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Surf's up in the desert
Classes lure novices, thrill old-timers

Angela Cara Pancrazio
The Arizona Republic
Jun. 29, 2005

Angela Cara Pancrazio/ The Arizona Republic Surfers enjoy the Big Surf view - part Arizona, part Hawaii - as they wait for their turn during an evening surfing session at the Tempe wave pool.

They stood at the water's edge, in a place called Waikiki Beach, squinting into the setting sun, studying the ebb and flow of the waves. Tucking their boards beneath their arms, the surfers paddled out past the silhouetted palm trees lining their liquid path to the waves.

Camelback Mountain rose in the distance.

This is surfing Arizona style, riding a 3-footer at Tempe's Big Surf wave pool. It's a way that many a landlocked surfer hones his or her skills. It's their fix until the next middle-of-the-night road trip to San Diego. advertisement

Arizonans who surf: It might seem like a corny joke, a far-fetched notion that desert dwellers can hang 10 and be good at it.

But it's true. There's a surfing culture here, albeit understated and slightly underground - perfectly fitting for the laid-back lifestyle ascribed to by those who partake in the sport that was well under way when English explorer Capt. James Cook arrived at the Hawaiian Islands in 1778.

There are no official statistics. But there certainly are ways to gauge the legitimacy of the surfing subculture in Arizona.

Big Surf is holding its own in the desert. After turning away surfers when recent after-hours surf sessions filled up, the wave pool's manager, Kim Nguyen, added more sessions.

"It's a good wave to satiate you until you go to California or wherever you go," she said. "It's good in terms of it's Arizona and there's no ocean anywhere."

While the 3-foot waves at Big Surf don't compare in stature with real ocean waves, which can be 4 to 6 feet high in San Diego, they are superior in their reliability; one comes every 3 minutes.

Thousands of Californians relocate to Arizona every year - 186,000 from 1995 to 2000. But they don't want to give up the ocean even though they're "zonies" now, zonies who have a long tradition of taking to San Diego beaches every summer.

In fact, there are about 200 Arizonans counted as San Diego members of a national environmental surfing group called the Surfrider Foundation, said Stefanie Sekich, San Diego chapter coordinator.

To stress the point, California folks were a bit miffed last year when a Tucson family attending a surfing camp was randomly picked to win a drawing for a trip to the popular surfing destination of Costa Rica.

"People said, 'What is that about? They live in Arizona,' " Sekich recalled. "I told them, 'They need it more than us. We live near the ocean.' "

There's more proof that surfing is popular among desert dwellers. Last December, a Phoenix surf shop, Desert Surf Co., was the No. 1 retailer on the West Coast for Global Surf Industries, a surfboard distributor.

That meant, owner and Florida transplant Toby Keller said, that her shop outsold the distributor's California stores for that month.

Not bad for a Phoenix surf shop at 44th Street and Camelback Road - one that skeptics questioned when Keller and her son Brent first opened in 2003.

"They'd say, 'A surf shop in the desert - get over yourself.' "

They didn't. In two years, they've opened two more stores, in Chandler and the West Valley; they have plans of opening five more in the Valley and possibly in Tucson.

Another barometer, Keller said, is that she can't seem to keep enough DVDs stocked of Endless Summer, the film that hooked wannabe surfers a generation ago.

The business tied to surfing appears to be brisk. But what a place like Desert Surf Co. offers beyond the famous-maker surf wear like Quicksilver, Billabong and Roxy is a place to talk the talk.

"What everybody has in common is that there's no beach here . . . you get a little homesick for the ocean, you come into the shop and you're able to talk about surfing," Brent Keller said.

And being in a place where people are speaking the same vernacular was important enough for Trevor Reis that in addition to his summer job of framing houses, the 17-year-old works part time at Desert Surf. He buys all the surfing magazines, watches all the surf movies and sleeps beneath a surfboard hanging from the ceiling.

Last weekend, though, Reis was off to the real thing. His parents towed his 1965 Volkswagen bus packed with his surfboards behind their Chevrolet Suburban and headed to Mission Beach.

What did Reis plan to do when he got there?

"Get up as early as possible, run out and check the surf," he said.

Run or walk?

"Run," he said with a smile.

As the surf licked the wave pool's light-blue concrete beach at Big Surf last Friday evening, the surfers here were either from California or like Reis, were on their way.

All plunked down $35 for a chance of riding 10 waves created by what is called a "flush system," which, as Nguyen explained, "works like a toilet."

That same flush system launched 21-year-old Nguyen's obsession with the sport, and hundreds who came before her since the nation's first wave pool opened in Tempe in 1969. Here, where about every 3 minutes a wave rolls out of a wall painted to look like a hot-pink tropical sunset, is where Nguyen learned how to stand up on a board from "old school" surfers three years ago.

"It took one summer, but when I got it," Nguyen said snapping her fingers. "It's addictive."

Her teachers were from "back in the day," the early years when swimmers, rafters and surfers each had their shot at catching a wave during regular business hours.

Over the years, Big Surf switched ownership a few times. Surfboards on the waves vanished due to liability issues. Golfland Entertainment Centers Inc. has operated the water park since 1991. And three years ago, as more customers inquired about surfing, the sessions started up and take place in the early evening after the park closes.

"It's all we got," said Chris Owen, 30, as he studied the waves.

"It's weird. There are different conditions every day. It's not the same wave twice," said Owen, who grew up surfing California beaches.

So did Matt Olsen, 29, who moved to the Valley from Los Angeles six years ago.

Even though these waves are manufactured, Olsen said, "the sound - I love it - I'm homesick."

This place is also where Drew Vichules, 48, first stood up on a board in 1973.

"Took a lesson, stood up on the first wave," he said. "And I've been chasing that feeling ever since that moment."