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Western Region Surfing Association Championships

The festival's first open (non lifeguard) competition was the surf contest Saturday morning at 45th Street in Manhattan Beach. Randy Meistrell, 42, was there at 6:15 a.m. with his sons Matt, 18, and Nick, 15. The family is heir to one of surfing's most treasured legacies. Randy's father Bob, and his twin uncle Bill founded the Dive N' Surf shops and wetsuit maker Body Glove.

For the Meistrell family, the ocean is recreation, business, and family all rolled together. While Randy was watching his sons surf his wife Susan was preparing for the Dick Fitzgerald Two-Mile Beach Run at the Hermosa pier. Sunday morning, Randy and his daughter Mahala would paddle tandem in the Velzy Stevens Pier to Pier Paddleboard Race.

Randy has been participating in the surf festival since he was a Junior Lifeguard.

"It's a weekend to be with the family. If there's any bigger thrill in life than seeing your kids born, it's watching them get their first tube rides," Randy said.

Another dad watching his kid was former Dewey Weber team rider John Joseph. His son John, 15, was entered in the longboarding and body boarding competitions.

Dad began surfing in 1954, when he was 10. His father coached water polo at Santa Monica City College. His 1954 team included Hawaiian big wave riders Mickey Munoz, Peter Cole and Ricky Gregg. At the end of the season the three gave Joseph's dad a 10-foot Hobie, one of the first foam and fiberglass boards. Every day that summer Joseph dragged the board down to the beach from their Maria Avenue home on the east side of Pacific Coast Highway.

Growing up at the beach is an advantage, but not a requirement for an ocean clan. Mariah Wilson, 18, of Lakewood placed second in the women's division Saturday morning. The previous weekend she won the Rusty contest at Huntington Beach. Mariah, her brother Steve, 16, and her dad George started surfing together just three years ago. Dad said he wanted something he and the kids could do together. Going to the ocean came to mind because he remembered the good times he had one long ago summer when his brother was a Huntington Beach lifeguard.

Body Surfing contest

Mike Cunningham was another surf festival participant whose early exposure to the ocean spawned a lifelong relationship. Saturday morning, he and his dad Jack were signing in over 100 entrants in the International Body Surfing Championship on the north side of the Manhattan Pier.

Each summer Mike's mother would walk her seven children from their Manhattan Beach home in the 600 block of 14th Street down to the beach and plant them in front of the 14th Street tower. The 14th Street lifeguard was her husband Jack.

Jack was a promising high school swimmer with eyes on the Olympics when World War II began. After the war, in 1946, he became a summer lifeguard to pay his tuition at Loyola University. His brother Jerry would also become a guard. Jerry retired a few years ago as director of the Los Angeles County's Department of Harbors and Beaches.

Jack went in to the printing business and eventually was elected to the Manhattan City Council. He continued to lifeguard every summer for 40 years.

During one of those summers, when Mike was 12-years-old, a couple of older body surfers stopped by the Cunningham's house and asked Mike's parents if they would allow him to join the Gillis Beach Body Surfing Association. They thought he could be a champion body surfer some day, given proper guidance. One of the club members was a scruffy Vietnam vet named Bob Holmes. Thirty years later, when Holmes resigned from the city council, he would help Jack get elected.

Mike joined Gillis, and after earning All CIF and All American recognition for swimming and water polo at Mira Costa High School, went on to win an unprecedented six World Championship Body Surfing titles. He became a county lifeguard the year he graduated from high school. Today, he is the Manhattan Beach Lifeguard captain.

A few years after Mike joined the bodysurfing club, dad was invited to join, too. As a consequence, neither was eligible to compete in the surf festival body surfing contest. The event is run by the Gillis Club, which has found that competing in events it runs invites trouble, particularly when it already holds more world titles than any other club.

The Dick Fitzgerald Two-Mile Beach Run

Saturday morning's Dick Fitzgerald 2-Mile Beach Run in Hermosa was especially sweet for homegrown former Olympian Jeff Atkinson, who once again won the event that launched his competitive career 24 years ago.

Atkinson, now 37 and a tireless exponent of running for fun as well as for competition, strode to an easy victory, leading the way as 137 participants chugged one mile in the soft sand, and then one mile back again on hard sand nearer the waterline.

Atkinson won in 11 minutes and 49 seconds, six seconds ahead of second-place Andrew Wartenburg, then hung around the waterline to encourage other finishers and congratulate the young runners he trains.

Lord of the dance

It was Atkinson's entry in the event as an eighth grader that turned him into a runner, propelling him onto a course that would lead to first place in the 1988 1500 meter U.S. Olympic Trials and then to Seoul, South Korea, where he finished 10th in the 1500 meters in 1988 Olympics.

"I was in Junior Lifeguards, I was very proud of that, and we had done some distance running, but I had probably never run more than a mile and-a-half," Atkinson said.

The 1976 Fitzgerald was broken down into three divisions -- one for women and kids up to eighth grade, one for men in their athletic prime, and one for men 40 and older.

"I was this little pipsqueak and I beat all these eighth graders and women, and men over 40, and I got my picture in the Daily Breeze." Atkinson said. "I thought, maybe this is something I can do."

Now, with Atkinson's competitive career behind him, he decided to focus this year on winning community "road races," such as the Fitzgerald, the American Martyrs Church 5K, and Hermosa's Sand and Strand, which saw him triumph in back to back 2.5-mile and 5-mile races.

"It's a silly little goal, but it's fun," he said. "I'm getting old, at 37, and my days of winning outright are numbered."

Atkinson runs with the local Club Ed (Avol) and works at his ongoing mission to unite the South Bay's various subcultures of social and competitive running, aiming for a European-style "cradle to grave" support structure for the sport and the pastime.

He and his wife Alison bought a house in Redondo Beach in March, and are expecting a baby in September.

Tortoises or hares: Who cares?

Sue Barr, 44, of Torrance, a regular participant in the Fitzgerald event, epitomizes the race's run-for-fun vibration. Every year she falls just short of her goal to finish in the top three in her division, and then she and friend Nancy Mathe usually win a prize in the next day's San Castle Contest in Manhattan Beach.

"It's just so much fun," said Barr who, like Atkinson, runs with Club Ed.

"When I first started running with them I said, 'Oh my God, I'm in the same running club with someone who ran in the Olympics.' Of course, he's much better than I am, but I think it's really cool that a club includes people with such diverse abilities, from someone who is as fast as Jeff to someone who is as sluggish as me," Barr said.

We are family

Familial togetherness was a common theme for the Fitzgerald run, which is named after former lifeguard and longtime Beaches and Harbor Director Dick Fitzgerald . The Von Blankenburg family moved from the South Bay to San Francisco, but they return to the Fitzgerald every year, likes swallows flocking to San Juan Capistrano.

This year 59-year-old Conrad was out competing on the water while his 59-year-old wife Kathryn ran the Fitzgerald with their 7-year-old grandson Troy. A middle generation of Von Blankenburgs, Erik and his wife Jenny, hauled around their young son Max, and lent support.

Another regularly participating family is the Silva clan - 69-year-old Victor, twin 37-year-old sons Paul and Mark, and Mark's 37-year-old wife Diane.

Mark finished this year's race eighth overall in 12 minutes and 40 seconds. But the big family rivalry between Paul and Diane took a hiatus. Paul missed the Fitzgerald to go camping.

"He and I have a rivalry, kind of. I beat him sometimes and he beats me sometimes, it comes out about even," Diane said.

The Silvas have run in the event since the days before it was moved to Hermosa from Torrance Beach.

Mark and Diane grew up in the beach cities and now, despite the fact that they live in the more affordable Gardena area, they head west for recreation.

"We do everything in the beach cities. I love the surf festival, and it's good to feel like part of it," Mark said.

"This is one of the few you don't want to miss. There's the Old Hometown Fair 10K, the Super Bowl 10K -- this is one of those that unless you're hurt, you don't want to miss it," he said.

"It's a very tough race, and this is not my strong point, running in the sand. I don't train for it in the sand, although some people do," Mark said.

Diane and Mark got into running about 25 years ago. She competed in cross-country for El Camino College. Both now run with Club Ed in Manhattan Beach.

"It's nice to be outside, and you're in your own little world, just thinking about whatever," Diane said. "And you can do it any time you want. It doesn't take much, just a good pair of shoes. And the competitive thing, that's addicting. The feeling of running fast is really awesome."

Dad Victor, who is retired and lives in Hermosa, has competed in the Fitzgerald almost every year for the past 10 years.

"I started running in 1984, when I was 53. I was working at TRW and they were raffling off tickets to the Olympics if you ran in a 5K. That was the first time I had ever run more than a mile at a time," he said. "Someone else won the raffle, but that's how I started running. Five years later I ran in the LA Marathon."

He runs every other day on the Strand, going from the Hermosa pier to the Manhattan pier and back again "on a good day," covering about three and-a-quarter miles. Barney, his Labrador Retriever, strides along at his side.

"He hardly even breaks a sweat. He just sort of trots along. I think he does that to embarrass me," said the elder Silva with a laugh.

Silva's grandsons, 8-year-old Dayton and 3-year-old Mason, are both "very active" as well, Diane said. Dayton has run the Sand & Strand and the Manhattan Mile.

Footloose and free

To run shoeless or not to run shoeless, that is the question for many of the regular participants in the Fitzgerald, which has been around about as long as the 39-year-old festival. The patriarchal Victor Silva runs barefoot some years.

"The soft sand is the tough part, but coming back on the hard sand, you're flying. You're just lighter." he said. "Maybe it's psychological," he added with a laugh.

His daughter-in-law Diane said shoes can bog down the runners, especially in years when the tide carries waves far up onto the hard sand, soaking the footgear and making it heavier.

"Invariably the waves come in and get you," she said. "You try to dodge them, but they manage to get you. One time I was in up to my waist, by accident of course."

Since Atkinson was first in the race, he gets the last word:

"You really don't need shoes, ever. It's always bio-mechanically preferable to run without shoes. That's why a track spike is hardly a shoe at all, it's just a little bit of cushioning. A shoe just adds weight, and you get plenty of cushioning from the sand," he said.

"It's lighter and freer," Atkinson said. "It's like running when you're 3 years old."

Paddleboard

Over 100 paddleboards, ranging from six-foot BZ "sponges" to 18-foot fiberglass unlimiteds were scattered on the beach on the north side of the Manhattan Pier Sunday morning for the Third Annual Velzy-Stevens Pier to Pier Paddleboard Race. The race is named after pioneer surfboard and paddleboard maker Dale Velzy and local surfer-paddler Terry Stevens. Velzy had Manhattan Beach's first surfboard shop, under the Manhattan Beach pier in the early 1950s. Stevens, a popular local surfer and winner of the Catalina Classic Paddleboard race, died two years ago at age 44.

But the person as much responsible as anyone else for paddleboarding's growing popularity had never entered a paddleboard race until Sunday morning.

Saul Levy was born on New York's Lower Eastside. Last week he was surfing with his sons Mark and Derek when Mark suggested he enter the paddleboad race.

"I said I wasn't interested. I'm 70 years old. But then I remembered that Mark's 13-year-old son Caleb was paddling, and Derek's daughter Samantha was paddling. I thought, what the hell."

After Saul's family moved out from New York when he was in his early teens, he used to go to the beach in Hermosa and stare in envious admiration at the local kids with their surfboards leaned up against the palm frond shack at 22nd Street.

"I thought it was so cool, but I didn't have the money for a surfboard," Saul recalled

Decades would pass. He would marry and divorce and become an elementary school teacher in downtown Los Angeles. When he got custody of his children, he took them down to the beach. Mark was 11 and Derek was 10 at the time.

"Greasy Lee" Goodwin, owner of the Surfboarder at Marine Street and the Strand in Manhattan Beach, sold Saul a nine-foot Donald Takyama for $60.

"It was the best investment I ever made," Saul said.

In 1968, after a year of weekend beach commutes, Saul moved with his children to Manhattan Beach. Mark and Derek quickly fell in with a group of Marine St. surfers called the Crabs and soon were surfing competitively. When Mark was 17 and Derek 15 the brothers competed in the US Surfing Championships at Cape Hatteras. Mark placed first in the junior division. Surfing inevitably led the brothers to compete in the 32-mile Catalina Paddleboard Classic. In his first channel paddle, Mark placed second in the stock division (under 12-foot boards). That experience led the brothers to help form the Southern California Paddleboard Club, which organizes the Hennessey Cup Series paddleboard races. Their paddles across the English Channel, the Florida Strait and around Manhattan Island have brought international publicity to the sport.

In Sunday morning's race Mark and his son Caleb each won their age divisions. Saul posted a respectable finish among the top 10 in the unlimited division. Derek finished among the top five in the unlimited and then paddled back down the course to pace his daughter Samantha across finish line.

Thirty minutes after the end of the paddle, Mark swam back to the Manhattan pier in the two-mile Dwight Crum Pier to Pier swim. He finished the swim in 47:07 to win the paddle/swim division with a five-minute margin over second place finisher Pat Wickens.

Six-man, six-woman volleyball tournament

John and Joan Stimpfig of Manhattan Beach met at El Camino College while playing on the co-ed volleyball team in the 1960s.

"We met and love flourished," Joan recalled.

After they were married, their beach volleyball prowess grew. John was AAA rated in the sand, Joan AA until injuries took their toll. The six-man, six-woman volleyball event was a regular part of their beach volleyball fix. When children Janiece, Jason and Jeff were born, it was inevitable that they too would become big beach volleyball players.

"Jeff was six days old his first tournament," Joan said. "And Jason was six or seven weeks old when he was down here for his first tournament."

Nowadays, John and Joan watch on the sidelines while the kids carry on the family name.

Jason, a former national team and AVP member, gave the family a big thrill last year, winning the tournament with Pure & Basic.

"I've been playing ever since I was 11 years old, when teams were playing us on their knees," Jason told Easy Reader last year. "This is my second final, my first 'W', so I'm very excited."

Sunday afternoon, Janiece and Jason's wife Laurie, a former professional volleyball player herself, hoped to duplicate Jason's 1999 achievement with a team called Urban Works Salon. But after an undefeated Saturday, their title hopes went for naught. So too did Jason's hopes of repeating. Pure & Basic had to settle for a seventh place finish.

The story is similar for Redondo Beach residents Kerry and Matt Wachtfogel. They met on the volleyball court at open gym at Aviation High School more than 20 years ago.

That's almost as long as the Wachtfogels have been playing in the six-man tournament. Kerry, 40, has played every year since she was 16. Matt, 42, has been on the sand off and on since he was 18.

This year, however, was extra special. It was the first year Matt played with sons Andrew and Aaron, who starred indoors for Redondo Union's league championship teams in 1998-99.

"This is the highlight of the summer," Kerry explained. "Because it's such a tradition for me, when the boys started playing, it became the family following in the footsteps of the parents."

"It's good being so close to them in age," said Matt, who admitted he had to beg his sons to play on their team. "The main thing I'm happy about is they got to see me play. Some of the older parents, their kids never got to see them play ball."

Manhattan Beach resident Phil Morris learned the game from current UCLA coach Al Scates, when Phil was a high school freshman.

"He taught us the right way and I've always loved it since then," said Phil, an actor best known for his recurring role as "Jackie Chiles" in Seinfeld.

Phil and son Jordan, a talented setter on Mira Costa's freshman team last year, played together in the six-man tournament on "Clippers Spanked."

"I was a late starter," Phil said. "But once you're in, you're in for life. And you've got to bring in the second generation, which is what Jordan is."

Playing with Jordan was a special thrill, Phil added.

"To see him flourish as a legitimate volleyball player and then to see him come out and have a good time with us is just icing on the cake," he said. "Now it's totally his passion and I'm really happy about that. He's got it in his soul."

Jordan, who played in his first six-man, was happy just being on the sand. His expectations were understandable for a team called Clippers Spanked.

"We're the Clippers. We're supposed to lose," he said.

Manhattan Beach resident John Featherstone first played in the six-man tournament in the 1960s. Now playing in the Master's event, he still enjoys watching teenage daughters Ivy and Keegan do their thing in the main draw.

"It's really neat to see my kids play and be involved in such a fabulous, traditional event," he explained. "When I'm not playing, I'm watching them. Of course, as the daughters get older, the dad becomes invisible a little bit. They don't want to hang out with pop very much, so I try and stay in the background and cheer them on."

"It's really nice for us as parents to be able to play with our kids, to train our kids and then watch them play if they're not playing with us," he added.

Identical twins Lee and Lisa Hoven played together for the 22nd consecutive year, leading 12th Street Drillers well into Sunday's elimination bracket. Brothers Ty and Kyle Lum of Redondo Beach helped take their team Straw Dogs to the men's final. Gayle and Wendy Stammer went one better, winning the women's tournament with techies.com.

Monday morning

"The best thing about the pier to pier swim is that you can stop training when it's over," said Annie Russell-Moler Monday morning. But she won't stop training for long. On Tuesday, she said, she'll be back at Sport Center asking for help on her stroke from former Canadian Olympian Mojca Cater. The La Jolla One Mile Rough Water Swim is just two weeks away. Local surfers this weekend will be back in the water for the Hermosa Beach Aloha Days surf contest. And next week is the 32-mile Catalina Classic Paddleboard Race. Saul Levy's kids are telling him he can do it. He's thinking about it.

Complete results for many of the surf festival events are available at www.commpages.com/surffestival