Surf’s Up -- Make That Way Up

For Jake Grace, it was a bummer that some beachfront homes were damaged. But these were the biggest waves to hit Southern California in a long time, and he was going surfing.

“I’m psyched,” the wiry 27-year-old with long, blond hair said Friday, standing on the porch of a friend’s boarded up home in Malibu Colony. “I’m waxing my board and getting out there. This is one of the better swells to hit the area in the last couple of years.”

Large waves slammed parts of the coastline Friday -- the aftermath of a storm that hit New Zealand and Tahiti last week -- attracting hundreds of surfers and spectators to the water’s edge and prompting warnings in Malibu, where the home of Grace’s friend and two others had windows broken and other modest damage.

Chris Borg, a forecaster with Surfline, a wave forecasting-firm based in Huntington Beach, said the big breaks are welcome after a relatively weak surfing season.

“It’s been a wait. On the whole, it’s been kind of a slow summer,” he said. “There have been some waves out there, but less than average. This really makes up for a lot of that lost time.”

A swift-water rescue team was on duty Friday night in Malibu, and crews were on hand to help with sandbagging and to build a berm near Zuma Beach, said Inspector Ron Haralson of the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

As of Friday afternoon, no one had to be rescued from the ocean because of the high surf, Haralson said.

Large swells from the south were expected to produce unusually large waves and high tides late Friday night and tonight, said Bruce Rockwell, a spokesman for the National Weather Service in Oxnard.

Normal tides this time of year are 2- to 3-feet high, but they are expected to swell to 6 1/2 feet, which would cause waves of up to 12 feet at south-facing beaches by 9:45 tonight, Rockwell said.

After a summer of ankle-slappers, that was good news to surfers up and down the Southern California coast.

Veteran surfer Matt Rosas, 40, said it’s been years since he had experienced such a swell off Malibu.

“It’s huge,” Rosas said. “Massive waves. Gnarly conditions for expert surfers only.”

He landed at the beach at 8 a.m. Friday, catching waves twice the usual size and enjoying rides twice as long.

“You could get a ride of 45 seconds-plus,” Rosas said. “You get this, at most, once a year.”

Rosas, owner of www.malibulongboards.com and a surf instructor, said his regular crew of six other surfers knew as early as Monday that this week would provide especially good waves. They saw them and confirmed it on the Internet.

The waves were coming in from the southwest at a 200-degree angle, enough to swell around Palos Verdes, which usually blocks the good waves before revelers get a chance to paddle into the ocean, Rosas said.

During his two hours on the water Friday morning, Rosas said, most of the surfers were accomplished.

“The waves have their own way of discriminating naturally,” he said. “When the waves are this big, you need to know how to paddle real well.”

Matt McClain, a spokesman for the nonprofit Surfrider Foundation, said news of this week’s stellar swells had reached the saturation point in the surfing community, thanks to the Internet’s abundance of live Web cams, sites providing data from buoys and even satellite imagery.

“It puts more pressure on the surfers in the water because the good spots get more crowded,” McClain said.

He spoke wistfully of his high school days when he and friends would wake up at 5 and drive by as many as a dozen beaches in search of the best waves to surf before class.

“But I’m torn on technology,” McClain said. “You know when they’re going to hit.”

As a result, McClain was able to use saved-up vacation days to take Thursday and Friday off to enjoy the waters. He hit the waves at 7 a.m. Friday on the T Street beach below his house in San Clemente.

The swell came none too soon.

“This year has been pretty dismal,” McClain said. “This is the best swell we’ve had all summer.”

Already, some are saying the swells may rival 1975’s legendary surf, McClain said.

“My personal feeling is that it may be as big, but it won’t last as long,” he said.

Jay Wagner, owner of Zuma Jay Surfshop, knew Thursday night that the waves were going to be excellent when the windows started rattling in his store.

As expected, about 150 surfers in Malibu knew about the waves and crowded the waters, waiting for the sets to roll in.

“The waves looked so good it was slowing traffic down on the highway,” said Wagner, 55. “They were rubber-necking. Half of those people probably surfed, even the executives in their Porsches. They were probably calling into the office saying, ‘I’m taking the day off.’ ”

Wagner said he hadn’t seen waves as good since June. He described them as “overhead-plus,” meaning they hung over his 6-foot-2 frame, tubing and curling. He expects “double overhead” by Saturday.

That means whoever is sharing the water with him and his friends had better know how to duck, dive and stay off of other surfers’ waves.

“Of course, it would have been better without the red tide,” Wagner said of the reddish-colored algae blooms that have hit the coast this summer. “It got a little ugly with my eyes sore and my throat sore.”

Wagner said he had to pour peroxide into his ears to rinse off the toxins.

The overcast skies made the scene especially beautiful, Wagner said, because it meant winds from the south were being blocked.

That made the waters smooth and glassy.

“It was picturesque,” Wagner said.

Charlotte Millar of Los Angeles took daughters Juliette, 3, and Rosetta, 6 weeks, to Malibu State Park on Friday to see the action.

“It’s fun to see,” Millar said as Juliette romped in the sand. “It’s interesting to watch the surfers.”

Indeed, the large waves provided the best entertainment in town as spectators flocked to the shore all day, parking bumper-to-bumper along Pacific Coast Highway.

“This is what we all wait for,” said Mike Avatar, owner of Malibu Mike’s surf school, who was waxing his board before taking an experienced student into the ocean. “This is when you take time off work and spend as much time out there in it as you can, enjoying what we have here.”

The big waves were a murky brown, the result of a red tide, which occurs when microscopic phytoplankton reproduce very quickly and in large numbers.

The annual algal blooms usually come and go every few weeks beginning in May, but this year the plankton blooms have persisted almost four months.

In Orange County, surfers were relishing the first big waves they’ve seen in some time.

“Everybody’s been dying to get some waves and finally the swell came in, so everyone’s out there,” said Ryan Hartsfield, manager of Rockin Figs Surf Headquarters in Huntington Beach.

The 19-year-old hit the waves off the Huntington Beach Pier for four hours Friday morning before heading to work.

“It was like 3- to 5- to 7-foot sets coming -- it was super fun finally to get the swell,” he said. “Everybody’s stoked to be out there. We still have a little red tide, but it’s fun to finally get the waves.”

Farther south at legendary surf spot Trestles, where an international surfing competition was underway, officials were buoyed by the sight of waves at least a dozen feet tall.

“This exceeded our expectations,” said Mark Fewell, an announcer and organizer of the 2005 Boost Mobile Pro of Surf. “We have had some amazing good luck to get waves in the 12-foot face range when we picked the dates so far out.”

Tides elevated by a full moon are coinciding with high surf to create a combination that often sends waves deep onto shore, National Weather Service officials said.

The swells are expected to weaken early Sunday.

Times staff writer Seema Mehta in Orange County contributed to this report.