, the 20 surfers who were caught trespassing twice had to pay $500 fines in federal court, the Navy said.

Surfers also report incidents in which Point Mugu personnel have waded into the surf to confiscate boards. According to surfers, the Navy also intimidates surfers who arrive by boat.

“A couple of times I saw the Navy have guys with guns launch a boat from a pier and require surfers to get back in their boats,” said Steve Cook of Thousand Oaks, a retired lieutenant commander and longtime surfer.

And then there was the amphibious landing of the late 1970s. “It was a fairly well-coordinated operation,” said Sam George, 36, a former Santa Barbara County resident who is a senior editor at Surfing magazine.

The Navy base is strategically between the surfing cultures of Ventura and Los Angeles counties. The eastern boundary of the base is a wetlands formed by overflow from Calleguas Creek.

The proximity of the Calleguas break to Pacific Coast Highway makes it a popular destination, often attracting 25 to 35 surfers a day in the summer.

But Pelican Point, a Hawaii-type break with consistently outrageous summer waves, lies off an area of the base that is inaccessible to civilians and reachable only by boat. Although inconvenient--boats have to be launched from miles away--surfing expeditions to Pelican Point have an advantage over trips to Calleguas Creek: They’re legal.

Although the Navy has the authority to arrest anyone trespassing on government land, it does not have jurisdiction over surfers who operate from a boat and stay in the water, Navy officials say. On a summer day, some surfers usually take advantage of this technicality, motoring in from Channel Islands or Ventura harbors.

Cal State Northridge art professor Robert von Sternberg surfs Pelican Point (also known to surfers as “Radar Towers”). The boat ride from Channel Islands Harbor takes him less than 30 minutes. He anchors his 50-horsepower Zodiac in 30 feet of water about 150 yards from a rocky promontory. In six years of surfing the point, he has had only one confrontation with the Navy.

“The Seals came out,” he said, “but that’s because one of our guys had a camera.”

When surfers are apprehended for trespassing, the Navy usually handles them with kid gloves. Even after he was nabbed in the amphibious landing, George said, “The Navy actually treated us pretty well.” He and his friends were photographed and fingerprinted but their boards were not confiscated.

“The Navy even gave us a ride back to our cars,” George said.

Camp Pendleton, on the other hand, always had to remind surfers that it was a Marine base. Don Krafft, a Hollywood set decorator who surfs Pelican Point with von Sternberg, said: “Mugu is tame compared with Pendleton.”

In addition to physical altercations with Marines at Pendleton, surfers had cars, distributor caps and surfboards confiscated, Barry Berg said. But sometimes an even worse fate befell captured surfers: Their parents would be summoned to a facility in Oceanside and required to watch a film about surfers who did not behave like gentlemen.

“There were shots of surfers mooning the Marines or throwing rocks at them or setting fire to Trestles,” Berg said. “Those (occurrences) really weren’t that prevalent, but they served to justify why the Marines patrolled so harshly.”

At Point Mugu, security concerns are the main justification for the Navy’s intolerance of surfers. But there are other reasons. Pelican Point is in the vicinity of a land-based radar installation that tracks missile launches from the base and from Vandenberg. Public affairs officer Alan Alpers said the radar emits electromagnetic radiation that can harm anyone in its path.

But Dr. Gordon LaBedz, a surfer and member of the board of directors of the Surfrider Foundation, said most of the Navy’s concerns are exaggerated. The radar is aimed skyward, not down at the water, surfers say.

“The Navy is just being overzealous,” said LaBedz, who led the successful fight to open Surfside Jetty at Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station. “The real reason they don’t like surfers is that they just don’t want the hassles.”

Valovich, who believes that the “surfing culture is pretty neat,” conceded that surfers “haven’t really created problems at the base, but the potential is there. I fly planes for a living,” he said, “and you always have to think about ‘what if?’ ”

Surfers are more understanding about the Navy’s reasons for keeping them away from the Calleguas break: The environmentally sensitive wetlands is home to the snowy plover, a threatened species, and other delicate creatures.

“Surfers frequently cross the wetlands to get to the beach,” said Ron Dow, civilian head of the base’s environmental division. “A lot of marine organisms are in the mud.” Walking through the wetlands--called the “swamp tromp” by surfers--”can kill everything,” Dow said.

Non-surfers are probably wondering why surfers risk arrest and bodily injury for the simple pleasure of riding a wave. The answer: Because it’s there.

“Why do people climb mountains?” Krafft said. “It’s partly for the adventure, partly for the reward.”

Considering that surfers have been known to surf in raw sewage, are there any conditions that would absolutely keep them out of the water? Tom Grubbs, a cinematographer living in Malibu, believes that even the most foolhardy surfers stay clear of a break near the San Onofre nuclear power plant in San Diego County.

“There are limits to even where surfers will go,” Grubbs said.

But George disagrees.

“If the waves were good around a nuclear plant,” he said, “surfers would surf it.”