Dudes’ Day Out

Dude, it was not a time to be riding a desk. No way.

On a day like Thursday, when the sea was up and the morning sun was bright and warm in a crystal-blue sky, the noxious commute and the fluorescent workplace lights and the entire anxiety-producing, stress-inducing career thing could just wait. At least for a couple of hours.

Sure, you gotta work. But, more important, you gotta surf--if you belong to that culture of Southern Californians who are up each day before the sun to wheel, like sea gulls, up and down the coast in search of waves.

For them, Thursday amounted to opening day of another endless summer. Classic spring conditions produced a steady beat of good-size waves that thundered ashore, particularly in the South Bay, and served to underscore a truth too often obscured by the drudge of another freeway crawl:

It can still be fun to live in and around Los Angeles. For all the well-documented urban woes, where else can you find world-class surfing conditions in the morning and then, feeling exhilarated and truly alive, scamper back to a job in the big city?

“Work is serious and the bills are there,” Brad Valentine, 33, said as he stretched in the early morning sunshine at El Porto, a surfing hot spot at the very northern end of Manhattan Beach.

“It’s good to work,” said Valentine, a car salesman. “It’s good to have a nice ride, a nice place, of course a nice woman--get a good L.A. lifestyle for yourself.

“But,” he added before grabbing his board and heading into the crashing surf, “you’ve got to remember to have fun.”

*

When conditions are right, as they were Thursday, the “migratory herd” of surfers, as Valentine put it, emerges in full force.

At Malibu, where the beach faces southeast, waves averaged 1 to 2 feet, according to county lifeguard Bill Powers. At southwest-facing Zuma, it was 1 to 3.

These were not the places to be.

Instead, the scene was in full swing at El Porto and other west-facing beaches in the South Bay, beneficiaries of a swell produced by a wind coming in from the west and northwest.

At El Porto, as many as half a dozen surfers jockeyed for position Thursday morning across the crest of each big wave, each paddling like frantic water bugs, a lucky two or three rushing into the spray below.

In Hermosa Beach, waves were “easily 3-foot plus,” lifeguard Cindy Cleveland said. At the Topaz Street station in Redondo Beach, it was “head-high waves” and “pretty good surf activity,” lifeguard Mike Inscore said.

Conditions Thursday were further enhanced by the warming weather--sea temperatures of 61 to 63 degrees, up from winter lows in the 50s.

And the South Bay crowds were swelled by another fact of nature--it’s April.

“I mean, ski season is essentially over,” said Robert Chapman, 38, a field service representative for the Gas Company, waxing his board at El Porto. “So now it’s surfing full-bore. It’s a major lifestyle, living in L.A. Roller-blading, skiing, surfing, snowboarding. I dig it.”

Surfing at daybreak, meanwhile, takes discipline. It also requires resourcefulness, flexibility and a commitment to ensuring time for play before work beckons.

As well, it demands an uncommon sensitivity to the nuances of wind and sea and tide.

To the initiated, it was obvious Wednesday that Thursday held the potential for good waves in the South Bay--and that any breakfast meetings in the office ought to be rescheduled.

The wind that whipped through Southern California, howling onto shore at 30 to 40 mph, generated a significant swell.

According to a computerized graphic updated every three hours and distributed on the Internet by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, “significant wave height” beyond Catalina and other islands rose to more than nine feet.

On Wednesday afternoon at the beach, it was too windy and too choppy for anyone to get wet except experienced windsurfers-- such as Neal O’Brien, 36, an architect. “These are the kinds of windsurfing days you wait for,” he said while rigging together his board at El Porto. “A nine out of 10.”

In the morning, meanwhile, the wind is typically far calmer--but the swell it has generated keeps churning toward shore, producing bigger waves. Before the wind picks up again, as it did Thursday afternoon, conditions are ideal for surfing.

“I woke up, saw just a bit of purple in the sky, peeked through my blinds--separated them quietly so I wouldn’t wake up my girlfriend--and saw the fringe of a palm tree just barely waggling in the breeze,” said Valentine, who lives in Santa Monica.

“That one little palm frond was saying to me, like, ‘Come on, let’s go surfing.’ ”

Sean Collins, a forecaster with Surfline/WaveTrak in Huntington Beach, said: ‘We get a lot of this [wind swell] in the springtime. On Friday, the winds ought to be backing off. But hopefully we’ll still have our leftover swell.”

The trick Thursday was knowing that the South Bay was the place to be.

*

The Surfline/WaveTrak forecast hit it right on--a boon for the busy business type on the go. Its El Porto forecast, displayed Wednesday afternoon on the Internet: 3 to 5 feet, “more waves on the way.”

“On a Thursday at 3 o’clock, I might be fielding calls from work and dial in to Sean and, in a calculated fashion, block out between 1 and 4:30 the following Tuesday afternoon and know that on that time frame I’m on a sure-hit basis with conditions,” said Nick Christensen, a 35-year-old real estate broker from Manhattan Beach.

Al Dickerson, a movie producer, tried a more old-fashioned approach: trial and error.

From his Santa Monica home, he drove first to a beach in Ventura County. The waves there were “too small,” so he hopped back on the freeway and drove all the way down to Manhattan Beach.

“It was great,” said Dickerson, 46. “Nobody was on the road. It was meditative.”

Valentine did much the same thing, going first to Malibu, then to El Porto.

“You can always count on El Porto when the wind is right,” he said, launching into a brief sermon about the beauty of both surfing and golf: “Sticking the perfect wave--I get the same rush as connecting with my metal driver, connecting sweetly, and seeing that little white ball take off down the center of the fairway.”

He paused. “By the way,” he said, “I sell Fords. Want one?”