Awed Ocean-Watchers Admire Nature’s Show

Doris Rapp, a retired secretary from Chicago, was still several blocks away from the Manhattan Beach Pier on Thursday when she looked up and saw a massive churning hoary wall.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said the vacationing heartlander. “I saw all this white. It looked like a mountain of snow.”

Steve Oetzell, an airplane pilot from Redondo Beach, lusted to rip off his shirt and jump into the whipped-cream-like foam.

“I think it’s pretty spectacular,” said Oetzell, who stood on the pier with his wife and 19-month-old daughter. “But between my job, my family and writing a novel, I can’t even find time to play golf anymore, let alone belly-board.”

Rapp and Oetzell were among the thousands drawn Thursday from their offices, houses and hotels to the piers and beaches of the Southland to simply stare at the phenomenon: some of the largest summer waves anyone has seen in years.

At Manhattan Beach, continuing high surf from a storm several hundred miles off Tahiti resulted in the waves splashing as high as 30 feet up the pilings of the sturdy, baby-blue pier.

“When it pounds the pier, it feels like an earthquake,” said Dana Collier of Manhattan Beach. “It’s cool, it’s our own little Disneyland--at least when you know it’s not a real earthquake.”

Along the coast from San Diego to Ventura, waves continued to pound south-facing beaches, cascading as high as six feet at Zuma Beach and Marina del Rey, eight feet at the San Clemente Pier and 10 feet in Newport Beach.

“The conditions are very hazardous--unless you’re an expert bodyboarder or surfer,” said Los Angeles County Lifeguard Scott Davey.

The surf was expected to begin diminishing today. But on Thursday, water conditions proved exhilarating for bodyboarders, hairy for lifeguards, and supremely enjoyable for the vicarious multitudes on shore.

“It’s beautiful,” said Rapp, who looked as if she was off for a jaunt in the Lake District of England in her straw hat and white shorts. “Would I go in it? I wouldn’t go in it even if it wasn’t like this. I’m afraid of the water.”

Vacationing Flo Collier of Kennett, Mo., also marveled at the foam and the denizens of the surf. But she wasn’t about to jump in either.

“I hate to say it,” she confided to her daughter-in-law, Dana. “But ever since I saw ‘Jaws,’ I wouldn’t go in that far.”

While Collier spent as much time keeping watch over her tricycling granddaughter as viewing the Pacific’s waves, Manhattan Beach resident Hilary Luckenbaugh reclined nearby in a wooden beach chair, sipping the foam off a huge cappuccino cup, a copy of Martha Stewart Living in her lap, as she gazed at the foam below.

“It’s exceptional here today,” said Luckenbaugh, who had taken the day off from her post as a business developer for an office construction contractor. “This is a way of unwinding.

“I’d come out here even if the waves were flat.”