Same Surf, New Waves

“Ladies, your heat has started.”

At the quarterfinals of the OP Pro, a proving ground for California surfers on the amateur circuit, Richard Langen is plunked in a beach chair on the sand, his eyes fixed on the tattered waves. Just off the Oceanside pier, four surfers bob on the water as the Isley Brothers’ “Who’s That Lady?” floats over the loudspeaker. One of those ladies--chestnut hair, freckles, Hotline wetsuit, yellow jersey--is Langen’s daughter Kyla. And so far the community college student and national collegiate surf champion is acing the competition.

“Last wave for yellow, 5.5,” the announcer bellows.

The conditions this morning are lousy; the surf is windblown and small. One after another, the women take off only to see the waves collapse into mush. Langen, an affable guy of 53 clad in a sweatshirt and jeans, teaches the surfing class at Oceanside High. He’s been coming to contests like this since Kyla was 15 and ripping for Carlsbad High’s surf team. Even so, “it’s so nerve-racking for me that I’m thinking about not going” anymore to her competitions.

Yes, Langen is the one who first pushed Kyla into the waves at the age of 12, the one who saw that magical moment when she popped up and he knew she was a natural. He encouraged her to compete, and when she asked for surfboards for Christmas, he bought them. He still loves to surf with his daughter, but things are different. Now his 20-year-old baby chases the big waves in Hawaii. “I’d never do that,” he says.

After a few dramatic moments when a fin suddenly snaps off her board and she has to race to shore to grab another one, Kyla manages to land first in the heat. She’s made the semifinals. Langen grins, but right now he’s too busy to celebrate. He’s hunched over in the sand screwing a new fin in his daughter’s board.

Kyla’s ascension as top surfer in the family is a sign of the times. When she first started paddling out in the waters off the coastal town of Carlsbad, she was usually the only girl out there. Despite its veneer as the apogee of everything cool and free-spirited, surfing was chiefly male terrain. Ian Cairns, founder of the Assn. of Surfing Professionals, once described it in less-than-flattering terms as a sport “run by a lot of rad male chauvinist pig dudes.”

Well, pig dudes, welcome to the revolution.

If you haven’t set foot on a beach lately, you haven’t seen the revolution in women’s surfing that’s sweeping the California shoreline. While no one can cite precise statistics, most observers agree that of the roughly 1.5 million hard-core surfers in America, about 10% to 20% are female and that women’s surfing is growing exponentially. “I never thought I’d see so many girls in the water in my life,” says Jessica Trent Nichols, a marketing manager at Billabong, the surfwear company that launched its girls’ line only three years ago.

Evidence of the revolution is everywhere. A few weeks ago, on an overcast Sunday at Oceanside, I counted a half-dozen women and girls in the water, including a surfer mom in a rash guard and board shorts whose shaggy-haired husband played with their two small children on the shore while she surfed. Five short summers ago, that scene would have been rare. For many guys, who used to disdain the idea of sharing their male-dominated turf with a female, it’s actually cool to have a girlfriend who surfs.

Female surfers are also changing the marketplace. In the last two years at least a dozen new surf schools with names such as Just Sisters and HB Wahine have cropped up along the coast. The already established schools are being flooded with students--from 7-year-old boogie boarders to middle-age moms. Isabelle “Izzy” Tehayni, the force behind Surf Diva, one of the best-known schools catering to women and girls, has seen enrollment in her surf camps double every year since 1996, when she founded the La Jolla school. This summer she had to hire 15 more instructors just to keep up with demand. Mary Hartmann, who has been running Swell Time Surf School in Dana Point since 1987, used to get one or two girls in her surf camps in the early ‘90s. This year the camps filled in a day, and of the 220 kids who signed up, 210 were girls. The groms are also getting tinier. At last fall’s Roxy Wahine Classic, an amateur surf contest in San Onofre where girls mingled with the female pros sponsored by Roxy, the youngest competitor was 4.

Three years ago, Sunshine Makarow, then a member of the U.S. Surf Team, took over the Web site Girls Surf Life because, as the 24-year-old put it, “the guys tend to be so sexist.” Response to the site led to a print version that debuted in June. “Blue Crush,” a movie about the lives of competitive surfer girls is scheduled to open Aug. 16. Female surfers are popping up in other media as well, from Sheryl Crow’s latest music video to American Express commercials to E! Entertainment Television. Randy Hild, an executive with Quiksilver, which launched the Roxy line for women and girls in the early ‘90s, says that television “is more interested in girls’ surfing than boys.

“How can you lose with girls in their bikinis out in the ocean?”

Mary Setterholm is keenly aware of the “bikini factor”; it’s precisely the kind of attitude she’s been rebelling against for most of her life. Setterholm, who grew up in a low-slung neighborhood near Santa Monica, is a pioneer in women’s surfing and won the women’s title in the U.S surfing championship in 1972 when she was 17. Seeking to improve conditions in the sport, she and several other pro surfers founded the Women’s International Surfing Assn., an organization that held female-only contests for 17 years. Now the owner of Surf Academy in Manhattan Beach, the 47-year-old surfer has her own theory about why girls are flocking to the sport: “They’re being given permission. A lot of times what gives people permission is the marketplace. We’re aesthetically appealing for advertising, so it’s the thing to do.”

The first signs that women and girls might invade the sport started to emerge about 10 years ago. What kicked it off was the performance of four-time world champion Lisa Andersen, considered the most aggressive woman surfer of all time and one of the sport’s first female celebrities. The Florida native, who returned to the pro circuit this year, achieved a milestone when Surfer magazine put her on the cover of its February 1996 issue with the provocative caption: “Lisa Andersen Surfs Better Than You.” Andersen was only the second female surfer in the magazine’s history to be featured on the cover (Santa Barbara’s Margo Godfrey Oberg was the first) and, according to Hild, “it was a turning point” in inspiring girls to take up the sport. Another turning point was the resurgence of the longboard in the early 1990s. Because they were lighter and floated better and were easier to ride than their shorter counterparts, women who’d been intimidated by surfing found an avenue into the physically daunting sport. Then, in 1993, Roxy launched the now ubiquitous boardshort, liberating girls from bikinis.

“This is going to sound really weird,” says Janel Anello, a former pro surfer who competed against Andersen in the late ‘80s, “but one of the things that really pushed girls’ surfing is girls’ swim trunks. It made the girls who weren’t surfing aware of it. [They said] ‘Wow, these are cute. They’re surf trunks? Surfing? What’s that about?’ ”

Even so, 10 years ago the surf industry still revolved around men, and if a woman wanted a wetsuit tailored to her physique, she was often out of luck. That inspired a few entrepreneurs to open the first surf shops for girls and women, which in turn spurred the huge growth of surf apparel lines for women. “I was doing business before the doors were even opened,” recalls Hartmann, who launched Girl in the Curl in Dana Point in 1997. Not that she didn’t encounter a tide of cynics. “When I first opened, people were like, ‘An all-girls surf shop? I don’t think so,’ ” says the 41-year-old former competitive surfer. “There were times when I closed the door and would cry.”

Hartmann’s shop also filled a need in the male-driven subculture by giving women and girls a place to meet and feel safe. “It’s kind of like girls rule, this is their little sanctuary,” says Hartmann. There’s a strong sense of community among female surfers, and “they can come in and tell me about that great wave they had. You go into a guys’ surf shop and you’re scared to talk to them. A lot of them feel girls should be in a thong bikini on the beach.”

Many of the best girls in the sport came out of a movement that started in the late 1980s, when a group of surf-crazy adults in San Diego brought competitive surfing to public schools. Today the Interscholastic Surfing Federation has more than 1,500 students in middle schools and high schools from Santa Cruz to San Diego, and about 20% of its members are girls. “When I first started my involvement, most schools could not even put two girls in the water,” says Diane Steuer, the federation’s executive director.

“I still remember my first day,” says Tasia Jones. “Once I got it, I loved it.” Tasia is 16, a longboarder on Carlsbad High’s championship surf team, and she is describing that blissful summer in sixth grade when she first paddled out with her friends Natalie and Amy. The teens are still surfing together, and when she recalls the year they went surfing in Baja or the winter they were too broke to buy wetsuits and surfed in the bone-cold water in their bathing suits and rash guards, her voice grows animated.

“We grew up around the beach together, then we just grew to love each other,” she says. “We get so hyper out in the water. It really relaxes all the stress you have.”

Jones doesn’t exactly fit the surfer girl stereotype. For starters, she’s a brunet. And she’s a devout Christian who prays before contests (“You have to be a good role model for younger girls because they’re watching you.”). She respects her parents, doesn’t smoke or drink and, in a sport almost invariably linked with partying and plentiful sex, laments how females are viewed in the larger culture. “It’s irritating because people think if you’re a girl surfer, you’re either a slut or a [lesbian],” she says. “That’s not how it is.”

Like most surfer girls, Jones has always been athletic. By 8 she was playing softball, and she competed until she broke her elbow during a game in high school. By then she preferred surfing anyway. Last summer she was the only girl selected for Carlsbad’s surf team at the National Scholastic Surfing Assn.’s national competition. She has also attracted sponsors, which has boosted her surfing profile and means that her parents don’t have to pay for most of her surf gear anymore.

Carlsbad High seems to be a hotbed for up-and-coming women surfers. Jones is following in the wake of alumna Julia Christian. Now 20, Christian is touted as America’s next hope for women’s world champion, a title now held by Australian Layne Beachley.

Last summer Christian came in second in the U.S. Open of Surfing at Huntington Beach, and she is currently ranked 14th on the World Qualifying Series Tour, which feeds into the World Championship Tour. And she doesn’t intimidate easily. A few months ago, when she showed up in Panama for the Billabong Pro, the women’s event was cancelled because there weren’t enough entries. Christian entered the men’s shortboard event, and “she beat out a lot of the guys,” says Nichols.

Certainly surfing has had female legends: Joyce Hoffman in the ‘60s, Jericho Poppler, Margo Godfrey Oberg and Hawaiian surfer Rell Sunn in the ‘70s, Frieda Zamba in the ‘80s and, in the last decade, Hawaii’s Rochelle Ballard, one of only 17 women on the elite World Championship Tour. But because surfing has long been considered male territory, the sport has produced relatively few world-class women surfers and only a handful who are American.

As with many of the current generation of surfer girls, Christian started in junior high because her two older brothers encouraged her. “They’d surf and I’d tag along,” she says. Surfing came easily, and soon she was dragging her best friend, Amber Tisue, out in the waves with her every day. She loved the freedom of the ocean and and hanging out at the beach with her friends. “It kept us out of trouble,” she says, giggling.

As a top female pro, Christian travels to the Maldives and France and other exotic venues on the world tour, but she hardly lives like royalty. Her dad is a tile setter, her mom is in purchasing for the Carlsbad School District, and Christian still lives with her parents in their tiny two-bedroom bungalow a block from the beach in Carlsbad. Until recently she even shared a room with her brothers. She does chores at home, baby-sits, and sews her own clothes. Last year she was thrilled because she’d just bought her first truck, a 2001 gold Ford Ranger, with money she’d saved from her prize earnings.

“She is so deserving of sponsorship,” says Nichols. “She hasn’t had things handed to her on a silver platter.”

An honors student in high school, Christian could have gone to a number of colleges. But “if I stopped surfing, I don’t know what I’d do.”

If anyone has been an emissary for women’s surfing, it’s mary Setterholm. After a journey that started in Santa Monica and spanned marriage, five children and a divorce, she returned to the sport in 1998 when she founded Surf Academy. Known primarily for its women’s surf clinics and classes such as “Wild Woman Workout,” the school is also geared to families.

Setterholm rarely advertises, but she does publish a Web site that includes a surf report (“Surf is small, hardly there, but fun if you are a beginner and want to master taking off on an unbroken wave”), contest results, a column called “Mary’s Soapbox” and various news items (“Surf Academy was on CNN across the country and around the world on Friday. It is going to be a busy summer as CNN wants to do this again real soon.”)

On those few mornings when she’s not training for a surf competition or standing waist-deep in the surf cheering on a pod of female students, Setterholm can sometimes be found on dry land, recruiting women and girls. One hazy weekday morning she turns up at Notre Dame Academy, a Catholic girls high school in West Los Angeles. Setterholm has been invited to speak to the school’s surf club by Susie Conley, who taught for her the previous summer. She’s brought along tons of surf-related giveways for the girls, including stickers, posters, T-shirts and her surfboard--which she props up next to a statue of the Virgin Mary. Dressed in running shoes, a red T-shirt with the logo “Wild Woman Water Day” on it, and black tights, her thin blond hair stuffed in a ponytail, Setterholm looks fitter than most 20-year-olds.

When the girls pour into the gym in their tan pleated skirts and white shirts, chattering and lugging their backpacks, she greets them effusively. “Hi, guys! This is Surf Academy. It’s all about women’s surfing!” She’s brought a video of “Wild Woman Water Day,” the annual sporting event that consists of a variety of amateur swimming and surfing contests. But before showing it to the two dozen or so teens, she whips them up with a little history lesson and pep talk.

“How many of you surf?” she asks. A half-dozen hands tentatively go up. “You guys know it’s a happening thing to surf? I’ve been surfing over 30 years.”

“Wow!” a few girls murmur.

Setterholm’s audience is even more impressed by the video, a series of quick-action images of girls and women charging into waves or gliding on top of waves, hooting and cheering for each other. But when Setterholm asks afterward how many of them want to surf, the response is muted.

Setterholm knows surfing isn’t going to attract every girl and that only a few of the young women she’s met this morning will ever fling themselves onto a board and paddle out, ever feel the thrill of skidding down the face and across a fast-moving wave. For all its glamour and sex appeal and current cultural chic, surfing is a tough sport to learn. It takes years to master. But that’s OK. Setterholm knows there are plenty of girls out there ready to rip.

In the last two years, she has seen her own numbers swell radically. In May, Surf Academy became the official surf school for the city of Santa Monica. She’s already got 500 kids lined up for summer camp there and another 600 at her Manhattan Beach site, twice the number of groms she taught last year. More than 60 people are working for her. In her first summer program four years ago, she probably had 25 girls. Now she’s receving more than 100 calls a day, many from women and girls languishing in the landlocked Midwest. “It’s just gone through the roof,” Setterholm says, sounding amazed.

In addition, Surf Academy now runs the camps sponsored by industry giant Quiksilver. Early last month, Setterholm was gearing up to run a series of clinics called “Roxy Surf, Now.” Held at various Southern California beaches, the clinics were aimed at the rising wave of girls, ages 7 to 17--the very group that will shape the future of the sport. To say the least, Mary Setterholm is stoked.

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Mona Gable last wrote for the magazine on Tom Hayden.