Landlocked Surfers Ride Roads to Shore

Like any die-hard longboarders, Bob Poirier and Jerry Ford are on a constant search for the perfect wave. There’s only one problem: The surf’s never up in Fresno.

So here in California’s Central Valley, where most people obsessed with water and weather forecasts are farmers, Poirier and Ford helped found--don’t laugh, they ask--the Fresno Longboard Surfing Assn.

Nearly every weekend, a contingent of these displaced desert misfits journeys to some point along the faraway Pacific coast to catch a break and a short dose of the scene that most surfers would never live without.

“Everybody’s surprised to hear that anyone from Fresno surfs,” Poirier said recently, grabbing a midweek lunch with Ford at a chain restaurant in a huge strip mall call Riverpark--no river or park anywhere to be found.

The man credited with being the nexus of a motley crew that now numbers about 30 is Bob Thompson, also known as the Surfing Judge for obvious reasons: He’s a county judge, and when he’s not handling child support cases, he’s usually riding waves.

A story about Thompson in the Fresno Bee a few years ago caught the attention of Poirier, Ford and others who shared the judge’s passion but didn’t think, until then, that they would ever find friends to share their lonely pilgrimages to the shore. The road trips, which last 2 1/2 hours at a minimum and wind through flat, somewhat uninspiring landscapes, can seem as endless as a surfer’s summer--only nowhere near as fun.

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“It makes it pretty nice to go out to the coast with other people and talk,” Ford said. “That’s been one of the best parts.”

The club formed slowly at first, with a handful of members meeting once a week at the City Cafe, a popular eatery that at the time was right across from a surf shop. They advertised in the paper, and things snowballed from there. The group formalized about a year ago, and when it did, one of the main challenges was coming up with a name.

Central California or Central Valley Surfing Assn. were bandied about. Thompson jokingly suggested the OAFS, or the Older Adolescent Fresno Surfers, to reflect the aging pioneer members, most of them 50 or older. He was serious, though, about not making a reference to Fresno.

“One of Bob’s main concerns was that if we put Fresno in the name, people would laugh at it,” Poirier said.

The judge was overruled.

The ranks are now dominated by professionals. Ford, the club president, works as general manager of a municipal water district north of Fresno. Poirier is a heart surgeon. Other members include a fire captain, a stockbroker, a teacher, attorneys and salesmen.

It is not coincidence that most of them are transplants, their careers keeping them rooted in a place where they long for the shore, too remote for them to act on a surfer’s practically built-in reflex to check the waves every and any chance they get.

Ford, who caught his first wave as a kid at the Santa Monica Pier, remembers getting a lot of flak when he left the Long Beach area, his friends warning him that his “surfing days are over now.”

But the 57-year-old hasn’t had to give up the surfing, or the fellowship that comes with it.

Besides the weekend outings, there are surf vacations, charity events, barbecues, lunches and other informal get-togethers, sometimes just to smoke cigars.

“There’s a good deal of camaraderie, perhaps even more so than what people normally associate with surfing, since we’re in such a remote place,” said Poirier, who learned to surf in Rhode Island.

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Ford and Poirier, at 59 the oldest of the bunch, are among a core group that surfs obsessively--”the Advil group,” Ford quips. They rotate trips to Southern California, where Ford still has a condo, with trips to Northern California, where Poirier has a second home. Two favorite breaks are Blackies to the south and Pleasure Point near Santa Cruz.

Getting out of the water and coming back home is never easy.

“You drag it out as long as you can,” Ford said.