It’s a New Wave: Surfer Girls Get Their Feet Wet

Another hot morning in Palm Springs, and Dana Simrin’s father is in the garage again listening to Jan and Dean on a scratchy transistor radio, standing perpendicular to the neat stripes of his Hang Ten T-shirt. A pharmacist stuck in the desert with a surfer’s mentality, he can dream.

Dana turned out to be the surfer in the family.

“My dad never actually went surfing,” says the 21-year-old graphics student. “When I was a little girl, he was into the surfing culture--he dressed like a surfer and listened to all the music, but surfing seemed unreachable to him.”

A tiny wave slaps the sand in front of Simrin, who has walked down to this spot at 9th Street from her apartment adjacent to the Huntington Beach pier. She says her father visits occasionally, and watches her surf from the beach through binoculars.

More and more women are taking up surfing, in spite of strong gender biases that would have them beached forever in thong bikinis. They represent a swell of young female athletes claiming a place for themselves in a competitive lineup already loaded with male egos in the form of radical body surfers, body-boarders, long-boarders and teen-age boys on short boards.

Raul Duarte, who has taught the surfing class at Golden West College in Huntington Beach since 1971, says there were no women in the class when he started, but since the mid-’70s, their numbers have been steadily increasing. Now, “if there are 20 beginners in my class, 15 of them will be girls,” he says.

Duarte, who also coaches the surfing team, says of eight spots on the team, one is reserved for a woman, and “a lot of girls want that spot.”

Mary Lou Drummy of the Women’s International Surfing Assn. says the increase of females in the water is because their parents are less inclined to discourage their daughters from taking up the sport. “They don’t seem to think it’s just a guy’s sport anymore,” she says.

“In the last few years we’ve seen more women in the water than ever before,” says Drummy, who founded the Endless Summer Surf Camp in La Jolla three years ago. “There are more and more girls learning to surf--maybe one in five.”

Jodi Holmes of the Assn. of Surfing Professionals, the Huntington Beach-based organization that conducts professional surfing contests worldwide, agrees in part with Drummy’s estimate.

“As far as the new surfing population--those who are learning to surf--such a ratio is pretty realistic, especially for recreational surfing in Southern California,” she says.

An increase in the number of female recreational surfers, however, isn’t yet translating into more female competitors. Holmes says in the ASP, there are 582 men to 57 women, or about 1 in 10. Of the 1,200 amateur surfers competing this year in the National Scholastic Surfing Assn., only 25 to 30 are women, according to Janice Aragon, executive director of the Huntington Beach-based group.

There’s a push by the ASP board to increase the number of competitions including women, which would bring a lot more of them into professional surfing.

But “sometimes (male surfers) still look at you as if you’re from outer space,” Holmes says. “And, in that regard, women are still a novelty. But the education process has improved our acceptance in the lineup. The guys seem to rate your surfing abilities,” rather than just automatically moving in on your wave.

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In Hawaii, they call a surfer girl “wahine” (usually pronounced wa-HEE-nee)--a special word that connotes beauty, strength, stamina, fluidity and balance. Yet surfing has always been dominated by territorial young men, perhaps because there are too few waves on God’s blue Earth, and too many kooks (surfer’s lingo for unskilled surfer) in the water.

“In surfing, you get to be perfect for like one second,” says Simrin, dreamily.

“Surfing allows women to explore their strength, their natural affinity with the ocean, and their beauty,” says Debbie Beacham, 1982 world champion surfer who lives in La Jolla.

Lisa LeMasurier began surfing a few years ago and says it’s one of the most difficult activities she’s ever pursued.

“It’s a lifestyle, not really just a sport. It goes deeper than that,” says LeMasurier, 18, of Huntington Beach. “You practice and practice and then one day it just clicks, and you have this realization that you can surf. . . . A lot of people beginning are either before that point or just at that point where they decide if they’re gonna go for it or not.”

LeMasurier was a body-boarder when she entered Huntington Beach High School. She wanted to be a part of the surf team because of her affection for the ocean, and surfing coach Andy Verdone encouraged her to give it a try.

A lot of girls wanted to join the team, but many were intimidated by the huge learning curve the sport presented. LeMasurier pushed herself, joining the “dawn patrol” every morning on a $30 board she bought a garage sale. By her senior year, she was voted female most valuable player.

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Many young people find their favorite athletic pastimes supplanted by the growing demands of adulthood: the pursuit of higher education; dating and marriage; geographic changes; credit cards, taxes. Their track shoes and tennis rackets are inevitably kicked to the back of the closet.

LeMasurier says that won’t happen here.

“No matter what I’m doing, I’m always thinking about surfing--the feeling of the water, of riding on the waves, of getting out there and doing it,” says LeMasurier, now a nursing student at Golden West College, where she plans to go out for the surf team again. “I’m always gonna make time for surfing.”

Kim Hamrock of Huntington Beach began surfing when she was 16. Three years later she got married, but that didn’t curtail her time in the water. Neither did the birth of her son Chris, now 12, followed by Nina, 9 and Margeaux, 6. Nina already shreds on waves. She should; she’s been surfing since before she was born. Her mother surfed through most of her pregnancies.

Today, at 33, Hamrock, at just under 5-foot-2 and 117 solid pounds, is the top-ranked amateur in her age division nationally, riding a long and short board with equal prowess. She believes her greatest contribution to surfing is as a teacher and mentor to young women serious about competing.

“Surfing is right up there with family and God,” she says. “You design your life around it.”

Because she hopes to find a place for herself in the athletic world of surfing competition, Connie Clark, 23, recently read a pile of books on the subject.

“I wanted to know what society thinks about that. It’s hard for them to accept women as athletes,” she says, noting pro beach volleyball has made the biggest strides in gaining acceptance because, though the women are brilliant athletes, their bikinis tend to draw the crowds.

Clark has done well on the amateur circuit, and hopes to turn pro eventually.

“One of the major ways to get better is by having role models,” says Clark, who started a surf league for women in Huntington Beach. The league meets once a week for lessons and support. Clark says the goal is to compete up and down the coast with other leagues, which she says are slowly forming.

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At Huntington Surf and Sport on Main Street, women crowd around a rear counter buying smoothies--pineapple/guava/mango or date and yogurt with banana. They flip through racks of clothes hung with the grunge look appropriated by the surfwear industry--oversize flannel shirts and baggy jeans, hooded sweat shirts they could drown in--looking for something that might fit. Surfing is still mostly a man’s world, or so the industry thinks.

Yet women entered both the OP Pro and U.S. Open in record numbers this year, while Joyce Hoffman was an inductee into a women’s category at the new Huntington Beach Surfing Hall of Fame.

Even so, surfing is still plagued by sexism.

Surfer Allen Lambert, 28, says he doesn’t mind an increase of girls and women in the water, but admits most guys would rather they “decorate the beach.” Lambert, who sells surfboards for Robert August of “Endless Summer” fame, says, “I’ve seen more girls in the water in the last month than I’ve seen in my whole life,” adding, “People in the way are people in the way--it doesn’t matter if you’re a girl or a guy.”

Verdone, who has about a half-dozen girls on his Huntington Beach High School surf team vying for three spots while guys have 12 spots, says, “There’s nothing more cocky than a male surfer--it’s the most arrogant human being you can run into.”

He compares the female surfer to guys in their 30s, 40s and 50s who are learning or relearning the sport.

“They get harassed. It’s frightening,” says Verdone. “And you put in the elements of the ocean, which is a pretty scary environment. You have to have self-confidence when you surf.”

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There is a peak forming at 9th Street--two- to three-foot glassy waves with nice shape and no wind. Slightly high tide. Mostly rights. Linda Laszlo of Seal Beach thinks the water is still pretty warm, though the air feels like it does at the end of summer.

She stands on the beach wrapped in a wet towel, still wearing her short john. In other parts of the world, surfers can surf in the skin, but this is California. Laszlo has a dolphin tattooed on her right ankle, and a palm tree, discreetly marking the inside of the same ankle.

On the other foot is a weathered booty--only one. She has worn it in Fiji, Tahiti, Australia, New Zealand, the Cook Islands, France, Spain, Portugal, England, Costa Rica. Once in Bali she paddled out three-quarters of a mile to waves that from the beach looked as if they were only three or four feet. When she got there, she was battered by a 12-foot wall of water and dashed against the infamous reef, which accounts for the booty.

As a 6-year-old, Laszlo says she was forced into ballet lessons, like most little girls, and later coerced her parents into letting her take up gymnastics instead. She learned grace, stamina, balance, agility and courage--qualities she exploited when she took up surfing at the age of 10.

One more thing, adds Laszlo: “Surfers need faith to learn not to be afraid.”

Behind her, three young women in short johns and sun-bleached hair approach the water’s edge.

Laying their boards down on the wet sand, they stretch languidly, like gymnasts, for several minutes as the tide keeps time. They have caught the attention of some guys climbing out of the water after a long morning session, but they don’t seem to notice.

They bounce onto their surfboards and plane perfectly into the white water. One of them pauses to cup her hand in the salty water, then crosses herself before hopping on and paddling out to the lineup.