Fantasy Surf : Dreaming of an Endless Summer, Campers Learn How to Catch the Perfect Wave

For most, toting surfboards through the sand was a piece of cake. But 8-year-old Shawn Tierney had to strain every muscle just to lug the giant surfboard that dwarfed him.

Maybe someday, the Huntington Beach boy will look back on the Summer of ’95 as one of his best. But on this day, Tierney’s first at Super Surf Camp, it seemed more like work than fun.

“This is my first time surfing ever in my life,” he said as he reached the water and prepared for the next struggle--to propel himself into the surging surf. “I’ve been on a swim team before, but this is different.”

Welcome to Surfology 101: people of all ages paying $185 to $800 a week at surf camps to pursue their dreams of slipping into the Pacific and sliding across a wave.

In Orange County alone, others include the Paskowitz Camp, run by a famous surfing clan at San Onofre State Beach, and the Endless Summer Surf Camp, operated by prominent surfer Mary Lou Drummy of San Clemente. The camps offer weeklong instruction not only in surfing technique but in safety, surf culture and reading the ocean.

At the Super Surf Camp, the operation is equipped with plenty of surfboards and each student gets a wet suit for the week.

Joshua Stoops, 11, of Chino Hills, came out of the water with a grin.

“I’ve got my own surfboard. I’ve been able to get up on it a coupla times,” he reported. “But with this bigger board, it was so easy to stand up and you can just stand there and it goes!”

Sessions begin at 9 a.m. and run until 3 p.m., Monday through Friday. Once each camper selects a surfboard, chief instructor Chris Koerner, 37, of Dana Point, asks them to arrange the boards “nose first” in a semicircle facing him.

For Aaron Baughman, 10, of San Clemente, finding the nose--the front of the surfboard--was the first lesson.

“I just put the board there, OK?” he asked another camper, Aron Yehuda, 9, of Anaheim. “Can you help me move this around?”

Once all the noses were pointed in one direction, Koerner instructed the class on the surfboard’s parts, water safety and the art of standing up.

The camps are not just for youngsters. Laura Ehlers, an adventurous 38-year-old mother of two from Long Beach, said she became interested by way of her two surfing sons.

“I wanted to see what this was all about,” she said.

Hesitatingly, Ehlers entered the water and smoothly paddled out to gentle breakers. As a series of swells rolled in, she positioned the board toward shore.

After she made a few short strokes, a wave picked up the surfboard. Within moments, she and the board were being hurled across the water. She lifted herself up, planted both feet beneath her and, for a few brief moments was surfing.

“It’s like floating you toward shore, like on air,” Ehlers reported 10 minutes later, safely on shore--and beaming. “It’s like flying.”

Super Surf Camp is operated at Sunset and Salt Creek county beaches by Herb White and Jim Balok, lifeguards for the state who have run summer junior lifeguard programs privately for many years.

“One thing we do differently is, we advertise in parenting magazines and publications for children,” White said. “Very few other camps have targeted this market. Most target the surfing magazines.”

At all the camps, instruction is lively.

“I remember with one group of youngsters we had a dry spell where no sizable waves were coming through,” said Koerner, a lifeguard for 17 years in Australia and the United States. “Well, I had the group believing that the oil derricks out there were big wave machines. When the dry spell hit, I told them, ‘We aren’t getting waves today because I haven’t paid the electrical bill.”’