Riders of The Tijuana Sloughs
Allen "Dempsey" Holder, who started and lead it all. Image courtesy of Tom Keck
[An older, shorter version of this chapter, last updated in 2005, is still online at: http://files.legendarysurfers.com/surf/legends/ls15_sloughs.shtml]
The hardcore surfers who rode the Tijuana Sloughs, south of Imperial Beach, California, right next to the international border with Mexico, are unquestionably the most unknown of California’s standout surfers of the 1940s and even later.
The Tijuana Sloughs was the site of California’s first assault on big surf. It began with body surfing and riding soup on very crude equipment – even “wooden doors” – in the late 1930s. After World War II, Sloughs big wave surfers grew from a handful of surfers riding planks to a couple dozen locals and visitors from all over Southern California riding redwood/balsa’s and then, finally, Simmons “machines.”
Although many of those who rode the Sloughs would go on to find more consistent big wave surf in the Hawaiian Islands, the Tijuana Sloughs remained California’s premiere big wave spot until Mavericks – outside Pillar Point Harbor, just north of Half Moon Bay – was regularly surfed at the beginning of 1990.
Geology & Topology
Bank Wright, in Surfing California, referred to the Tijuana Sloughs – located at the mouth of the Tijuana River, on the border between the United States and Mexico – as “A spooky, big-wave break.”1From the late 1930s onward, it became known first and foremost for its winter surf of size. There are three main breaks, the Outer Peak, the Middle Peak and the Inside Peak. A spot that breaks rarely is what some old timers have called the “Mystic Peak” or “Mystery Break” which is even further out than the Outer Peak and only breaks in abnormally huge swells.2
The Tijuana River, as it enters the Pacific Ocean, is an inter tidal coastal estuary on the international border. Three-quarters of its 1,735 square mile watershed is in Mexico. The salt-marsh dominated habitat is characterized by extremely variable stream flow, with extended periods of drought interrupted by heavy floods during wet years. The estuary – what is now the 2,531 acres of tidal wetlands known as the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve – is the largest salt water marsh in Southern California.3
The Tijuana Rivermouth is ancient, having formed during glacial times when heap stones were deposited as far out as a mile from shore. During the last glacial melt, the river’s mouth became a massive reef and was covered up with ocean. Kelp beds now grow on the stone deposits, over a mile out.4
The Tijuana River begins at the confluence of the Rio Ala Mar and Arroyo Las Palmas, eleven miles southeast of the city of Tijuana, Baja California. It enters the United States just west of the city of San Ysidro and flows northwesterly 5.3 miles through the Tijuana River Valley into the Pacific Ocean.
The lower Tijuana River Valley encompasses 4,800 acres; a small patch of open space between two major metropolitan centers, San Diego and Tijuana. The valley is host to agricultural farms and horse ranches. The estuary itself is about three miles long and one and a half miles wide. It encompasses 1,100 acres that include salt marshes and tide channels.
The Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve, with its unique location on the Pacific Flyway, attracts many species of birds. Over 370 species have been sited in the estuary and the Tijuana River Valley. About fifty species are resident birds, the rest are migratory. There are six endangered species of birds which use the estuary: the California least tern, the western snowy plover, brown pelican, least bell’s vireo, light footed clapper rail, American peregrine falcon, and the belding’s savannah sparrow.5
Sloughs Rider Jim Voit wrote about the topography of the Sloughs:
“I have dived in the Sloughs area and seen eelgrass and rocks in the shallow waters. In 20+ feet of water the scene looks a lot like the desert at the foot of a canyon – lots of volleyball sized boulders and almost no vegetation. Further out, I have heard there is kelp. I have never seen “reefs” there of the kind seen at La Jolla, Sunset Cliffs, Cardiff, Del Mar, and other places along the coastline of the San Diego area.
“The location of rocks in the Sloughs area can be inferred from where the lobster fisherman set their traps, and that is generally in the area north of the Sloughs mouth and south of Imperial Beach Avenue. Bobby Wilder, a summer guard there, once dived with tanks in about 30 feet of water off Elm Avenue to determine why a lobster trap was set there, on what we thought was a sand bottom. He found a Navy F4U resting on the sandy bottom, with lobsters sheltered between the ribs of the wings. So the fishermen are good at finding lobsters, and where there are lobsters, there are rocks (or airplanes).
“The bottom around the end of the pier [in Imperial Beach] is sand, off the Navy radio station (north of IB) is sand, and I think it is sandy south of the “delta” until you get to Point of Rocks Mexico – offshore from the Tijuana bullring.
“If you follow the 3-fathom contour line on the map from north to south, from just north of the Sloughs mouth, you see it change direction from south to southeast. The gradient there (perpendicular to the contour lines) is fairly steep and points towards deeper water to the southwest, forming the “channel”. The feature we called the channel is really just the deeper water to the south of the delta. We all called it ‘the channel’, but in describing the area to someone, the word could be confusing…
“The [surfing] areas were called Outside, Middle, Inside, First Notch, Second Notch, Third Notch, Mystery Break, and Backoff.
“The really good surf at the Sloughs is in a very specific location and is associated only with a big clean north groundswell with an interval of 15 to 18 seconds. This swell breaks in a region called ‘the outside’. The outside is further defined by line-ups as first notch (closest to the beach), second notch, and third notch (farthest out). These notches are features in the hills south of the Tijuana Bullring (not built until the 1950s) that are lined up with the south edge of the bullring to establish a ‘distance from shore’ estimate. This ‘outside’ region does not indicate any structure except that the bigger the waves, the farther out they break. The Mystery Break is a break quite a ways outside of the outside break. It always backs off, and is always obscured by waves in the set that accompanies it. We never seriously considered going out there because it seldom breaks, and it always backs off.
“The outside and the middle are distinguished by a feature that causes a wave that breaks on the outside to ‘back off’ before it re-formed on the middle. The region where it backs off is called the back-off area. At times the surf is not big enough to break at all on the outside, but there are still good waves in the middle. At other times it breaks on the outside and backs off completely then re-forms on the middle. When the surf is large, soup from a wave breaking on the outside rolls right through the back-off area, but the shoulder halts its movement southward, recedes northward towards the back-off area and then re-forms to move south again.
“The tide and the size of the surf determined whether we surfed at the middle or the outside, and often we would start one place and move to the other as conditions changed.
“There is a similar structure associated with the middle and the inside, with another back-off area between them. Thus the question: ‘which back-off area?’ might come up...”6
“We never got a longitude/latitude fix on the position of the outside breaks,” Jim continued. “The enclosed chart shows a 2-fathom spot, which would be about 2.5 fathoms (15 feet), deep on a medium tide. I think this spot is near the latitude of the outside breaks. It is 700 yards out on the map, and the 3-fathom contour is only about 25 yards further outside. If we assume that a wave breaks in about the depth of water equal to its height, then the big surf would start about there. With all the fancy electronics available these days, there may be someone with a good longitude/latitude fix on the outside breaks. I believe the estimate of 1 mile out is an exaggeration, as the map shows a depth of 6 fathoms at 1 mile out on the delta.”7
History of Imperial Beach
As for area names, there are several interpretations of the word “Tijuana.” The dominant interpretation has “tijuan” as a Native American word meaning “by the sea.”8
The area was certainly inhabited by the Kumeyaay people well before the arrival of Spaniards in the 1700s. After the Spaniards subdued the local people and began to convert natives to Christianity, the Kumeyaay were noted for their resistance to the conversion.9
Just prior to 1891, there was an active tourist enclave straddling the mouth of the Tijuana River. In 1891, floods destroyed between 30 and 40 homes. When the floods receded, locals chose to rebuild on higher ground. This search for higher ground is what started the development of the modern-day cities of Tijuana and Imperial Beach.10
Before it was known as Imperial Beach, a land boom hit the area in the 1880s. Promoters followed the general pattern replicated elsewhere. First came acquisition and subdivision, followed by a hotel or other attraction. Then came land auctions and finally the building of the community by its new residents.11
This same pattern held true for many of the developments in the surrounding area, such as Coronado Heights, Oneonta, Monument City, South San Diego, International City, Barbers Station, South Coronado, Tia Juana City, and San Ysidro.12
The modern history of Imperial Beach – the Sloughs’ closest population center in the United States – started about June 1887 when R. R. Morrison, a real estate developer, filed a subdivision map with the San Diego County Clerk. The map referred to the area as South San Diego Beach. The area it encompassed was 5th Street to 13th Street north of Palm Avenue and from about 9th Street to 17th Street between Palm Avenue and what today is Imperial Beach Blvd. This included areas that have since been annexed by San Diego and which were formerly called Palm City.13
Imperial Beach, 14 miles south of the City of San Diego, “was named by the South San Diego Investment Company in order to lure the residents of the Imperial Valley to build summer cottages on the beach,” according to the California Coastal Resource Guide, “where the balmy weather would ‘cure rheumatic proclivities, catarrhal trouble, and lesions of the lungs.’ Imperial Beach was a quiet seaside village until 1906 when ferry and railroad connections with downtown San Diego were completed. After that, a popular Sunday pastime of San Diegans was to board a ferry downtown and sail through a channel dredged in the bay to a landing where an electric train would take them to ‘beautiful Imperial Beach.’”14 Despite these links to the big city, as late as the 1930s and ‘40s, Imperial Beach could still be considered a “sleepy” town.
Imperial Beach got its first sidewalks in 1909-1910 and a wooden pier was constructed about 1909. The pier’s original purpose was to generate electricity for the town, using wave action which activated massive machinery on the end of the pier. The “Edwards Wave Motor” ended as a failure and was eventually dis-assembled and removed. For many years thereafter, though, the pier attracted large crowds, as did the nearby boardwalk and bathhouse. The wooden pier finally deteriorated and it washed into the sea in the severe storm of 1948. The boardwalk lasted until 1953.15
In 1910, the builder of the Hotel del Coronado, E. S. Babcock – who reportedly kept a mistress in Imperial Beach – dredged a channel to where the north end of 10th Street is today. Boats carrying up to fifty passengers landed at what was called the South San Diego Landing. The boats were operated by Oakley Hall and Ralph Chandler. Captain A. J. Larsen piloted the Grant as it traveled from Market Street, in San Diego, to the South Bay Landing, three times a day. Sometimes a night trip was added. A battery powered trolley car operated by the Mexico and San Diego Railway Company met the people at the South Bay Landing. The trolley took them up 10th Street to Palm Avenue and then west on Palm to First Street, where it turned left and proceeded to the end of the street before returning to the landing. The motor cars’ batteries were the newest invention of Thomas A. Edison, who had experimented with a way to do away with the overhead trolley car wires. The cruises were very popular for about six years.16
A decade after World War II, on June 5, 1956, Imperial Beach voted to become its own independent city. The act of incorporation was recorded in the California State Secretary’s office on July 18th, 1956. This became the official birthday of Imperial Beach, which became the tenth city in San Diego County and the 327th city in California.17
1937-41
Just prior to World War II, a very small number of pioneering California surfers began surfing south of Imperial Beach, off the river mouth of the Tijuana River. They established the spot so solidly among Southern California surfers that after the war, The Sloughs became the testing ground for most mainlanders going on to more consistent bigger surf in the Hawaiian Islands. The Sloughs were home of the then-known biggest waves off the continental United States.
Tijuana Sloughs was first surfed – body surfed, actually – in 1937 by Allen “Dempsey” Holder.
“In the summer of ’37, I went down to the Sloughs and camped with my family,” Dempsey recalled. “Well, I saw big waves breaking out at outside shore break and went body surfing. I never did get out to the outside of it. A big set came and I was still inside of it. Well, I sort of made note of that – boy, you know, surf breaking out that far.”18
“According to Dempsey,” said John Elwell, a Sloughs rider that would come along in the early 1950s, “Towney Cromwell and him surfed it first [on surfboards] in 1939.”19
“One of the first guys that surfed down here with me was Towney Cromwell,” Dempsey confirmed. “He was studying oceanography at Scripps.”20
For at least the next 10 years, Dempsey rode the Sloughs on the redwood plank surfboards of the time. In the late 1940s, he got a dramatically improved surfboard from Bob Simmons.
“The Sloughs was Dempsey’s place,” Lloyd Baker wrote me. “Every big day with the right swell direction and good wind condition, Dempsey was there. The rest of us were just visitors, a day here and a day there.”21 A similar parallel can be drawn to the story of Jeff Clark and Mavericks, decades later up the coast.
“Dempsey was the guru down there,” agreed Flippy Hoffman,22 who rode the Sloughs as a visitor in the late 1940s. What’s more, “Dempsey was surfing there all by himself,” for many years, testified Windansea surfer Jim “Burrhead” Drever, who was one of the early guys to surf the Sloughs, in the 1940s. “He was really glad to have friends show up to surf with.”23
“Back in the ‘30s and [beginning] ‘40s there were the Hughes brothers,” Dempsey remembered of surfing the inside break, adding that he wasn’t alone all the time. “They would take a barn door out and would hold it and jump on it in the surf.”24
“He had originally come from Texas, with his family,” Chuck Quinn, who came onto the Sloughs scene in 1949,25told me of Dempsey. “He started surfing at Pacific Beach, at what was called ‘PB Point’… His mentor, his hero, was Don Okey from Windansea. He said, ‘He was the best. I learned from Okey. He was a genius. He would have been a millionaire, with a little bit of luck, because he was always inventing things.’
“‘Dempsey,’ I said, ‘Did you and Okey surf together at PB Point?’ He said, ‘Yeah, that was the original.’
“Okey talks about riding 30 and 40-foot waves off Pacific Beach Point,” Chuck repeated to me. “I surfed waves over 20-feet, there,” he attested.26
Chuck might have been exaggerating on Don’s behalf, for as Lloyd Baker underscored, “We surfed the PB Point from 1937 until 1960 and I never saw a wave more than 20 or 25 feet.” Lloyd added, with some humor: “I don’t know what Okey was smoking when he saw 40 footers.”27
“I used to surf with Dempsey Holder in La Jolla, at Windansea,” Woody Ekstrom told me, “and I also surfed with Dempsey at Sunset Cliffs, but mainly in La Jolla. We’d grab a sandwich, lay down in the park there by La Jolla Cove. It’s something I will always remember – having lunches in the park.
“From there, Dempsey would always come up because Windansea was the most consistent peak of its time. You know, as far as speed and being tough most of the time. You could always get something out of it.
“Dempsey then went down to Imperial Beach to lifeguard…”28
“What you need to understand,” emphasized John Elwell, who began surfing the Sloughs a little after Chuck Quinn and a good number of years after Woody began down there, “is that what happened in 1939-1941 was brief. They just sampled it and had boards that really couldn’t surf it. Then, the war broke out and they all went into the military. Dempsey too, but Dempsey suffered a serious illness and was discharged. He thought it was spinal meningitis.”29
“Our boards were too heavy,” Lloyd Baker, who started surfing the Sloughs in 1940, explained, “and not quick enough to really get the most out of the big thick waves. Some were chambered redwood, others were balsa and redwood; average 75 to 120 pounds.”30
“It was so primitive,” Woody underscored. “Nobody was there. Dempsey’s the father of the area. Dempsey was the only one who really knew the Sloughs. He’s really the pioneer of the Sloughs… I know the word got out and fellas like Burrhead – Jim Drever, from San Clemente and Salt Creek – [was one of the first to show up]. And the word got out to the San Onofre area [and those guys came down, also].”31
Winter 1943-44
When the 1940s got under way, Kim Daun joined Dempsey, along with Lloyd Baker, Don Okey, Bill “Hadji” Hein and Jack Lounsberry.32
“According to Kimball [Daun],” John Elwell wrote of one of the Sloughs earliest riders, “surfing was tried again around 1943, when Kimball came back from the merchant marine once. That is when Kimball was swept almost to the Mexican Border.”33
It ended up being one of the most memorable big days at the Sloughs. It was the Winter of 1943 and World War II was still on in a big way. It was the same season that saw the death of Dickie Cross in big waves at Waimea.34
“In the winter of ‘43,” recalled Kim Daun, “I was in the Merchant Marine and just come back from a six-month trip. I hadn’t been doing any swimming or anything, and I wasn’t in the greatest of shape. Dempsey called me and said the surf was up at the Sloughs and wanted to surf with me.”35
“It was so god-damned big that day. So wicked,” declared Bob Goldsmith. “It was one of those days where you could see whitewater forever.”36
“Dempsey and I went out and the shore break was murder,” Kim Daun continued. “Dempsey had a heavy board and my board weighed 90 pounds. We were really a long way off the beach and we managed to get onto a couple of rides. There was a lull, but then Dempsey and I saw it at the same time: the Coronado Islands disappeared behind swells. So we immediately started paddling out like crazy. Dempsey was 100 yards north of me and I was on the south side. The first wave broke and I was over to the shoulder of the first wave and it got Dempsey. From that point on I never saw him again.”37
“I was trying to make shore,” explained Dempsey, “but they were so damned big. I was going like hell trying to get back in there and here’s something as big as a house, looked like it was gonna break on me. I turned around and dove as hard as I could to get in the face of it, and not have it break on me. I don’t know how long that went on.”38
“I got over that first wave,” continued Kim Daun, “and the second one broke about 15 feet in front of me. That wave took my board like a matchstick. My god, when I saw 15 solid feet of whitewater roaring down on me all I could think was, ‘Get underneath it.’ I finally came up. I don’t know how long that goddamn thing rolled me around. When I came up I was tired. The next wave busted in front of me again, and I went down and I thought I was deep enough and it still got me and rolled me and rolled me. The next goddamn wave broke right in front of me again, and this time I went down to the bottom and it was all eelgrass and rocks. I grabbed two big handfuls of eelgrass and that thing just tore me loose from that.”39
“The horizons tilted on me a couple of times, and that scared me,” continued Dempsey. “The next time I didn’t even look around. I just kept going, it broke on me, washed me far up enough so I could dig in. My eyes had dilated and everything was sort of puffy.”40
From Kim Daun‘s perspective, “Each time these waves came I would swim south as much as I could in the few seconds that I had. The next wave I got far on the shoulder and I swam south.”41
When Dempsey reached shore, “Bobby Goldsmith shoved my board over to me and said, ‘Where’s Kimball?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, we got separated. He took off left and I went straight in.’” Dempsey recalled that Daun, “was supposed to be out of shape. I was supposed to be in good shape. I usually didn’t get so tired, but when you don’t have a wetsuit on, your feet get a little numb, and the eyesight is a little fuzzy. I remember laying across the hood of a car – a Ford convertible – trying to get some body heat in. Bobby kept looking for Kimball Daun. Couldn’t see him anywhere. Well I said, ‘Goddamnit, maybe he drowned. Who do we let know... we’re the lifeguards, maybe we let each other know.”42
“I just kept swimming south,” retold Daun. “[And then] I was on the beach and they didn’t see me. I came in south of the Tijuana River. I was freezing. I started walking on the beach and they didn’t see me until I got to the mouth of the river.”43
“We waited there on the beach for Kimball,” remembered Bob “Goldie” Goldsmith. “I hadn’t been worried about Dempsey... old Ironman. I knew he’d make it. We were concerned for Kimball.”44
“I think I was as close to dying as I ever was in my life that day,” admitted Kim Daun.45
“During those days,” concluded Bob Goldsmith, “it was every man for himself.”46
Dempsey Holder
“Dempsey was just unbelievable,” recalled John Blankenship. “There wasn’t anybody else for sheer guts. He was the ultimate big wave rider. No fancy moves; he caught the biggest waves and went surfing. The closest guy to Dempsey was Gard Chapin [Mickey Dora‘s stepfather], although Gard never tackled waves as big as Dempsey.”47
“He’d take off even if he had a twenty percent chance of making it,” remembered Buddy Hull.48
“Dempsey would take off on anything, always deeper than he should have,” Buddy Hull recalled,49 and Woody Ekstrom agreed: “I remember him saying, ‘If you make every wave you’re not calling it close enough.’”50
“Dempsey was as strong as an ox,” Bob “Black Mac” McClendon said, “and he had the guts to go along with it. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t try.”51
“I think maybe he was a little masochistic,” declared Don Okey, “he liked to get wiped out.”52
“Dempsey called Towney in the early morning,” John Blankenship recalled of a particularly memorable time Dempsey rounded-up a crew to attack the Sloughs, “and he [Towney] could hear the roar of the surf in the background.”53
“Towney had gone over the depth charts,” Dempsey said, “and called me up and told me the bottom out there really looks good. I said, ‘Well, I told you about it.’ And he said, ‘You let me know when it comes up.’”54
“Towney comes up,” added Woody Ekstrom, “and comes out and tells me, ‘Hey Woody, you know that Sloughs is the biggest thing I’ve ever seen on the coast here. It’s the biggest stuff I’ve ever seen. Dempsey is gonna give us a call when the surf comes up.’”55
“About a week later it came up,” continued Dempsey. “I called Towney and he came down and got a lot of waves. The next day he came back and brought a kid from La Jolla named Woody Ekstrom.”56
“Dempsey called and was real grave,” added Woody Ekstrom, “and said to Towney, ‘I think it’s gonna be our golden opportunity.’ Towney looked at me and grinned from ear to ear.”57
I asked Woody what was so funny.
“Dempsey would say, ‘I think it’s our golden opportunity,’” Woody repeated and laughed at the memory. “It was colder ‘n hell and he said that and Towney looked at me and said, ‘Well, Woody, what do you think of that? Our “golden opportunity”!’ And, God, we were freezing!”58
“They’d get the phone call late at night, ‘Surf’s up,’” wrote environmentalist and local writer Serge Dedina. “The next day they’d show up at the County lifeguard station at the end of Palm Avenue in Imperial Beach. Dempsey Holder, a tall and wiry lifeguard raised in the plains of West Texas, and the acknowledged ‘Dean of the Sloughs,’ would greet them with a big smile. For Dempsey, the phone calls meant the difference between surfing alone or in the company of the greatest watermen on the coast.”59
“He would call up –” Woody told me. “I don’t think he could get a hold of me, but he could get a hold of… Towney Cromwell. Towney would [then] call me up and say, ‘Dempsey called and he says it’s humpin’. Do you wanna go down? Let’s go!’
“‘Yeah!’”60
“What year was this?” I asked Woody.
“1946, ‘cause I remember guys were on 52-20, after the war, you know. The war’s over and all these guys – GI’s – collecting 52-20. Even my brother was in on that.”61
“Towney and I would get in Towney’s ‘35 Ford coupe – trunk shoved with boards,” Woody continued. “We’d go down there [Imperial Beach] and meet Dempsey at the Sloughs itself. We’d get on our suits – we had wool bathing suits; like Navy ‘bun huggers’ we used to call them. We’d put on our black wool suits and… it was really cold, as I remember! Pretty cold. But, the main thing was we had to get out there before the wind came up. Once the wind comes up – and it blows through Imperial Beach quite a bit – by 11 o’clock, you’re completely blown out.”62
“We had good times together,” Woody reminisced. “Cromwell went to Hawai’i when Dempsey was a ham operator. So, when his wife wanted to speak to her husband in Hawai’i, she’d drive clear down to Imperial Beach from La Jolla and talk to Towney, in Hawai’i, through Dempsey’s ham radio. Dempsey had the ham operating set-up right in the lifeguard station; about 1948-49.
“Towney and I were just like brothers,” Woody said. “Of course, so was Blankenship.
“He [Towney] got killed June 2nd 1958,” Woody knew the date by heart. “I remember it [the day] real well. One of the saddest days of my life… I still miss Towney…” Woody said quietly, with visible emotion.63
“How long did you surf the Sloughs?” I asked, trying to divert some of Woody’s sadder memories.
“I surfed it until about the early ‘50s. In the early ‘50s, I had to go into the army – in ‘52; got out in ‘54.”64
As time went on and more surfers joined the group riding The Sloughs, the scenario would go like Serge Dedina described:
“Boards were quickly loaded in Dempsey’s Sloughmobile, a stripped down ‘27 Chevy prototype dune buggy that contained a rack for boards and a seat for Dempsey. Everyone else hung on anxiously as they made their way through the sand dunes and nervously eyed the whitewater that hid winter waves that never closed out. The bigger the swell, the farther out it broke. It was not uncommon for surfers to find themselves wondering what the hell they were doing a mile from shore, scanning the horizon for the next set, praying they wouldn’t be caught inside, lose their boards, and have to swim in.
“If you liked big waves and were a real waterman,” Dedina summed up, “... you’d paddle out with Dempsey. No one held it against you if you stayed on the shore. Some guys surfed big waves. Others didn’t. It was that simple.”65
“Dempsey was an ironman,” declared “Goldie” Goldsmith. “He was out there pushing through the biggest, goddamnest shit. He was fearless and brave and he had the guts. He took off on anything and could push through anything, in any kind of surf.”66
“There was one time when Woody Ekstrom lost his board,” John Blankenship gave as an example. “Well Dempsey grabbed his own board and Woody’s and punched through the surf.”67
“We didn’t have leashes,” Woody explained to me in that gravel voice he has. “So, if you lost your board, that ended your surfing that day because the swim’s too far. By the time you got to the beach, due to the water temperature in that area – it’s usually low [in the winter]; 50-55 [degrees F] – by the time you got to the beach, that was the end of your surfing” that day.68
“One time I lost my board,” Woody said of the time Blankenship had mentioned, “and Dempsey had caught it inside… He got hold of my board by the tailblock. He had my board plus his. A board in each hand, shoving through these walls [noses first].”69
“We were blown away,” Blankenship attested. “Nobody had ever seen anyone ever do that before. We had enough trouble punching our own boards through the soup.”70
“The biggest wave I ever rode out there was in the ‘40s,” said Dempsey. “I caught one on the outside with that big old board I had. The only reason I took off on the thing [was] because it looked like there was something else that was gonna break on me behind it. Just barely made it, and before I got to the end, it actually broke over me. I got on the shoulder and straightened it out. Got down and made one paddle and got in the backoff area. I swear there was one of those big old waves that was as big as the one I’d taken off on. I was scared to death (laughs). I got far enough out on the end, cut back, got underneath the soup, and rode it till waist-deep water and went into the beach.”71
1st Crew, Early 1940s
· Towne “Towney” Cromwell
· Kimball “Kim” Daun
· Don Okey
· Lloyd Baker
· John Blankenship
· Bob “Goldie” Goldsmith
· Bill “Hadji” Hein
· Jack Lounsberry
Visitors:
· Lorrin “Whitey” Harrison
· Ron “Canoe” Drummond
After The War
“Beginning in the 1940s,” wrote Serge Dedina in a 1994 article on the Sloughs for what was then called The Longboard Quarterly (later just Longboard magazine), “when north swells closed out the coast, surfers from all over Southern California made the journey to a remote and desolate beach within spitting distance of the Mexican border. Before the Malibu, San Onofre, and Windansea gangs surfed Makaha and the North Shore, they experienced the thrill and fear of big waves at the Sloughs.”72
Even so, only a handful of surfers regularly surfed the Sloughs. While word of the size of the winter surf at the Tijuana Sloughs grew as time went on, visitors from outside were never large in number. They came from a select group of Southern California’s best watermen – guys like Ron Drummond and Whitey Harrison.
“Back in the early ‘40s I surfed the Sloughs when it was huge,” retold Lorrin “Whitey” Harrison. “It was all you could do to get out. Really big. We were way the hell out. Canoe Drummond came down.”73
“We paddled out and the surf was probably about 20 feet high or so,” remembered Ron “Canoe” Drummond. “I looked out about a mile where some tremendously big waves were breaking. I asked if anybody wanted to go out there with me, but nobody did. So I went in my canoe and paddled out there. I set my sights in the U.S. and in Mexico, and figured out where I wanted to be. One of the biggest sets came through and I caught a wave that was bigger than most. I rode down it when it closed over me. I was caught in the tunnel. Well I rode near 100 feet in the tunnel and just barely made it out. If that wave would have collapsed on me, it would have killed me.”74
“The main draw back to the Sloughs,” Lloyd Baker wrote me, “was the distance from shore the waves broke [from]. And the temp of the water: 51-58 degrees most all winter. Because of the temp of the air and water, you sometimes did things that were not too bright.”75
“One big day,” Lloyd went on, “I lost my board on the first wave and it was gone to shore or some place toward shore. It was already cold from the air temp, so in desperation, I picked up the next wave, which was the largest I had ever tried to body surf. I was so long back in the powerful white water that I was about to dive and give it up. Then, I shot out in front to get a little air. It finally let me go when I reached the shorebreak. It was nice to catch my breath and get warm again.”76
“The down side of the Sloughs,” Lloyd added, “was the inconsistency (only 4 or 5 times a winter). I lived in Mission Beach and Dempsey would call me if he thought the next morning might be good. This was fine, but it took 5 or 6 hours out of that day. The time to drive to Imperial Beach, then to get organized and down to the Sloughs, wait for a lull in the shorebreak, paddle out (a long, long way), catch 2 or 3 waves, then getting warm [on the beach], and back home too exhausted to work.”77
Word continued to spread about the Sloughs, but it was hard to compare to, outside the Islands.
“I had told the guys up north about the surf down here,” Dempsey said. “They were asking about it. One day I stopped at Dana Point on my way back from L.A. with a load of balsa wood. It was the biggest surf they had there in six years. They wanted me to compare it, and I told them, ‘Well, the backside of the [Slough] waves were bigger than... the frontsides [of the Dana Point waves].”78
Jim “Burrhead” Drever‘s initial introduction to the Sloughs was not untypical for a good number of Southern California’s best surfers. He recalled, “One time about 1947, I was sleeping in my ‘39 convertible right on the beach at Windansea, and I heard these guys pounding on the car. I’d heard about the Sloughs and they were going, so I followed them. It was pretty damn big. This was before I went over to the Islands and I’d never seen waves that big around here.”79
“After the Sloughs,” remarked John Blankenship, the biggest waves at the Cove [La Jolla Cove] didn’t seem so big.”80
“We went out there in the goddamnest stuff,” remembered Bob Goldsmith. “Big stuff – that would scare the hell out of us. The soup was so big that we would roll over, drive into it with the board, and get thrown around like it [the board] was nothing.”81
“The bigger the better,” added Buddy Hull.82
“When you’re out there you take a different perspective,” said Goldsmith, “because you couldn’t rely on anyone else. You’re on your own. Sometimes it was just big, cold, and miserable. When it was big we’d say ‘Come on down and hit it.’ But since it would happen in the mornings, me and Dempsey would be down there alone.”83
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