Driving out to Malibu for the first time since the January fires last week was quite shocking to me, so many fine oceanfront homes just gone from along Pacific Coast Highway, nothing remaining other than the dusty foundations behind a long line of witch’s hats, I suppose there to prevent tourists like me pulling up to take happy snaps.
So I didn’t – it seemed a bit too much like taking shots of recent gravestones anyway – and when I finally made it up to Pacific Palisades and my friend Hilly took me on a tour of the devastated community of Rustic Canyon, just beyond the immediate neighbourhood, that feeling was compounded.
Nine months on from the January fires, people across Malibu and the Palisades, those who lost their homes and those who still have one, are still trying to deal with the mountain of insurance issues (for those lucky enough to have full coverage), rebuilding permits and dangerous and ongoing toxicity, which is often the hidden killer expense of the survivors. None of it is pretty but the resident spirit remains high, as it always has in the wake of so many natural disasters in recent decades along the Pacific shores of Los Angeles.
Which was why I was so glad to be back at the Malibu Surfing Association’s Longboard Classic for the first time in 15 years, a very special gathering of mal riders from all over the world, made even more special this year with fundraisers for fire victims. My old mate Wally Allan from the Noosa Malibu Club has been a regular at the MSA for the past few years and it was on his urging that I decided to make a business trip to California coincide with the fun fest at the ‘Bu. Last time Noosa had a team of a dozen or more. This time it was me and Wal, under the bogus banner of “Australian Longboard Club”. Oh, and Matty Chojnacki, the Waxhead, who couldn’t make up his mind whether he was representing us or them.
Anyway, I was stoked, if somewhat bemused, to see that the MSA hadn’t changed a bit in the intervening years. I’ve written about the Malibu events way back in the day in this space before, but for clarity my abiding memory of the year I led a Noosa Mal Club team to the Bu, there were so many competitors that heats began and finished in the dark, and I don’t mean dusk, I mean so dark that the judges had torches aimed on us from the tideline and the head judge relayed the wave scores to the talliers in the stand with a battery megaphone.
Well, guess what? This year, when the heat draw finally appeared, I discovered that the 70-79 years men’s round one heat one was first in the water at 6.15am. Having just arrived, I asked a Californian buddy, is it actually light then? Clearly not an early riser, he said of course it was. But it wasn’t. (See pic.)
I was out of bed at 5.30am at Malibu’s cheapest hotel (The M, more than $500 Aussie a night thanks) and sprinting down past the pier in the pitch darkness to find the Waxhead, who had a nine-five McTavish for me to ride. Coach Waxy was only 10 minutes late and waxed the stick for me in the dark while giving me a pep talk on where to sit at low tide First Point, not that it mattered, all I could see was the faint orange of the emerging sun and the lights on the pier.
The lad means well and I love him dearly, but I really shouldn’t have had those last seven drinks at the welcome party. And then we were paddling out, and of course I paddled too deep and turned a couple of pretty peelers into straight-handers, and so it goes.
But who cares? It was great to catch up with old mates like Otis Sistrunk from Oceanside, who was a regular at the Noosa surf festival for so many years, Kirra Seale and her mum and former world champ Honolua Blomfield and her baby, screenwriter and Bu legend Denny Aaberg, and of course the unofficial mayor of Malibu, Allen Sarlo, who I’ve known since Hawaiian North Shore days half a lifetime ago.
So how did team Australia go? Well, two-thirds of us had to carry the weight and one of them wasn’t your columnist. Wally got a third and Waxhead a fourth. And we all got a few lovely shoulder-high Malibu peelers to ourselves.
As I write this, I’ve just been driven home to the Palisades by an invisible robot after a meeting in Santa Monica. He/she didn’t have much to say but didn’t hit anything either. More about this and other adventures in Cali next week.
