1976-'77: Junior Year

Newport Beach River Jetty    

The summer before my Junior year was interesting. Ray and David went to surf Mexico for a couple of months so Ethel and I started hanging out again and surfed Newport Beach a lot. Then we began heading down south all the time in her car. We surfed Salt Creek until the locals started throwing rocks at us while we walked down the dirt trail to the break. We both loved surfing Trestles and Oceanside so we started driving there more and more. Then we started going to Baja.

Tijuana was not a safe place for a couple of young girls to hang out in so we'd drive straight through to K38, K55, and sometimes all the way to Ensenada. K38 was my favorite surf spot at this time. Its a perfect right point break. I could ride the waves doing big round-houses and vertical off the lips without fear of closeouts, no matter how big it got! If I rode to the end of the wave there was a place to get tubed before kicking out. In my eyes it was heaven...until the federales came around.

One particular weekend Ethel, some other friends of ours, and I went to K38 to camp out and surf. This was when there was nothing but a big dirt parking space with a herd of goats wondering around on top of the cliffs above the surf spot. When we got there the waves were 6 foot and perfect. As the day went on the waves seamed to grow with the incoming tide. Every set was bigger then the last! Within a couple of hours the waves had grown to 12 feet. Some of our friends got out of the water and started taking pictures. The federales saw the cameras and pulled up in a blaze of lights and sirens. They tore the car apart searching for drugs (which they found), then they took the cameras, our wallets, a couple of surfboards, and our food. We spent the rest of the day putting the car back together so we could drive home. It got ripped apart again when we got searched at the border. Good thing the other feds took the drugs.

The constant fear of random searches and sexual harassment didn't stop Ethel and me from going to Baja as much as we could. The surfing was too good. I simply started tucking my blond hair in a hat while walking around the towns and we really watched our backs when we went into bars. Most of the time however, we just stayed at the beach and left all our good stuff at home. Soon we started buying travelers insurance state-side before we crossed the border. It cost $5.

Before school started Ray and David came back from Mexico and brought back a lot of weed to sell so they could recoup the money they spent over the summer traveling. Ray along with my brother and I were sitting at our dinning room table dividing it up and smoking it when Mom came home. We heard her car pull up and franticly started shoveling the Mexican pot up into bags. There was too much of it that by the time she walked into the room we had only succeeded in spreading it around. The house reeked of pot smoke too. We were so busted! And all we could do was laugh (because we were also very stoned).
"I want this stuff cleaned up by the time I get back." was all Mom said. Then she walked out of the house and drove away. She never mentioned it again.

Edison Surf Team 1977. I'm next to Coach John Rothrock. 

My Junior year at Edison was bitter-sweet. I was the only girl on the surf team which was cool, but most of my friends had already graduated and were doing other things. At the beginning of the year Ethel's drug dealing brother took a lot of LSD. He then took off his clothes and walked into the ocean never to return. That convinced me to stop doing LSD and acid (I picked it up again in Hawaii), however I was still using Cocaine regularly. The suicide sent Ethel into another world, one that I didn't understand so I never asked her to talk about it. She had a boyfriend and spent much of her time with him. She went to school while I ditched all the time to hang out with Ray. 

Ray, David and I attended most major Skateboarding events, and I even watched the Z-Boys tear up a few skateparks and pools. We also went to the OP Pro and the Katin Pro-Am that was held every year at the Huntington Beach Pier. In 1977 I met my teen idol Mark Warren and was star struck. Later, in 1979, we hooked up in Hawaii and I was to find out about, what the surf pros call, "Sport Fucking" (FYI, its not flattering to girls), but, at this time I thought he was the cutest guy in the world. 

                                                   Pete Townend and Mark Warren 1977

As far as the surfing world went, it was about this time that kneeboarding was being replaced with boogie-boarding. Less and less surfers went to kneeboarding and those who were already doing it started standing up. I didn't care because I liked the sport and the way I could get into the smallest tubes and take off as late as I wanted too. By this time I had two custom-made Robert August kneeboards, the single fun, and an airbrushed blue 5'6" 23 inch wide 2 1/2 inch thick deep swallowed twin fin fish kneeboard...and all the Victory wetsuits I wanted. I was confident in the line up and aggressive. There was no way I was going to flounder around while trying to learn to stand up. My ego couldn't take the purling. To date I'm one of two committed kneeboarders on the whole East Coast. 

Physically in '77, I continued to workout. I wanted to stay strong since I was riding big surf regularly. Along with push-up and crunches, I was doing leg workouts because most of the So. Cal surf spots were gotten to by trails down rocky cliffs. Blacks for one. I rode my bike a lot for exercise and alone time. My ride would start at Huntington and would mostly take me south to Laguna Beach. Sometimes I'd go all the way to Aliso Beach and watch the local skim-boarders. I also spent a lot of time at the Wedge in Newport Beach. Watching the bodyboarders was always entertaining. When I rode my bike North I 'd turn around at Long Beach. 

My brother had started smoking and at some point I tried it, but I didn't like it that much. 

Road Trips...

One weekend during the winter Ray and I went skiing up in Big Bear. We made the drive in a little sports car. We got real stoned and started the drive up the mountain. About twenty miles in Ray pulled the car over.  

"What's up?" I asked.

Ray pulled the steering wheel off of the car and handed it to me, "You want to drive?" The bolts holding the steering wheel in place had wiggled off and had fallen onto the floor while he was driving. I turned white as a ghost. We put the bolts back on with the wheel and rapped duck tape around the whole thing. Then we went skiing. 

Another time we were at a party when we decided to take a surf trip up the Calif. coast to Rincon "...and maybe farther north if the surf is good," we concluded. It was about 2 in the morning when we got our stuff and hit the road. While traveling north on PCH in Malibu Ray fell asleep at the wheel. I watched as we started heading for the mountain made famous with mud-slides. I woke Ray up frantic and begged him to let me drive. When he refused I took the keys and we slept in the car on the side of the road. About 5am we heard a tap on the window. A police officer told us we had to move on. That morning we surfed Rincon while the sun came up. The waves were ten foot and the wind was off shore. After surfing we promptly headed farther north to Santa Barbara where we stayed for a couple of days surfing. We slept in the car.   

The year ended with me barely passing my classes because I was ditching all the time to surf. I still paddled out at my local breaks like the Huntington Cliffs, Newland St., Brookhurst, and Newport Beach, and I thought it was fun to surf at night under the Huntington Beach pier, but I was traveling north and south a lot, and those surf sessions took all day. There was no time for school in 1977, and even less time in 1978.