These Sites Are Shore Eyes

By DEXTER FILKINS

Aug. 5, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

HUNTINGTON BEACH —

The latest ripple on the Internet is giving the phrase “surfing the Net” a whole new meaning. And it’s turning beach bums into techno-wizards.

Cameras, hidden in dunes or mounted atop oceanfront buildings from Malibu to Oceanside, are snapping pictures of surf conditions and beaming the images to the Internet.

Click: Monster break at Malibu.

Click: Three to four feet and glassy at Huntington Beach Pier.

Click: Major tubes at Trestles.

“I check out the waves on my computer every morning and decide whether I’m going to work or going to the beach,” said Tom Kennedy, a body-boarder who owns an insurance agency in Mission Viejo. “The computer saves me a drive to the beach.”

At least a half-dozen Southern California companies and foundations have set up sites on the Internet that allow browsers to view close-up color photos of breaking waves. The photos, updated every minute on some Web sites, are adorned with information on wave size, water temperature, tides and wind speed.

“We have people from all over the world looking at our waves,” said Ken Torimaru, whose company, Surfspot, operates a surf camera at the Huntington Beach Pier.

Last month, in one of the more ambitious projects, a Huntington Beach company called SurfLink started camera sites at Malibu, the Huntington Beach Pier, Manhattan Beach and Cardiff.

Using technology provided by GTE, SurfLink employs cameras that transmit images to its Web site via cellular phone transceivers. The photo is updated once a minute.

By the end of the year, Mark Bertignoli, SurfLink’s president, hopes to convert the wave images to nonstop video.

“I love surfing, and I was looking for a way to put surfing on the Web,” Bertignoli said. “This is it.”

The computerized surf reports are threatening to alter the age-old practice of driving to the beach and checking out the waves before deciding whether to get wet. If the waves are flat, the Internet photos could save surfers who live miles inland a long drive to the beach.

“They won’t have to battle the traffic,” said Mark Babsky of the Surfrider Foundation.

Kennedy, the insurance agent, lives in Mission Viejo, a 30-minute drive from the San Clemente beach where he surfs.

If surfing conditions are poor, Kennedy said, “The computer can save me an hour’s drive.”

Yet for all the hoopla, some mainstream surfing institutions have reacted coolly to the introduction of high technology to their sport, which has long prided itself on being at one with nature.

“Most surfers are visceral people,” said Nick Carroll, executive editor of Surfing Magazine in San Clemente. “When they surf, they don’t want anything to do with technology. They surf because they want to be close to nature.”

And some surfers say they’re worried that Southern California’s prime breaks, like Malibu and San Clemente, are going to be overrun with geeks and wannabes.

“Guys I surf with say, ‘I hope they don’t put a camera here,’ ” said Carroll, who surfs at Trestles in northern San Diego County.

The computerized surf reports grew out of the phone-in services that wave-riders have relied on for years. Surfline/Wavetrak in Huntington Beach, for instance, provides surf conditions--but no photos--from more than 100 beaches all over the United States.

Sean Collins, a forecaster at Surfline/Wavetrak, is adding cameras to complement the wave reports. His company operates cameras at Huntington Beach Pier and El Porto in Manhattan Beach, and plans to turn on cameras soon at Playa Hermosa in Costa Rica and Sebastian Inlet on Florida’s East Coast.

“We’re very encouraged by the response we’ve gotten so far,” Collins said.

Surfline/Wavetrak’s Internet site gets about 100,000 visits a month, Collins said.

The quality of the surf images vary widely.

Some of the photos are clear and sharp. Others, even with a high-definition computer screen, look like grainy postcards. Since some of the cameras are fixed and unmanned, the photos they take are sometimes unremarkable.

The fixed cameras are limited in other ways, too. Last week, some of the images from Huntington Beach on the Web showed the beachfront scaffolding erected for a televised surfing contest.

Collins, of Surfline, is able to avoid that problem by controlling his camera from his office with a joystick. And on most Web sites, computer users can peek into a folder and look at all the wave photos from a particular day.

Babsky, who maintains the Surfrider Foundation’s Web site, does it the old-fashioned way: Each morning, he trots down to the San Clemente Pier and snaps a picture with a camera and posts it on Surfrider’s Web site.

One drawback to the Babsky method: When he takes a day off, the photos aren’t updated.

“I’ll just a post a note on the computer that says ‘on vacation,’ ” he said.

Like many other services on the Web, the success or failure of many of the surf reports will ride on whether they can attract advertisers. Many of the Web sites carry ads for surf shops, and some sites have been more successful than others at attracting the advertising dollar.

SurfLink, for example, runs ads from GTE Mobilenet.

Bob Barnett, a lawyer and surfer in Santa Monica, says he thinks the Web sites will catch on. The reason, he says, is that great waves are something most surfers don’t ever want to miss.

“I check the waves every morning on the computer,” Barnett said, “because when the surf is good, everything else waits.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Shooting the Pier

Now, while surfing the Web, you can check out the waves along several of Southern California’s beaches. Web sites display actual pictures of waves with updates ranging from hourly to daily. The images include water temperature and other information.

Cameras are either installed near the beach or photographers take pictures on-site. The three ways images get to Web sites:

* Image transmitted via satellite

* Photographer takes picture, scans image into computer

* Image transmitted via telephone lines

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Web Locations

Here is a partial listing of surf reports available on the Internet and where surf shots are taken:

Surfline/Wavetrak https://www.surfline.com

Manhattan Beach, Huntington Beach

Surfrider Foundation https://www.sdsc.edu/SDSC/partners/Surfrider/recent.htm

San Clemente pier

Surfspot https://www.surfspot.com