Bodysurfers tangle with the guard
John Shearer bodysurfs north of the Manhattan Beach pier. Photo
Second of two parts
One day in 1966, Bob Holmes stopped by the lifeguard tower just north of the Manhattan Beach pier on his way to bodysurf. Legendary big wave surfer Greg Noll happened to be at the tower, visiting his fellow lifeguard and big wave surfer Mark Stange.
Noll, known as “Da Bull” for his hard-charging style, was at the peak of his considerable powers. In 1964, he was the first to catch what until then had been considered an impossible wave, the 25 to 30 ft. sets breaking outside the reef at Banzai Pipeline off Oahu. He rode the wave on a giant 11 ‘8 board — this was before the shortboard revolution — and the feat made him world famous (A lesser known fact is that Stange had been on the same wave but wiped out).
Holmes was co-founder of the Gillis Beach Bodysurfing Association, a collection of avid and slyly gifted watermen and women who had made the north side of the pier their home. Surfing was an ascendent sport, and Noll its biggest star; the Beach Boys’ songs about the surf lifestyle had captured the country’s imagination, and on the silver screen, “The Endless Summer” had just that year given the world a window into the surfing life. Bodysurfing didn’t have that kind of sex appeal, but for folks like those in the GBBA it was also more than a sport but way of life, one based on an almost spiritual connection with waveriding. Surfers ride atop waves; bodysurfers surrender themselves to waves.
Stange, who frequently guarded north of the pier, rarely surfed near the pier, but instead often joined the bodysurfers for sessions. North of the pier, after all, was for bodysurfing.
On that day in 1966, Holmes was surprised when the biggest waverider of all joined him in the water, without his board, for a bodysurfing session.
“He sat on the outside, just like how he surfed and waited for the biggest wave,” Holmes recalled. “If it was a 4-to-6 ft. day, he wanted a six-foot wave. It was so in character.”
Bodysurfing is closely connected to lifeguarding. Mark Cunningham, a lifeguard from Hawaii generally regarded as the best bodysurfer in the world, said that this is a natural fit. The body control and wave recognition bodysurfing requires, he said, can be the difference between life and death in performing a rescue.
“Bodysurfing is the essential skill of surf lifesaving,” Cunningham said.
The conflict that has emerged, then, on the north side of the Manhattan Beach pier between lifeguards and bodysurfers is particularly jarring for both parties. A group of bodysurfers lead by John Shearer, a Manhattan Beach native who has devotedly bodysurfed that spot since 1968, are outraged at a shift in local lifeguards’ longstanding practice of protecting a roughly 200-yard area north of the pier for bodysurfing.
Lifeguards started “blackballing” the north side of the Manhattan Beach pier in about 1960. If bodysurfers swam out, guards would put up a flag with a black ball indicating no board surfing. Shearer didn’t realize anything had changed until he swam out one-day last summer and nearly collided with a surfer. When he went to guard in the nearby tower, he was shocked to learn the area was no longer protected for bodysurfing and swimming. The guards had apparently deemed it no longer in the best interest of public safety to delineate the area, which had been the only spot set aside for bodysurfing in LA County.
“It had seemed safe enough since 1960,” Shearer said. “But now it’s unsafe.”
Shearer and Holmes tried to get answers. What Shearer finally came to understand, after a meeting in May with Fernando Boiteux, the Acting Chief Lifeguard for the Los Angeles County Fire Department, was that overall increased usage of the area had led local captains to end the practice of blackballing. Boiteux told him it wasn’t a policy change, but simply trusting the expertise and judgment of the lifeguards charged with protecting public safety at that specific spot.
To the local bodysurfing community, Boiteux’s stance still didn’t answer a fundamental question: what was the root cause of the change?
“I see it as a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist,” said Holmes, a former elected official in Manhattan Beach who was known as “the bodysurfing mayor.”
An alternative theory has arisen among some bodysurfers: surfers, they say, are greedy, hence lifeguards making the decision are doing so on behalf of surfers.
“A very reasonable supposition,” said Holmes. “There’s a sense of ‘Why? Because I can.’ You are not seeing any sense of accountability, and not really seeing any good solid reason. All you are seeing is, ‘I’m going to back my guys.’ But they’ve made a decision that flies in the face of at least 45 years of history. Normally, when you make a significant change, there is a reason. To say there are more people — that doesn’t make sense, I’m sorry. In the summer, it’s always been crowded, and in the winter, it’s not crowded. End of case.”
Conrad VonBlankenburg, who has bodysurfed since 1943 and served three years as a lifeguard and six in the Coast Guard, says the math does not add up.
“There are over 100 miles of coastline in LA County,” he said. “About 200 yards of it the bodysurfers are asking to be set aside. It doesn’t seem unreasonable.”
The two captains who oversee the pier area, Jeff Horn and Tom Seth, were not authorized by their superiors to comment on the issue. Lifeguard public information officer Spencer Parker said that a captain’s job is always to strike the right balance for the differing uses any body of water has for beachgoers — a balance that has gotten increasingly tricky as numbers of people going in the water has increased, and the ways they ride waves has multiplied. Parker said that piers are particularly challenging to manage in a manner that serves all beachgoers yet maintains public safety. The blackball policy at pier, Parker said, had been an anomaly.
“The Manhattan Beach pier, since I’ve been a lifeguard in 2002, is the only pier that swimmers are really allowed to swim near,” Parker said. “That has always baffled me, why that exists. We preach that piers are dangerous for a reason — rip currents are on one or both sides of the pier, typically, then stingrays tend to hang around pier pilings and jetties. Then, in addition to that, you have the fact that they are covered in barnacles, and swimmers who get stuck in rip currents tend to feel a false sense of security by heading for pilings. And then you have fishing lines, people fishing off the pier. Both sides of the pier are pretty hazardous places to swim in, so every other pier I’ve ever been involved with has been ‘no swimming’ for safety reasons. It just makes sense. Personally, I am surprised this change happened so late.”
Parker noted that LA County Municipal Code specifies as much. “No person shall swim, surf, skin dive, scuba dive, or otherwise recreate in the Pacific Ocean within 100 feet of any pier,” according to code 17.12.480.
Lifeguard public information officer Lidia Barillias, who works directly with Horn and Seth, said the thinking behind the removal of the unofficial blackball policy is to prevent novice swimmers from entering near the pier.
“Our primary mission as lifeguards is to ensure public safety,” she said. “We can’t cater to certain groups. We have to make sure people stay safe, and even with what people are concerned about with the pier, it’s important to realize — that area near the pier should be considered kind of an expert area…If someone is a good, avid bodysurfer, they are not being excluded from that area and can still surf in that area. We are not excluding anyone but just trying to keep the general public safe.”
“As lifeguards, if you are looking at 30 plus years ago, the makeup of beachgoers and the kind of craft they are using has evolved,” Barillias added. “So as guards, we do have to evolve with that and continue to have that primary mission of keeping everyone safe and letting them enjoy the ocean. But we can’t put blinders on and say it’s still 20 years ago…There has been a change, an evolution of our approach at the pier. Piers just attract a lot more people, whether it’s because parking or easier access to the public. Plus it’s a place people want to surf,
because the sandbars around the pier create a shape that people want to surf — so it’s kind of a dynamic place to keep in order, basically.”
Bodysurfers counter that other areas designated for their sport, such as the Wedge in Newport Beach and Boomer Beach in La Jolla, are also known as dangerous spots. The solution, they say, is thus not to make it more dangerous by mixing surfers and bodysurfers together.
VonBlankenburg said two areas on Oahu officially designated for bodysurfing, Makapuu and Point Panic, offer a good example for management of the Manhattan Beach pier.
“It took several years for bodysurfers there to get that designated bodysurfing only, and now its posted with signs and police patrol it, believe it or not,” he said.
Cunningham, who testified at the public hearings that created Point Panic as a bodysurfing zone, said one of the key fallacies bodysurfers had to overcome is that they could mix safely with surfers.
“The analogy I made at the public hearings back in the 70s and early 80s is that it was like figure skaters and ice hockey players sharing the same rink,” he said. “Yeah, they are both skating on ice, and yes, we are both riding waves — but you can’t mix the two, really. Not safely anyway.”
He said surfers and bodysurfers can coexist in another way.
“What I tell board surfers at Makapuu and Point Panic is we are not kicking you out or asking you to leave, just simply leave your board on the beach and come join us for a swim,” Cunningham said.
Bob Burnside, a legendary waterman, avid bodysurfer, and former chief of the LA County lifeguards, said he is perplexed and disappointed in the way the matter is being handled by today’s guards.
“Use common sense, for god’s sake,” Burnside said. “One thing every public servant needs to understand is to bend with the circumstances. You don’t just sit on the goddamned post because you think you don’t like this. You learn to work it both ways. Let’s try to make both parties happy. I don’t see any way the lifeguards are trying to do that. If you can’t come to something — say, Mondays, 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., bodysurfing only, then the rest of the day surfers have priority, or the other way around — you aren’t doing your job. Just use common sense.”
One very early morning earlier this summer, Shearer and another bodysurfer, Scott McPherson, had the north side of the pier largely to themselves. The conflict over the place Shearer has bodysurfed for the last forty years has been uncomfortable for him — particularly the meeting with the chief guard in May, when the confrontation became so intense his voice shook. But out in the water, in the waves, he was a man totally at ease. Three pelicans, low to the water, skimmed by on the other side of the wave Shearer launched in, executing two full body spins in the middle of the ride and emerging with a grin.
McPherson said thus far they’d managed to coexist with surfers.
“I know a lot of guys who surf here really well because I share the water with them, and most are very respectable,” he said. “But it’s inherent that a guy with a board can sit further outside and they’ve got a wave-catching machine that puts them in the wave earlier, so we are kind of low man on the totem pole.”
But he also noted that bodysurfers are nothing if not patient. They have learned, from their time in the ocean — not on it — how to yield without completely yielding. Holmes has filed a complaint with Supervisor Janice Hahn, and Shearer has continued to quietly agitate on the issue. But for now, they are simply practicing wave recognition — which in this case means rising earlier and hoping whatever surfers might be present north of the pier give way to their little slice of paradise for what another longtime bodysurfer, John Rogers, calls their daily “rinse.”
“Part of the arc is that there’s a lot of humility and patience,” McPherson said. “One of the lines we always say to each other is that patience teaches you. And that’s really part of having to share waves with anybody on a board.”
Sometimes patience is also about endurance, which is to say the bodysurfers aren’t about to give up. Shearer recalls sharing a long bodysurfing session with Burnside, who is in his 80s, at Port Escondido a few years back.
“He’s a good 20 years older than I am,” Shearer said. “But I’d take a wave, then he’d take one, I take one, he takes one. I get back outside and I go, ‘Man, I’m getting surfed out.’ And he looked at me. ‘Johnny, never surf out.’ Unbelievable. I’m pushing my limit, and here’s a guy 20 or 25 years older, charging gnarly waves and admonishing me. And he’s right. Never surf out.”