July 27, 2012 Friday

San Onofre State Beach	Old Man’s
9:15 am to 11:30 am	2’ to 3’, sets to 5’
Low upcoming tide	No wind to light onshore breeze
Bright sunny day	Good session

“I always check here first. Lowers is always twice as big as all the other breaks.”

My life-long friend Greg was taking me through his normal morning surf check routine. Success in business has allowed him to purchase a home in south San Clemente that is a short drive or walking distance to some of California’s best surf locations. This was his routine every day this summer. We were up at 6 am, drove to the nearest 7-11 to buy coffee and a couple of bananas and jumped back in the car to check the surf. Greg first drove to his principle look out spot, that was on the off ramp to the San Onofre nuclear power plant and the state beach. At the top of a hill at a stop sign, we could clearly see Lower Trestles, the premier surf location of California, that’s it in the above photo. Keep in mind, we were standing at the center of several prime surf spots – Cotton’s Point, Upper Trestles, Lower Trestles, Churches and San Onofre. Set waves at Lowers were head-high, glassy and clean, and at 7 am thirty surfers were on it. Greg knew that there would be waves at San Onofre.

Greg drove further south and entered the employees’ parking lot for the nuclear power plant, just before the entrance to the state beach. Note – despite that nuclear reactors had been shut down since last January due to leaks in water pipes, there were plenty of employee cars in the lot. We jumped out and walked to the bluff to check the waves at Old Mans. Greg was right. It was half the size of Lowers – waist high with sets to shoulder height with about thirty surfers spread out across several peaks. We next drove back north to check out Cotton’s Point, which was flat with nobody out, thus San Onofre was our decision.

We returned to Greg’s house to drink our coffee and read the paper. After thirty minutes, we loaded boards, wetsuits, towels and his two dogs, Marley and Rocky, into the car and headed back to San Onofre. So that was his daily routine, and like me he usually entered the water around 9 am, gentleman’s hours.

Greg loaned me one of his San Onofre boards – a Stewart, Collin McPhillips model, 10 feet long, 23 7/8 inches wide, and 3 ¼ inches thick – a real paddling machine and I needed all the paddling speed I could get.

Old Man’s is the home of the classic “powerglide” waves, especially well suited for longboards, older surfers and mellow crowds. It breaks somewhat like the Patch at Bolinas, only the waves are bigger, a little steeper, more powerful and longer. Today they were a combination of a NW wind swell on top of a south ground swell. The wind swell portion would jump up into steep peak and the south swell portion provided the force and the long ride. Greg and I took off together on our first wave. The steep peak propelled us into the ground swell that continuously broke to the left and slowly built up to a nice inside curl. One wave and I was stoked.

The takeoffs were flat but the waves had force. Because the waves always reformed, we could go for the walls that would break in front of us, cruise along under the white water and climb back into the swell that would continuously break left until near the shore where the sea grass would stop the momentum of the board. My third wave was a good one. I was paddling out when a set wave broke in the channel and a good shoulder was reforming right in front of me and no one was on it. I turned, stroked into it and streaked across a waist-high curl until I hit the sea grass near shore.

After a long lull, a sizeable set came through. At the last moment Greg turned around and went for the first wave as it was cresting. After paddling over it, I looked around and saw Greg in a crouch hanging at the top of the wave with spray arching off the breaking part of the curl. He dropped down the face, disappeared for a second and then popped up again and shot ahead of the fast breaking wave. It was his best wave of the day. As he modestly put it, “I finally caught a decent wave.”

After an hour and a half, Greg went in to walk his dogs on the beach. I moved inside for another forty minutes and scored on several good inside waves. What a good session -- by then I had the feel of the board, the confidence that I had figured out these waves, my arms felt strong and the water was warm.