Countywide : The Long, Flat Summer Ends for Surfers

Surfer Matt VanderMeer had been waiting all summer for a day like this.

“It has been a ridiculous summer,” said VanderMeer, who lives in Huntington Beach and in the last three months has spent more time on the sand than in the water.

The surf, he and others said, “has been completely flat.”

But on Thursday, as waves along the Orange County coast sprang up, surfers cheered the first real powerful swells of the summer.

“It is going to get great,” said VanderMeer, who rode his bike to the Wedge at Newport Beach on Thursday, preparing to actually don a wet suit and dust off his surfboard this weekend.

“There were so many pseudo-hurricanes this summer that just fizzled.”

To some, hurricanes mean winds and rain that tear homes from their foundations. But for Orange County’s surfers, they are a thing of beauty.

Spinning far off in the Pacific Ocean, they produce the perfect glassy tubes of water along the shore.

VanderMeer and bodysurfer Eric Benson said they have both been checking the weather pages of the newspapers all summer, looking for the perfect hurricane.

“I think this is from that storm down in New Zealand,” said VanderMeer. “There is also that hurricane off Baja,” added Benson. In fact, the late-summer swell is being produced by a confluence of three storms in the Pacific.

In addition to the storms off Baja and New Zealand, another near the Aleutian Islands is contributing to the high waves expected through this weekend. The storms may generate waves of up to 10 feet in some spots along the Southern California coast.

The Wedge, Newport Beach’s renowned bodysurfing spot, may be the best sight for those who simply want to watch. Waves there are expected to top 10 feet today.

Lorne Caraway could hardly suppress a smile when he heard the good news. The 31-year-old Newport Beach resident stopped off Thursday at Newport Pier, which offers a vantage point from which to scout out the coastline.

“It looks like it’s breaking down around 44th Street,” he observed.

“Guess I should head on down there. Finally.”