San Simeon:
“Then somewhere around San Simeon, in sight of the castle, he pulled over to check a beachbreak. There was no one out, nobody even looking. It was hot, lunchtime. The water was smooth glass with a sweet right peeling off a small sandbar offshore. Over the barbed-wire fence, down through the rutted cow pasture and on to an untracked, coarse-grained berm. Tug on the wetsuit and into the clear, crisp water. The bar was good, 4 to 6 feet, dredging up foam and sand in a symmetrical slant right into the shorebreak. Transparent lips throwing out onto flat water. Tube after tube. Sea otters basking in the channel, red-tail hawks watching from fence posts — the only audience when Kidman snapped his board on a suck-out grinder.” — Sam George, Surfer magazine, June 1994
One thing Sam doesn’t point out here is that Aussie explorer/writer/filmmaker Andrew Kidman is one of the lucky few who have blindly stumbled upon great surf along what is undoubtedly one of the most fickle coastlines in the state. Sure, San Simeon is a gorgeous chunk of geography, as close as you’ll get to Ireland’s pastoral hills and breezy, rock-strewn waterline without booking a flight to Dublin. But the inspiring backdrops don’t do a lot for the area’s small legion of surfers, who are forced to deal with the consistently shoddy hand that Mother Nature deals them. If you’re intent on scoring in San Simeon, we hope that patience is your livelihood. There’s a 97 percent chance that you’ll be severely let down.
Pico Creek:
Pico Creek at the north end of downtown San Simeon. It will be either a thick, right-hand reefbreak wave during clean conditions or a peaky, rocky beachbreak on smaller days. The reef sits in front of the creek’s mouth and is clogged with seaweed and boils, yet manages to produce a rather decent right which peaks on the outside, backs off, then reforms and bowls into the inside section.
Popular with surfers of all types, Pico Creek is a fairly reliable spot if the swell is bigger than chest-high. If it isn’t, walk south of the short staircase. There you’ll find a wide beachbreak punctuated with several boulders and patches of shallow reef. Unsurfable on anything bigger than a few feet overhead, the beachbreak proves valuable during the summertime.