Late-Blooming Surfer Finds New Life on Ocean : Longboarding: Wanda Lange discovered waves, and with them, a new closeness with her family.

She drank quite a bit, dabbled in recreational drugs, and when it came to health and fitness, Wanda Lange was as lost as a piece of driftwood at sea. Then she discovered surfing 10 years ago, and she has been riding a new wave of energy since.

“It’s like I totally woke up,” said Lange, a 38-year-old mother of four. “I have an addictive personality, but getting in the water and surfing re-channeled my addictive behavior. I can get an adrenaline rush in the water getting a big or long wave. I can get a rush naturally from the beauty out there.”

Lange seems to draw her strength from the waves, and looking at her hectic schedule, she would seem to need a few 14-footers to start each day.

In addition to raising her three sons and a stepson, ages 9 to 18, Lange works four nights a week as a waitress at a Los Alamitos restaurant, takes afternoon classes at Long Beach City College and competes in Professional Longboard Assn. events up and down the California coast.

She’s also active in the Surfrider Foundation, a San Clemente-based environmental group, and somehow finds time to serve as team mom to her sons’ youth soccer, baseball and basketball teams.

“I’m overwhelmed all the time with kids, family, working and going to school,” said the effervescent Lange, a 1974 graduate of Kennedy High School in La Palma. “But surfing in the morning relieves all that stress. I’m 38, but I feel like I’m 25. In fact, these are the better years of my life.

“I was into drugs and things like that when I was younger--I grew up in an age when everyone was doing that. But now I’m really healthy and into my family and husband. I used to get teased because I was so skinny, but paddling a surfboard has built up my shoulders. I look better now than I’ve ever looked in my life.”

Lange’s husband, Gray, and oldest son, Marcus, 18, can attest to that. The family’s surfing vessel, a beat-up, green 1977 Dodge Van with the “Surf Costa Rica” logo, is well-known along the Pacific Coast Highway between Long Beach and San Clemente.

“Everyone honks because they know us,” Wanda said.

“Yeah, and when they pull up and see me, they’re disappointed,” said Gray, 49, a Long Beach middle school teacher.

Lange has also heard her share of pick-up lines from teen-agers in the surf.

“One day, my oldest boy came in the house laughing his head off,” Lange said. “He said his friend thought I was his sister and wanted to ask me out.”

Such flattery might have never come Wanda’s way had it not been for an odd exchange between Gray and a landscaping client 10 summers ago. Gray, who has a summer tree-trimming business, traded some yardwork for an old longboard so he could get back into surfing.

Wanda took that as a challenge.

“It was either sit on the beach with the kids or go out and learn how to surf,” she said.

So Wanda bought a longboard. She brought it to Seal Beach, where the male surfers seemed happy to give her tips and let her drop in on waves, and soon she became quite proficient.

“I tried a short board once, but when you’re learning to surf, it’s easier on a longboard, because they’re easier to balance and stand up on,” Lange said. “Paddling is so much harder on a short board. I didn’t want to fight for waves. On a long board you just take a couple strokes, get up and you’re on.”

Noticing she was usually the only woman catching waves, Lange began entering Women’s International Surfing Assn. events seven years ago so she could compete with more women. She had several first-place finishes in the novice division and usually placed among the top six after moving up to the women’s longboard division.

When WISA disbanded four years ago, Lange began surfing in the PLA, which holds monthly club contests. Lange now surfs for the Newport Beach-based Blackie’s Longboard Crew and has been sponsored by Wind And Sea Surfboards of Huntington Beach for five years.

The PLA doesn’t rank women’s longboarders, but Lange reaches the semifinals (top eight) of most events and has won her share of prizes such as bathing suits and wet suits.

More important than the competition has been the impact surfing has had on Lange’s family. Surfing events are turned into family vacations, with the Langes loading the kids in their RV and heading for surf spots such as Oceanside or Malibu. And the Langes surf together almost every morning during the summer.

“A lot of families go to church together; this is our tradition,” Lange said. “The kids learn a lot of new things, and it gives us something to talk about. I think they’re really proud to have a mother out there who can rip and surf.”

It’s not the most conventional lifestyle, but Lange says it’s working.

“Seeing the way kids are raised now and all the gangs, I mean, where are the parents?” Lange said. “The more you’re involved with the kids, the more you do with them, the more open they are.

“My 18-year-old still tells me what he does every day. I’m not only their mother, I’m their friend. If you’re with them, active with them, they don’t have to tell all their stories to their friends, they can tell me. I want an open, active communication with them, and this is the way to do it.”