Legendary Santa Barbara Point Break Continues to Produce Perfect Waves and Zero Humility About It

Rincon: Still the Queen, Still Not Apologising for Any of It

Rincon Point, the cobblestone right-hand point break straddling the Ventura-Santa Barbara county line where the Pacific Coast Highway passes closest to the water and the parking lot fills up in a way that suggests the concept of personal space has been negotiated down to zero, has been named the Queen of the California Coast for the fiftieth consecutive year by various publications, polls, and the informal consensus of anyone who has surfed there on a good winter northwest swell and is prepared to be honest about it.

The break, which operates across three sections — the Cove, the Rivermouth, and the Indicator — depending on swell size and direction, produces long, peeling rights on northwest swells that draw Southern California surfers north from Los Angeles in numbers that turn the PCH parking lot into a social event and the water into a lineup with roughly the density of a medium-sized farmer’s market but with significantly more localism and equivalent amounts of people asking what you grew.

The Winter Migration

Each autumn, as the summer south swells fade and the northwest groundswells begin their six-month run, Southern California’s surfing population executes what researchers at UC Santa Barbara have described as ‘the most predictable mass migration in American leisure culture’: approximately forty thousand vehicles travel the PCH to Rincon on each significant northwest swell between October and March, creating traffic conditions that have been the subject of three separate Caltrans studies and zero effective solutions.

‘We’ve modeled the traffic,’ confirmed Caltrans District 7 spokesperson Angela Reyes. ‘The problem is that the people causing the congestion are all making individually rational decisions — there is excellent surf, they want to surf it — but the collective outcome is irrational, which is to say that many of them spend more time in traffic than in the water. We don’t have a policy instrument for that. The surf is very good. People will drive to it. That’s the situation.’

What Rincon Is Actually Like

On the right swell, at low tide, with less than twenty people in the water — a condition that occurs approximately four times per winter season at hours that require either unemployment or an extraordinary alarm clock — Rincon is as good as surfing gets in California. The wave is long, forgiving enough for intermediate surfers and challenging enough for experts, and the setting — mountains behind, Channel Islands visible offshore, the smell of eucalyptus from the adjacent ranch — is the specific combination of California geography that the rest of the world means when it imagines California geography. The other three hundred and sixty-one days of the year it is busy, cold-ish, and still significantly better than most of what is available elsewhere.

Rincon swell forecasts at Surfline. Comedy: NewsThump.

SOURCE: http://prat.UK