Bodysurfing at Newport Beach

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Outside Magazine August 2004

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Bodysurfing
The Lip Comes Down
Wipe out trying to bodysurf the Newport Wedge and you'll burst an eardrum, yank out a shoulder, or snap a few ribs. Daniel Duane tackles the mean blue beast and meets the elite riders who court her lash.

By Daniel Duane


	Wedge pioneer Fred Simpson, the pope of Newport Beach (Jake Chessum)

WITH A SINGLE POWERFUL STROKE, 33-year-old Matt Larson launches himself into one of the most violent waves on earth. Lying prone in the water, his right arm at his side, the unofficial reigning master of this wave drives his center of gravity down and forward, reaching out with his left hand while flaring his legs and arching his back. As the peak grows higher and higher, moving toward the beach where I'm standing, Larson soars sideways across its face. Then it happens—the ocean turns itself inside out, and for an instant Larson is a black blur behind a ten-foot-high curtain of blue water. Wearing nothing but his Speedo and black Viper fins, Larson again shoots into view and lets the wave flip him to his back, rocketing forward, now headfirst and upside down, hands wide on either side to control his position and speed. The crowd starts to scream as he snaps back onto his chest and drives into the final collapsing cavern, radiating purpose even as he vanishes into the explosion.

Welcome to the world epicenter of extreme bodysurfing—and to the underground art of riding very big, very powerful waves with little more than your own skin. Here, alongside the 2,800-foot jetty protecting the harbor in Newport Beach, California, the elite sport, practiced at an advanced level by approximately 100 people worldwide, reaches its most intense and brutal expression. Every summer, swells that begin life off New Zealand, half a world away, finally slam home in North America at the tip of this breakwater, 40 miles south of Los Angeles. As the waves approach shore, they bounce off the jetty's boulders and, in the final seconds before landfall, merge and morph into a backbreaking and monstrous wave known as the Newport Wedge.

The Wedge breaks so hard, in such shallow water, that even highly skilled bodysurfers sometimes crack vertebrae and shatter ankles, dislocate shoulders and separate ribs. And they don't always walk away: The constant pounding surf tends to build up hidden sandpiles in the wave's impact zone. In 1979, a particularly bad year, five young men rode the wave into these invisible hazards. Every one of them ended up a quadriplegic.

Unlike board surfing, bodysurfing has no pro circuit. The more notable of the few organized contests include the Pipeline Bodysurfing Classic, held each February on Oahu's North Shore, and the World Bodysurfing Championships, a casual affair in the tamer waters off Oceanside, California, some 50 miles down the coast from Newport Beach. But no trophies are offered at the Wedge, which tops out at around 30 feet high—just the biggest jolt of natural adrenaline in all of Southern California. To ride this monster, "you've got to be fast and fit," says 48-year-old Hawaii resident Mark Cunningham, four-time winner of the Pipeline event. "Grab your nuts and pray for a happy ending."

Which is, of course, precisely what makes the wave irresistible to Matt Larson, a Santa Ana, California–based massage therapist and father of two, and the rest of the Wedge Crew—a tight-knit group of a dozen or so locals who have little patience for contests and fly completely under the radar of the big-wave marketing juggernaut. With the pop-culture machine currently devouring everything even remotely surf-related, it might at first seem odd that Hollywood hasn't started nosing around Newport Beach. But the Wedge is an elusive wave that breaks only a few times a year—it peaks during the summer months—and because of its unpredictability, it's no place for a board. Thus it remains a kind of unspoiled inner sanctum of wave riding at its purest—and most challenging.

"Bodysurfing is just too arcane a sport," says Matt Warshaw, author of The Encyclopedia of Surfing. "Not enough people can even do it." There are no soft-drink tie-ins here, no Imax cameras, and no sponsored poster boys. There's just the monster itself, and the Wedge Crew, a tribe of unsung heroes who like it this way, guarding their traditions as if their lives depended on it.

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DANIEL DUANE is the author of Caught Inside: A Surfer's Year on the California Coast. His second novel, A Mouth Like Yours (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), will be published in spring 2005.

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