Trying to Keep a Surfing Secret

The waves are frigid, inconsistent and “sharky.” Tolerance for being spun like a piece of laundry in an industrial washing machine is required. Ghostly plumes of smelly vapor rise from a nearby paper mill.

Malibu, it’s not.

Under a white-gray sky in a light rain, a dozen men and one woman park their four-wheel drives on the north jetty, strip to nakedness and don wetsuits--neoprene 5 millimeters thick, with hoods and booties. They tuck their surfboards under their arms and hit the morning waves.

They are part of an improbable and growing colony of surfers who endure harsh conditions to ride the big, clean waves that roll onto the far North Coast of California, more famous for groves of majestic redwood trees than its surfing culture. And that is part of the appeal.

As surfing enjoys a popularity surge and the waves off California’s best beaches become as gridlocked as its freeways, the coast from Eureka up to Oregon and beyond offers surfers their most cherished find: uncrowded waters.

But in the last five years, the locals have seen a big jump in the number of comrades in waves.

Urban refugees are fleeing to this northwest sliver of the state, more college students are diving into the waves and young local kids have nixed their fathers’ pastime of hunting in favor of surfing.

Advances in wetsuit technology mean sleek suits thick enough to provide good insulation but thin enough in all the places you need flexibility.

And word has simply leaked out.

Reporters snooping around don’t help matters.

“We’d actually be obliged if you didn’t make it sound too good,” says Lenny Ehlers, 56, clambering over the rocks into the roiling surf of the north jetty beach. “We don’t need another 500 people up here.”

Up here, locals are often the people who found this place before all the other people who now are finding it. Ehlers grew up in Hermosa Beach and moved here in 1960 to attend Humboldt State in nearby Arcata. He made a living as a fisherman with a salmon boat, but is now the owner of the Jogg’n Shoppe/Lenny’s Longboards in Arcata.

“It used to be you would come out here in the morning and wait for someone to surf with you,” says Glenn Stockwell, 57, a political science instructor on sabbatical from nearby College of the Redwoods.

It’s a disparate yet chummy group of surfers that claim these cold beaches as their own--doctors, artists, professors, students, fishers, store clerks. Here, attitude is unwelcome. Surfers sitting out in the water on their boards waiting for their turn at a wave chat like old friends.

“It’s more of a give than a take,” says Ehlers, 56, who has been surfing the North Coast since the 1960s. “How many places do you find that? I can actually sit out there and say, ‘Hey guys, that looks like my wave, what do you think?’ And they’ll say, ‘Yeah, it’s yours!’ ”

The surfers range in age from teens up to the patron saint of the local surfing contingent, 89-year-old John Ball, better known as Doc, who retired 25 years ago from dentistry in nearby Garberville. But he has yet to retire from surfing, he proclaims, making his way into the waves about four times a year.

“The water is so galldarn cold!” he says, chuckling.

When Ball moved north from Hermosa Beach in the 1950s to escape smog and congestion, he brought his hobby with him and plied the local waves with few companions. He shared his love of the sport with local teenagers, some of whom now are the veterans of this coast.

“He would have Wednesdays off and I would surf with him,” says Bill Hoopes, now 46, an English instructor at College of the Redwoods and a restorer of boards.

Their tiny colony of surfers took to the waves in the 1950s and ‘60s with great glee and without wetsuits. They built fires on the beach and cooked soup in coffee cans to get warm.

Famed surfers eventually made their way up this foggy coast. At his home in Crescent City, just south of the Oregon border, Greg Noll, a Southern California surfing icon of the 1960s, makes wood boards to adorn collectors’ walls. His son Rhyn, 34, runs the surf shop in town, the northernmost outpost of surfing culture in the state.

For many, the first hint that any surfing existed here came when a lawsuit by the Southern California-based Surfrider Foundation helped clean up the toxic effluent from two Eureka paper mills. The landmark 1991 agreement led to record fines under the Clean Water Act and established this area as a surfing enclave.

Like many cold-water surfers, Brian Woolsey, a 19-year-old Humboldt State sophomore, disdains the self-centered, aggressive Southern Californians who sometimes stumble upon these waves. “They don’t know sharing and camaraderie,” he says. “There’s less respect--even when they’re going out in the forest and leaving their trash.”

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The anxiety over outsiders might be a tad higher than usual now because this is prime season on the North Coast, which seems to feel the effects of virtually every storm that comes through the Pacific. Winter waves can be too intense, leaving the water a churning mess. Summer swells are minuscule, forcing the surfers to plan trips elsewhere. But a perfect fall or spring day can offer up big waves nicely groomed by an offshore wind, the water temperature a nippy 49 degrees.

Surf here long enough and you might see a great white shark--or hear a story about someone seeing one. Every few years, a shark mistakes a slick neoprene-covered surfer for a seal, takes a bite and spits him out. Ehlers remembers one attack several years ago.

The surfer, he says, “beat on its eye and the shark let him go. Some other people paddled over to him and the wetsuit kept him from getting too cut up. He needed 168 stitches.”

Even so, sharks are hardly a daily worry, Ehlers says. North jetty surfers are more afraid of getting flung against the rocks by the rough water. Injuries can include getting banged by a board badly enough to need stitches. The riptide that runs offshore is actually a boon, carrying surfers out to their waves with a minimum of paddling. “It’s added five years to my life,” Ehlers says.

On this day, the waves aren’t huge--maybe five feet measured on the face--but they are clean and glassy and draw 15 surfers through the early morning.

“If the waves were like this down south, there’d be 100 people out there,” says Chris Roberts, 25, suiting up on the jetty with his girlfriend, Lisa Douglas, 26. They met at Humboldt State.

“He took me out on a surf date,” Douglas says as she wriggles into her wetsuit. They run a clothing import business and surf two to three times a week.

Most days, a small klatch can be found in the predawn hours hunkered over coffee and lattes at the Udder Place, a tiny coffee bar that this crowd rates as one of Eureka’s best. From there, they make their way to the beach, wandering out on the jetty that borders Humboldt Bay, joking and gauging the surf before they change into their wetsuits.

“I never thought in my 40s I’d be spending so much time in my 50s pulling my clothes on and off in public,” Stockwell quips as he modestly drapes a towel around his waist. No one wears a swimsuit under the neoprene because, he says, “it’s just one more thing to put on.” He took up surfing at the age of 50 and has been known to drive 90 miles south to surf Shelter Cove, where the water is reputed to be a few degrees warmer, before teaching a 10 a.m. class.

He is ruddy-faced with a shock of gray hair and thick glasses that he takes off for surfing and replaces with contact lenses. Last, he pulls on finger-less gloves: “No warmth. Just paddling power. An old man’s prosthesis,” he jokes. “You’ve got to do whatever you can to keep up with the kids.”

He trots out into the water. “See you later!”

It’s unlikely that the North Coast will replace Hawaii or Costa Rica as a surfing vacation destination. “We live here and we like to surf, so we surf here,” says Carl Fulbright, a 54-year-old emergency room doctor who grew up surfing in Huntington Beach. “If we were just looking for a place to surf, we’d go to Hawaii where the water’s warmer.”

But increasingly, the North Coast casts a spell. Students come to College of the Redwoods and Humboldt State knowing they can surf within sight of a forest.

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Some give it up after a taste of cold water. The ones who stay after graduation say they love big waves and small towns. They drive to beaches such as Trinidad State Park and Patrick’s Point, both north of Eureka, and make their way down spindly trails over rocky bluffs to find waves.

“I wanted to be in the fog and rain,” Mike Moran, 32, says cheerfully. “No, seriously. I feel like the sun was too hard on my body.” Moran learned to surf in the warm waters off Coronado but now does battle with northern swells--he has suffered a sprained ankle and a burst eardrum.

On another day, the water is a stormy mass. Most surfers watch glumly from the jetty. “Garbage,” says Richard Kistler, a 33-year-old artist and potter, eyeing the choppy water. “Yeah, we’re going out.”

His Great Dane, Pablo, waits in the bed of Kistler’s pickup, baying at the ocean for his owner to return. Kistler finally emerges.

Surfing broke up his marriage, he says. “She decided I loved surfing more than her. She was right. She hated Eureka--but I wouldn’t leave because of the surfing.”

In fact, Kistler says he came here for the surfing. “It’s got the best surf on the West Coast--wait a minute,” he says, stopping himself. “I shouldn’t be telling you all this.”

Kirk Johnson, 36, who runs the Humboldt Surf Co. in Arcata, just north of Eureka, says his hard-core clients were initially annoyed that his shop existed.

“Surfers felt it was like pointing a finger to the area as a surf spot,” he says. “I have to be mellow with my advertising. I put out a few low-key ads.”

And he rarely talks openly about surfing spots. “There are still places you can find where it feels like you’re the first person to surf there,” he says. “That’s half the magic--finding it on your own.”

Johnson, who learned to surf at Dana Point when he was 15, has lived here for 17 years. “I came here to go to school at Humboldt State. I forgot to leave,” says Johnson, who despite surfing in head-to-toe rubber, has the sunburned, bleached blond look of a Southern California surfer.

He presides over a little store cozily crowded with wetsuits and gargantuan surfboards known as “big wave guns,” as well as skateboards and snowboards. It’s all equipment for sports where you stand sideways, he says.

His story, he adds, is typical: “People show up. They find out there are waves. They graduate. They get good jobs or do what they have to do to stay.”

And increasingly there are more people doing that, Johnson says. “Everyone’s trying to get out of the rat race.

“For us, it’s the coming rat race.”

That’s exactly what world-class longboarder Greg Noll did when he moved to the Crescent City area more than 20 years ago. The big-wave rider, who is thought to have ridden one of the biggest waves ever in 1969 at Makaha Point in Hawaii, left it all behind for a less hectic life as a fisherman.

“There’s a major, major difference in attitude up here as compared to Southern California,” says Noll, 59. “People are slower, they enjoy solitude more. If you come up here from Southern California, you stand out like a sore thumb. They talk faster.”

He owns a de rigueur Ford 250 pickup truck--traded for five of his hand-tooled surfboards. He wears shorts and flip-flops, even on a cold cloudy day. A brawny surfer who used his physical power in the water (he was called “Da Bull”), today his surfing exploits mainly run to making appearances, licensing his name for clothes, and fashioning about 12 collector surfboards a year, each of which he sells for thousands of dollars.

All are made of woods such as redwood and cedar. Some are replicas of old Hawaiian boards; all are meant to be pieces of art. Decades ago, surfers rode heavy, cumbersome redwood boards. Today, they ride ultralight boards that are made of fiberglass and foam.

The house where he makes his boards and lives with his wife, Laura, overlooks the Smith River and a redwood forest.

Rhyn dismisses surfers who think they can keep others from arriving on the North Coast.

“These people are living in a dream world,” he says. “They better wake up and smell the coffee, man. People are surfing up here. The North Coast is no longer a secret.”

And that’s fine by him. He loves a good wave, but is also a businessman who wants to encourage surfing. His shop is as much a service stop for surfers as it is a museum of old photographs and surfboards that belonged to once famous wave-riders.

Across the backyard from his house, in a converted workshop, Rhyn and two craftsmen shape surfboards and a longboard equivalent of a skateboard.

A surfing contest the younger Noll sponsored with his mother, Beverly, who co-owns the shop, drew more than 200 surfers and hundreds of spectators.

“People were like, ‘Hey, you’ve got this contest--you’re telling people about our surfing,’ ” Rhyn says. “Most of the surfers who participated were thoroughly stoked on the contest.”

His father has a similarly relaxed attitude toward the wannabe North Coast surfers. “If you can handle the cold water up here, come on!” he says, laughing.