New Artificial Reef Barely Makes a Ripple for Surfers

Where would you rather surf: at an artificial reef created by an environmental group, or a nearby sewage outflow pipe built by the city of Los Angeles?

If you want to catch some waves, you’d better pick the pipe.

The first artificial surf reef in North America, built by the Surfrider Foundation in September, has yet to produce a ridable wave.

On a recent Sunday at the El Segundo site, a gaggle of surfers and body-boarders jockeyed for waves around the pipe near the Hyperion sewage treatment plant. About 500 feet down the coast, the newly christened Pratte’s Reef--well, it was kind of hard to tell exactly where it was. As one online surfing publication put it, the only way to spot it is with a mask and snorkel.

“It’s bogus,” said local surfer Daniel Delcatillo, who has checked the spot about five times. “They spend all that time and money and you don’t even get a lump in the ocean.”

But the Surfrider Foundation is taking the heckling in stride.

The San Clemente-based group, the leading voice for an estimated 2 million surfers nationwide, just got a new grant to almost double the size of the reef. And it is waiting for big winter swells and extreme low tides to see if the thing might still work.

“Nobody ever promised the Banzai Pipeline,” said the reef’s designer, David Skelly, referring to one of the world’s best-known breaks, on Oahu. “This was an experiment from the start.”

There are only two other artificial surfing reefs in the world, both in Australia. One has drawn surfers, and one is a dud. In general, reefs shape the ocean bottom to lift swells rolling onto the coast and cause them to break.

Pratte’s Reef was built to resurrect a surf break destroyed in 1984 when Chevron built a jetty north of Manhattan Beach. State coastal authorities ruled that waves were a natural resource and ordered the oil company to pay $300,000 for an artificial surf reef.

So far, it has attracted only octopuses, fish and seaweed--as well as coastal cities seeking the group’s advice on the new technology; the reefs could provide an alternative to sea walls in stopping coastal erosion.

Skelly is building a similar reef for the city of Encinitas in north San Diego County to stop the loss of sand from the beach. Unlike sea walls, the reefs don’t create backwash that carries beach sand out to sea.

Skelly said the El Segundo reef--which was made of more than 100 14-ton bags of sand--hasn’t produced waves for a variety of reasons. One, he said, is that Chevron’s money did not buy enough sand to build it big enough. Two, it had to be built in a spot that wouldn’t anger local surfers and mess up nearby surf spots with erosion. And perhaps most important, it couldn’t be put in shallow water for liability reasons.

Reefs that are just a few feet below the surface can cause waves to break on much smaller swells. The problem is that powerful waves can easily hurl surfers right onto the reef itself, causing injuries and a touchy legal situation. Although that painful circumstance--called reef rash--happens on natural reefs all the time, a man-made structure could invite litigation, Skelly said.

Because Surfrider had to deal with so many factors that had nothing to do with producing waves, it couldn’t pick the optimal spot or use the best design, Skelly said.

“Where we put it offshore was determined by liability,” he said. “It wasn’t the best spot for waves.”

“They picked a dead zone,” said Vince Ray, 43, who’s been surfing the area since the 1960s.

“It’s like putting a BB in a swimming pool. What they need is corporate sponsorship.”

A reef would be a new frontier in commercialization, and it’s an idea the Surfrider Foundation is open to. “Everyone knew there wasn’t enough money,” Skelly said. “What blew me away was that the surfing industry didn’t come up with a million bucks for this.”

As it turned out, his group recently received a $200,000 grant from the Coastal Conservancy. With it, Surfrider hopes next spring to add about 90 bags to the 120 already there.