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by Jason Dietrich
After years of paddling through the coastal permit process, the Surfrider Foundation is ready to rip with its long awaited artificial reef project.
Pratte's reef, the nation's first artificial surfing reef, aims to turn a crumbly, closed-out stretch of Dockweiler State Beach in El Segundo into a surf Mecca. This week 110 Kharmen Ghia-sized sand bags are being filled and hauled to Los Angeles Harbor.
If the project's masterminds know their fluid dynamics, those massive black bags will shape Dockweiler's now unridable shorepound into makeable lefts and rights (and barrels when the waves get big)..
"We're not going to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but we can make the surf better than it is now," said David Skelly, a coastal engineer who designed the reef for Surfrider.
Weather
permitting, a barge carrying the 110 sand bags will head out of Los Angeles
Harbor Monday, Sept.18 with the machines and materials needed to create the
$300,000 reef 300 feet out, and 150 yards south of the outflow pipes for the
Hyperion Wastewater Treatment Plant.
"I'm excited. It can only help the area," said pro-surfer and El Porto regular Ted Robinson. "We don't have many good waves in the South Bay. If it works, people will be surfing it around the clock."
"Having another wave in the area can only help things," agreed former pro and Manhattan Beach shaper Chris Frohoff.
Build it, and they will come
Conjuring up a better wave break requires more than a boatload of sandbags and some heavy equipment. Shaping waves, like shaping surfboards, is an art. Coastal winds and offshore swells affect how high the surf gets. Swell direction, tides and perhaps most importantly, the shape of the bottom determine whether waves are surf-able. And until scientists, comes up with a way to control wind and the tides, those who want to build a better wavetrap will have to be content with altering the contours of the ocean bottom.
Hurricanes off Mexico and winter storms off Alaska send big waves to the South Bay. But for a wave to be rideable, the sea floor has to have the right profile.
Cyber surfing
Waves break in water that is about as deep as the wave is tall. A wave with enough energy to rear up eight feet will break in water that's about eight feet deep. On "closed out" beaches, waves that roll in from deep water break all at once as they encounter the straight, sloping bottom. At the better surf spots, waves first meet the tip of a barrier - a sandbar, jetty or reef -- and start to break off to the right, left or both, instead of straight across.
Beaches with the right bottoms, attract surfers like gulls to a leftover hotdog. Because of modern surfcasting and Internet wavecams, wherever and whenever there's a good wave, there's a flock of surfers.
Overcrowding at the best breaks has been a problem for wave riders since the sport gained mass popularity in the early 1960s .
"Southern California isn't getting any less crowded. When we get a good swell, everyone reads the forecasts and there are 100 people out before it even comes in," Skelly said. "Surfing should be an experience, not a war."
D.I.Y. ride
There are plenty of stories of surfers attempting to solve the overcrowding problem on their own. Amateur coastal engineers have tried dumping rocks at the low tide, and junking rickety vans and Volkswagen buses in the break zone. But if anyone's gotten one of these makeshift reefs to work, they aren't talking. Hermosa's city council, led by councilman and former lifeguard Jack Wise, approved a sand bag reef at Second Street in the early 1970s. But the bags broke open before a swell arrived to test its effect. Million-dollar artificial reef projects in Australia have met with mixed success. While they've increased the number of surf-able days in the area, locals say they've also increased crowds, rather than eased the pressure. Robinson is hopeful that the crowds at El Porto will thin out slightly if the reef works.
"There's obviously going to be a lot of media attention when it first opens. But after the hoopla dies down it should weed out some of the guys who come down from the north. They'll stop at the reef instead of coming all the way to El Porto," he said.
Building a wave park wasn't on Surfrider's agenda when the organization first came up with the idea of constructing an artificial reef.
Mitigating factors
In 1983 the Chevron/El Segundo built a groin just north of Rosecrans Blvd. to protect an underwater pipeline that ferries oil from offshore tankers to the refinery. The jetty-like finger of rock traps sand on it's way down the coast, creating a buffer for the pipes.
Tom Pratte, a co-founder of the Surfrider Foundation and diehard environmentalist, managed to get a proviso included in Chevron's agreement with the Coastal Commission that required a study of the impact the groin would have on nearby waves.
When the research came back showing that the surf had suffered, Chevron and Surfrider spent years debating how to make up for the damage. In 1995, a year after Pratte succumbed to cancer at the age of 55, Chevron agreed to fund the reef. Four more years were spent wrangling permits from just about every governmental agency that has authority over the coastline, from the Army Corps of Engineers to the California Coastal Commission.
"This project is the first of it's kind, and deservedly got a lot of scrutiny from everyone down the line. A lot of people question the appropriateness of putting structures in the ocean to make better waves," said Surfrider's environmental director Chad Nelson.
Just getting approval for the reef is a victory for surfers everywhere said Michelle Kramer, who acts as Surfrider's legal advisor.
"We're looking at this as an experiment. Even if it fails, the Coastal Commission will have recognized natural waves as an important resource that must be protected," she said.
Surfing bunker
More than one hundred 13-ton polyester sandbags will be plopped into about 15 feet of water by a satellite-guided crane. The reef will lie just two feet under water at low tide. It is designed in the shape of an arrowhead pointing out to sea. Planners hope sand will accumulate around the bags, creating a chevron shaped sand bar. At the business end of the wedge, the thickest pile of bags will bear the brunt of the winter's biggest swells. Waves should roll off to the right and the left down the arms of the reef. On less-than-epic days waves will break farther down the sides of the wedge, following the contours of the bags that lie in the increasingly shallow water.
"It's pretty incredible to think that we could just create a wave someplace where there really is nothing that's rideable," said Robinson.
Building a wave
Crowded beaches in the summer, migration and mating patterns of seabirds, fish and marine mammals, and weather conditions gave planners a short window of opportunity in either the spring or the fall to build the reef. Skelly figures that their crew can lay the bags in about three days, with a day to get the barge in position and a day to clean up.
Environmental impact from the project should be low, said Dave Gold, executive director of the conservation group Heal the Bay. The bags are filled with beach quality sand and should last 10 to 20 years. The construction site was chosen in part because it is free from sea grass and rocky surfaces where fish and other underwater wildlife congregate. The project might even become a habitat for marine animals.
"Anytime you put relief on the bottom of the sea, you attract life. An ecosystem might actually develop around the bags, as it has at other artificial reefs," Skelly said.
Scientists will be watching the effect the reef has on the beach. If the reef slows erosion of sand from nearby beaches, similar reefs might start popping up along the coast as a relatively cheap way to extend beach life and incidentally improve surf.
"If it works, we'll be the first ones out there," Kramer said. ER