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Spot: Steamer Lane, CA
36°57′07″N, 122°01′30″W
Don’t call it “Steamers,” although “The Lane” is okay. Spiritual and material home to the leash, the wetsuit, the aerial, the ding-repair kit, the headbutt and the “Oh my God, I’m blind! I can’t see!” late take off on a 10-foot wave.
Steamer Lane is the surfer name for what civilians call Lighthouse Point. Appropriately, the tip of Lighthouse Point looks like a fist, with a middle finger pointing straight to the south. Although it’s a little tucked away inside the northern top of the Monterey Bay, Steamer Lane takes in swell from north to south and makes sense of it in a series of reefs and points.
Thirty years ago, Santa Cruz was a quiet little hippie surfer town, but those days are no more as it has been layered over with a growing population of college students, money-engorged tech people from Silicon Valley and just a lot of people squeezing into a place that used to be a quiet little hippie surfer town.
The Good
Variety. Think of a six to eight foot west swell, offshore winds, deep blue winter sky and a view across the Monterey Bay to the Salinas Valley. Big peaks out at Middle Peak rolling into Indicator and lining up down to Cowells.
Although Steamer Lane is best known as a winter spot, it loves a big south swell with the moxy to make it all the way past the Arctic Circle.
The Bad
Variety. Crowds. Rocks. Kelp. Dirts, Banana Slugs, valleys, longboarders, yakkers, slackers, Fleas, Ratboys, Skindogs, girls, women, heroes, has-beens and wannabes. Steamer Lane is a flammable alchemy of first-time beginners straight out of a Hollister store, and some of the best surfers in the world.
Traffic. There was a time when weekends would load up but weekdays were easy to get around town. But that was long ago, in a decade far far away. KPIG radio now has a traffic report for the Monterey Bay, and that is just sad.
The Strange
They filmed The Lost Boys in Santa Cruz, if that tells you anything. Santa Cruz has always been a liberal town and it’s lenient toward homeless people, so there are a whole bunch of them. Downtown Santa Cruz is a pretty strange mix of college kids, tourists, and hillbilly panhandlers, but they did a nice job rebuilding the mall after the 1989 earthquake, and it’s a fun place to hang out, people watch, read a book, get a cup of coffee or a slice from Pizza My Heart.
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