Gloom and Board

It’s the first day of summer, and through the gray haze of morning gloom, Dusty Weber knows that the sun is shining. And that means days and days ahead--no Ventura High School, no alarm clock, no real obligations--to just slap on his surfer shorts, grab his board and let the waves take him.

It means Susan Harrer jets out of work on lunch break and waxes down her new long board--the one stamped with the blocky floral print that matches her self-designed bikini. It means that in the months ahead, on nice afternoons, her boss at Patagonia may even say “Why are you still here?” or may have already headed for the beach himself.

It means Jeanne Elder brings her Ojai brood--a troupe of children and neighbors with surfboards balanced on their heads--to Faria Beach, where her young sons call the 65-degree water warm and 9-year-old Shane can do a handstand as his board skims across the waves.

The first day of summer is a promise: of more warmth, fewer cares and, most importantly, of more days to come.

Summer clicked over on Tuesday evening at 6:48 p.m., the precise moment that the sun reached its northernmost latitude relative to the Earth.

And June gloom can’t keep the beach faithful away.

The waves are smaller now, so summer surfing in Ventura County is not about showing off--unless it’s how good you look in your bathing suit. It means the water is crowded, but no one seems to mind so much: How can you, when the ocean’s warm and the sun is trying so hard to shine. Summer is for the laid-back.

“It’s more social surfing,” Harrer says. “There’s no winter attitude.”

There are no hotdoggers slamming around on their short boards in the chop: The waves are flat.

The locals are nice, even to the land-locked tourists and folks from the Valley and the east county.

“These other guys were screaming for me when I was gonna catch a wave, ‘Go! Go! Go!,”’ says Adam March, a slight, freckled kid, as he pulls off his wetsuit in the Surfers Point parking lot. He will be a sophomore at Thousand Oaks High School next fall, and surfing will take a back seat again.

It means good things for Tim Greiner of Ventura because “the girls are out.” Even more, it means he can escape from his job for the moment. The beach is free, after all.

“I wasn’t gonna go out [today]. Then I thought, I’ll feel so good for the rest of the day,” Greiner says as he hefts his board at Surfers Point. “The ocean has energy.”

The surfers try not to think that from here, today, with the sun shining for about 14 1/2 hours, the days will only get shorter and more valuable. Each day out on the waves, Dusty Weber says, is “freedom.”

Dusty can still wake up at 10:30, eat breakfast at 11:30 and know that he and his friends have plenty of time for the beach. Dre Dominguez can lay back for a little snooze on the sand, discover two hours have passed and say--at least today--”I’ve still got the whole summer.”

Dominguez’s summer goal can be surfing, and she doesn’t have to feel like she is wasting time. In September, months away, there is her job as a softball coach at UC San Diego. Now, there is the beach.

“I think it’s gonna be a long summer,” she says. And then she leans back for a bit more rest.