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Spot: Rincon Point, CA
Summary
Rincon is the best surf spot in Santa Barbara County, that is not in Santa Barbara County. Similar to Trestles, which is the best San Diego County spot in Orange County, most of Rincon is in Ventura County – not that there’s anything wrong with that. Rincon means “corner” in Spanish, and this corner of the California coast on the Ventura/Santa Barbara county border is a perfect cobblestone-bottomed right point
Rincon’s surf history dates back to a Santa Barbara County lifeguard named Gates Foss, who first rode Three Mile in 1938. By the 1940s, Joe Quigg, Matt Kivlin, Bob Simmons and a handful of others were regularly surfing Rincon. And it was those long perfect walls that pushed the evolution of the surfboard, and particularly the pintail gun for speed.
According to Matt Warshaw in The Encyclopedia of Surfing: “Rincon has been viewed since the early ‘50s as the winter counterpart to Malibu, the famous Los Angeles County point break located 75 miles to the south, but while the Malibu surfing experience is warm and sun-washed, Rincon is usually chilly, with air temperatures in the 50s or the low 60s and water temperatures in the low to upper 50s.”
Rennie Yater, Kemp Aaberg and Bob Cooper lead the style charge during the 1960s, but it was a local kneeboarder named George Greenough who became one of the most important Rincon locals. During the 1960s, Greenough's experiments with wafer-thin kneeboards and flexible fins laid down the performance and speed foundation for modern surfing. Check out Greenough riding Rincon in Crystal Voyager and Innermost Limits of Pure Fun and you will see a guy doing then on his knees what surfers are doing now.
When Tom Curren was asked by Chris Mauro in 2007 how he wanted to be remembered, he responded: “I guess, um, that really goes back to something about being a part of Santa Barbara. There's this sort of mood here with guys like my dad, and Yater and Greenough and Al and even Kim Mearig, who was World Champion...it's a special place, and we've had a big impact, so if for nothing else, I just want to be remembered for being part of that tradition.”
These days, the slightest ripple at Rincon is observed by satellites, cameras, and drive-by surf reporters. Surfers flock here by the score, and you’ll be stoked on a clean, head-high day if you end up riding more than a couple of waves to yourself.
The Good
Arguably the best wave in California and one of the most perfect waves in the world. When Rincon is all lit up at six-foot-plus from a long-traveled west swell, with offshore winds in the middle of winter, it is the kind of wave that makes surfers drop to their knees and salaam.
Rincon Point is long and has many sections which change with tide and sand and swell direction. It can handle a pretty big crowd, and that is good, because there is a pretty big crowd of surfers living within a 150 mile radius who flock like Muslims at the slightest hint of swell.
The Bad
Almost dead flat for several months out of the year. Rincon is blocked from all summer swells by the Channel Islands, which is a shame because it would be interesting to see how the point would handle a big southern hemisphere swell.
And when the swell does hit, it has been forecast and predicted almost two weeks out, and because the entire surfing world knows about it, the entire surfing world shows up. What that spells is Trouble, with a capital T and that rhymes with C and that stands for Crowds.
What the world needs, and what Santa Barbara really needs is a wave machine out on Santa Cruz Island that can produce 6 to 8 feet of the good stuff, non stop. Imagine that. Imagine what this stretch of too-protected coastline would be like if there was Swell on Demand. Dream on.
The Strange
In 1835, Boston Brahmin Richard Henry Dana spent a couple of years as an able-bodied seaman along the coast of California – during a time when a voyage to the Pacific Coast of North America was like a trip to the moon. Dana loved Santa Barbara and one evening he described a walk along the beach in January like this: “It was growing dark, so that we could just distinguish the dim outlines of the two vessels in the offing; and the great seas were rolling in, in regular lines, growing larger and larger as they approached the shore, and hanging over the beach upon which they were to break, when their tops would curl over and turn white with foam, and, beginning at one extreme of the line, break rapidly to the other, as a long cardhouse falls when the children knock down the cards at one end.”
Yeah baby, yeah! Does that make you horny???!!!!!
Not so surprisingly, Rincon has been a battleground going way back in history. Clashing Chumash tribes used the point for a bit of the old ultra violence from time to time. Some historians believe Rincon Point was the site of a battle between revolutionary Pio Pico against Governor Juan Batista Alvarado. These days, the battle is between locals and outsiders, longboarders and shortboarders, men and women, boys and girls, dogs and cats, Escalades and beater pickups.
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