About San Francisco Surf Travel
It wasn’t until very recently that San Francisco took on the air of a surf town. Thanks to new wetsuits, better surf forecasts, and a newfound appreciation for Ocean Beach, these days it’s one of the hottest tickets on the coast on a good west swell day in the autumn. Ocean Beach attracts the lion’s share of the attention—for obvious reasons—but the City By the Bay is holding a few other gems. Spots like Fort Point and Dead Man’s aren’t to be trifled with when the North Pacific is unleashing its fury, but on ideal conditions, they can be downright magic. If you’re going to San Francisco you can probably skip the flowers in your hair, but definitely, pack a thick wetsuit and a board that can paddle with the best of them…you’re probably going to need every inch of it.
Ocean Beach:
It’s a nice drive from Fort Point to Ocean Beach: along Baker Beach (no surf), past the ritzy Seacliff neighborhood through the Presidio, along a nice golf course with a million-dollar view of the Golden Gate and the Marin Headlands, left at the Palace of the Legion of Honor and out into the civilized world. Down Geary Street to Cliff House, the civilized world ends and the natural world begins, dramatically. Turn a corner and — pow! — there’s the Pacific Ocean in all its glory.
That turn at Ocean Beach is always dramatic because, to steal a phrase from Forrest Gump, Ocean Beach is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get. Ocean Beach is the most emotional stretch of beach in all of California, and perhaps the world, because it’s located dead center in the middle of California, and it’s open to every burble and bellow from the north and the south. The winds are dynamic, but the real factor is the tide. All that water moving in and out of the Golden Gate sweeps up and down Ocean Beach with enough force to dislocate swell and shift sandbars from hour to hour. Ocean Beach has many, many moods, from the manic ecstasy of clear, blue offshore fall days to the gloom and doom of stormy winter, windy spring and gray summer. There is no stretch of ocean in California that changes as much from hour to hour, day to day and season to season as Ocean Beach.
When Ocean Beach is on, you will see three miles of shifting, meaty, dark-green offshore peaks, from head-high to triple-overhead, cannonading the surf zone from south, west and north. A perfect day at Ocean Beach can be a mind-boggling sight, a mile after mile of perfect surf, with scattered humans doing their best to paddle through the impact zone, make it out the back and catch one of the buggers.
On a lot of days at Ocean Beach, just getting out can be a major accomplishment. Depending on swell and tide and sandbar, on many days there is a 200-yard “zone of death” in between the beach and the lineup. It can be as hard to get off the beach and out to sea for a surfer as it was for a marine to get from sea to shore on the beaches of Normandy. It takes knowledge, skill, strength and courage, but the deciding factor on a lot of days is still dumb luck.
Make it outside, and there are rewards, but your troubles aren’t necessarily over. A good day at Ocean Beach is as good as any beachbreak in the world, but the good peaks here have a maddening quality of always being 50 yards away from where you’re sitting. Even good surfers who surf the place all the time will get skunked, catching maybe one or two waves an hour, while paddling back and forth, trying to hunt down the big, shifting beasts.
Ocean Beach is bordered by Kelly’s Cove on the north end and Sloat Street on the south end. In between are three miles of beachbreaks, which become emptier and lonelier from north to south. There is lots parking from Kelly’s Cove down to VFW’s in front of Golden Gate Park. At Lincoln Avenue, the parking lot ends, the dunes begin and the streets become alphabetical, beginning at Irving and running all the way to Wawona. You have to park along La Playa or Great Highway the Lesser to walk across Great Highway the Greater to get to the beach. Remember to look both ways as you cross Great Highway because traffic goes by fast.
Fort Point:
The first surf spot in North Central California, and one of the most unusual places to go surfing on the planet, Fort Point is a left that breaks directly under the Golden Gate Bridge. On the best days, the wave starts around the point, directly under the bridge and wraps nearly 90 degrees into the cove on the inside.
Fort Point is an experience: safe and dangerous, beautiful and eerie, exposed and protected, easy and hard. All of these things at the same time.
Fort Point is safe because when the big, bad ocean outside the bay is closed out, blown out or otherwise unsurfable, Fort Point can be 4 to 6 feet, hot and glassy. During the winter, Fort Point is usually offshore and rarely blows out, even in the strongest northwest winds.
Fort Point is dangerous for a few reasons. When the ocean is pouring in and the tide is pouring out, there’s a lot of water going every which way under the bridge. Outgoing tides rip through here like the Colorado River. On the strongest tides in the winter, the current flows out as fast as seven knots, too strong to paddle against. Another danger is that the break is lined with rocks, and there is a big rock in the middle of the break, marking the inside lineup. A wipeout on a big day here could be harmful or fatal if you get swallowed by the rocks. A lot of Fort Point locals wear helmets and those nasty rocks are why. Finally, it can be tricky getting in and out through the rocks that line the break. And then there’s always the possibility of some nutcase jumping off the bridge and landing on your head.
Fort Point is beautiful because the view from the water at the Point is overwhelming: the Bridge overhead, the Marin Headlands to the northwest, Tiburon and Belvedere to the northeast and all of San Francisco straight inland. On a windy weekend, the Bay is a field of sails and boats, with container ships and freighters weaving through the chaos.
Fort Point is spooky because it’s like surfing in the Land of the Giants. Everything around you is grotesquely out of scale: the bridge towers above you and the container ships are immense and close. And all that out-of-scale-ness makes you think of submarine-size great whites, but don’t worry…too much. There’s never been an attack at Fort Point, but in 1959, a man was killed by a shark at Baker Beach, less than a mile away.
Fort Point can be a pretty good wave. With the right angle on the swell and the right tide and the right wind, it’s a decent left point: sometimes hollow, sometimes fun, sometimes blown and ragged and gnarly and challenging. This wave is the definition of fickle: tide sensitive, wind sensitive. Not the hollowest wave in California or the longest-walled or the fastest, but definitely in the top five for being an unusual experience.