Drowning Darkens Mood at Beach

The day after 43-year-old Alejandro Amorsolo drowned surfing the Boneyard, a particularly treacherous stretch of ocean off Pacific Palisades, dozens of surfers again rode the swells. But a pall hung over them, and over the people at nearby Gladstone’s 4 Fish who witnessed the tragedy.

Ben Saltzman, a 16-year-old Gladstone’s host and a surfer, said he had to turn away from the drowning, in which others pulled Amorsolo from the water but could not save him. “It scared me,” he said.

Joey McGilberry, 30, a Santa Monica surfer, said he is now paying more attention to other surfers when they are knocked off their boards and pushed underwater.

Greg Temple, a Gladstone’s waiter who jumped over a 15-foot railing to help pull Amorsolo out of the water, spent Friday morning praying.

Relatives said Amorsolo, a resident of Northeast Los Angeles, had once surfed on a nearly daily basis but gave it up after a divorce.

He later sunk into a depression serious enough to require a disability leave from his bottling job at a brewery, according to Joy Arellano, who lived with him for the last six years.

At the suggestion of his psychologist, Amorsolo recently “resumed surfing to help overcome his depression,” she said.

Surfers speculated Friday that Amorsolo, who drowned shortly after paddling into the ocean, may have been rusty or simply overmatched.

“There’s an aura about a surfer, a charisma, a walk,” said Temple, who had watched Amorsolo before he drowned. “He didn’t have it.”

“He was paddling out and got stuck,” said Dan Sucharski, manager at Gladstone’s. “He never made it out. The waves kept washing over his board, pulling him under. This went on for minutes. He was obviously in trouble.”

Temple’s attention was drawn to the incident when he heard Arellano scream that her boyfriend was in danger. “He was on his back, about 10 feet off the shore,” Temple said.

He and another waiter, Paul Casillas, “looked at each other, looked at him, then jumped the rail” separating the restaurant deck from the beach.

When the men got to Amorsolo, “he was immobilized,” Temple said. “I looked straight in his eyes. They were glazed over. . . . It’s hard to pull someone out when you know he’s dead.”

By then, Arellano had already dashed into the water. “He was out of balance,” she said. “I saw he couldn’t get away, so I ran out and grabbed him. He was still conscious, and I yelled for others.”

Amorsolo was taken by ambulance to Santa Monica/UCLA Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead shortly after arrival.

County lifeguard Capt. Bob Buchanan said the season’s first reported drowning occurred during a heat wave and high swells that caused near record usage of beaches.

Surfer Julio Iversen, 44, of Pasadena, who knew Amorsolo only by his Filipino nickname “Dindo,” said that Amorsolo had surfed on “a near daily basis” but suddenly stopped coming seven years ago.

“Yesterday, I saw him for the first time. He was standing on the cliff, deciding what to do,” he said.

Iversen said he and a surfing buddy waved Amorsolo into the water, then lost track of him and did not realize the identity of the drowned surfer.

Thursday night, Iversen “went to bed praying the drowning victim wasn’t him.” He told another surfing friend: “We’ll have it on our conscience if he drowned.”

The problem, said another surfer, is that someone who is out of practice might look out at a series of small waves, feel safe and paddle out just as a set of large waves hit. With his ankle strapped to his board, the board flipping over and the cord entangling itself around an arm--as several witnesses thought happened to Amorsolo--getting away becomes problematic.

Surfer Shahid Sheikh, 32, of Pacific Palisades, said the part of the beach that lies south of a jetty, where the rocks are smooth and well away from softly breaking waves, is one of the safer ones. Only gradually do surfers progress up to the Boneyard to the north, where “the waves drop suddenly in a free fall,” and jagged boulders seemingly appear out of nowhere, he said.

Friday morning, the vast majority of surfers were south of the jetty, with just over a dozen riding waves in the Boneyard.

“Everyone’s fear is to drown in some freaky accident like this,” said Patrick Shea, 26.

Shea was putting his wetsuit on. He would keep riding.