Surfers uphold local Bear Back tradition

Scott Smith tucks into what looked and felt like a snow bank. Photo

Conditions were ideal Saturday morning for calling off the Annual Bear Back Super Bowl Weekend Surf contest. Water and air temperatures were in the chilly 50s. Skies were cloudy. The on shore wind was kicking up whitecaps. NOAA weather was describing the seas at the Hermosa pier as four to six feet and disorganized. And the lifeguards had posted a No Swimming sign because the 14th Street storm drain was dumping the previous night’s deluge into the contest zone.

Over 100 names were on the email invite, but only a dozen contestants were on the beach. Most were avoiding eye contact, shuffling their feet in the sand.

“Look at that right,” contest co-founder Greg Browning shouted in an effort to rally enthusiasm. The run off had carved a deep channel, allowing for momentary flashes of makeable waves.

But Browning’s opinion was suspect. He is a filmmaker for Body Glove, whose founders Bob and Bill Meistrell, were inspired to invent the wetsuit 50 years ago after a winter surfing bareback in Santa Cruz.

Proud and pasty heat 1 conscripts Jim Young, Greg Browning, Scott Smith, Aaron Osten and Matt Singley. Photo

“He called off surf contest because it was cold” was not what Browning wanted whispered around the Body Glove office Monday morning.

Finally, Greg’s brother Jeff rescued the family from dishonor by picking up the contest clipboard and signing in six names for the first heat, including his brothers, but not his.
Previous year’s heats (a term whose irony escaped no one) had been the traditional 15 minutes.

But hypothermia charts show that “Loss of Dexterity,” followed by “Exhaustion, Incoherency and Unconsciousness” doesn’t set in until 10 to 15 minutes in 50 to 60 degree water.

So contest co-founder Jimmy Young decreed that this year’s heats would be 20 minutes. Anyone who left the water before the heat ended would be required to ring the Bell of Shame planted on a pole in the sand. Anyone who lasted the 20 minutes would be allowed to ring the Bell of Pride.

Young came up with the idea for the Bear Back four years ago because he never wears a wetsuit, anyway. After decades of pulling pitchers of beer at his bar, the Pitcher House, he doesn’t need a wetsuit.

Chio Baldocchi applies the principal of cold shrinkage to get wrapped up in this block long barrel. Photo by Mike Balzer

As always, the surf proved to be more fun than it looked. Chio Baldocchi drank from the Bear Back Cup by scoring 17 on a scale of 1-10 for a block-long barrel ride in the second heat. “I was just trying to stay out of the wind,” he explained afterwards.
Scott Smith and Jax McCartney, winners of the first and third heats, were disqualified from the run-off for failing their hypothermia tests. Smith flunked the dexterity test, which required unhooking his bathing suit top. McCartney failed the coherency test despite his protest that it was discriminatory against Redondo High graduates. B

Comments:

comments so far. Comments posted to EasyReaderNews.com may be reprinted in the Easy Reader print edition, which is published each Thursday.