The Green Room

Surfer Magazine recently released an online report on springtime shark activity at Southern California beaches. Read the full article here:

According to the article, a ”6-foot long male Great White thrashing about in the shore break” was spotted at San Onofre State Beach in early March. The witness, Kelly Lewis, actually managed to get a picture of the thing (below).

But according to our own resident shark expert, Sean Van Sommeran of the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation, it turns out that the hyperactive shark flopping around on the beach wasn’t actually Whitey. When he heard about the strange encounter down south, Van Sommeran looked into it and once he saw the photographic evidence, determined that the above fish was in fact a Salmon Shark–not a known man eater.

Van Sommeran decided to set the record straight:

The shark pictured on the beach/tide-line (in the above Surfer Magazine online article) is not a juvenile white shark (Carcharodon carcharias). It is a juvenile or subadult Salmon Shark (Lamna ditropis), which is a close relative of White Shark and Makos and a fellow member of the Lamnid family of sharks. I’ve contacted the author of the article and associated shark attack specialists.

These sharks periodically strand elsewhere in California as well as Oregon, they are most common up in Alaskan and Canadian waters. Specimens collected had a carnobacterial infection of the head and nervous system causing these sharks to strand.

(For more information on specimen collection of stranded sharks check out this link to the PSRF website: http://www.pelagic.org/research/stranding.html)

These sharks are commonly mistaken by the untrained eye for white sharks but can be distinguished by subtle features of the head, pectoral fins and the tail section. The Atlantic and far southern Pacific have a very similar species (also Lamnid shark) called porbeagle shark (Lamna ditropis). The five species of sharks within the Lamnidae group of sharks are known for elevated blood pressures and temperatures and specializing in high performance fishes, other sharks and many species of marine mammals.

 Salmon Shark

Salmon sharks are not known to be a threat to humans although the larger adults (almost 10 total length and almost half a ton) are known to prey upon seals and porpoises; the larger specimens appear to be fewer and farther between, average adult size is perhaps 8′ total length.

(For more information on Salmon Sharks check out this link to the PSRF website: http://www.pelagic.org/montereybay/pelagic/salmonshark.html)

Please do make use of the information. Public education is very important to dull the hysteria as well as notify the public that these events and specimens are scientifically and environmentally important and that there is an animal rescue unit here locally (as far south as Santa Monica and as far north as Mendocino) that responds to fish and shark related stranding/rescue/collection events. We do assist with whale rescue and disentanglement events as well, on occasion.

Ciao,
Sean

The gray whales are in town, making pit stops along our coast on their journey back from their winter breeding grounds in southern Baja to their summer feeding grounds in Alaska.

Whales have been seen spouting right off Mitchell’s Cove Thursday morning and there have been numerous sightings up north in the last few days. Keep your eyes peeled for whales breaching and spouting just beyond the breakers at a surf spot near you.

Has anyone noticed that about a fourth of Seal Rock is missing? When I got back into town a few days ago and checked the surf at the Lane it appeared that the whole left side of the little sea stack had fallen into the sea.

There must have been some pretty solid storms that hit NorCal during the second half of February to do that kind of damage. Just a reminder that in the contest between sea and land, the sea will always win, no matter how many sea walls, jetties or groins we erect. I’m sure there are plenty of old carps around who still remember when that big rock on the inside near the Lane staircase used to be part of a natural arch.

And with sea levels rising the natural rate of coastal erosion could increase dramatically. A silver lining? Maybe in the not-so-distant future the wave at Pigeon Point will be cleared of its minefield of jagged, barnacle-encrusted rocks and transform into California’s longest point break. Then all you’d have to worry about are the sharks.

Seal Rock before.

Seal Rock after.

Notice the large indentation cut into the left side of the rock. Now it looks more like a crescent than a circle. Who knows, maybe in ten years time the rock will be scoured out all the way to the other side, leaving the top intact, and we’ll all be referring to “Seal Rock” as “Seal Bridge.”

More evidence of gnarly February storms.

Santa Cruz has always attracted plenty of attention when it comes to surfing: as a breeding ground for big wave champions, a hub of the progressive/aerial surfing movement, and even as the antagonist to Huntington Beach in the infamous legal battle over the title of “Surf City.”

Now Santa Cruz surfers have caught the attention of academia, and if you so choose, you could soon be under the proverbial microscope.

A research group from the Colford lab at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health recently announced its interest in studying the relationship between the health of surfers and the quality of water. The scientists, who launched the Surfer Health Study in February, plan to focus their research on surfers in Santa Cruz County coastal waters.

(more…)

Geoff Rashe’s new M10 Surfboards factory might look like your typical shaper’s manufacturing operation. It’s located in an industrial part of town, with dozens of foam blanks piled upon each other inside while freshly glassed surfboards sit drying on the racks. But the 20-year shaping veteran behind one of the most recognized surfboard labels ever to emerge from Santa Cruz is taking a unique approach.

Sure, like most shops the walls are covered with pages from surf magazines, displaying team riders ripping waves around the globe, epic days at local spots, and, of course, an assortment of beautiful girls posing on tropical beaches.

But other traditional elements of a board production house remain conspicuously absent from the M10 factory — most notably the intense smell of resin assaulting your sinuses. You know, those harsh chemical fumes that creep into your brain when you hang out anywhere surfboards are being glassed with traditional polyester resin. First, you feel a little dizzy, then maybe a little buzzed, and if you hang out long enough you might eventually be loopy to buy that board with the hideous candy cane airbrush and green spots that has been sitting on the rack since last Christmas.

For years now M10 has used epoxy resin to glass boards instead of polyester. Not only are the fumes from epoxy negligible compared to polyester, but epoxy also doesn’t release the toxic gases, known as Volatile Organic Compounds, that polyester resins do.

Epoxy resin is used in applications other than surfboard building — boats, electronics and aerospace parts. Rashe was one of the first surfboard manufacturers in Santa Cruz to switch over to epoxy. Although he is not alone in his use of the material today, he remains the minority. The epoxy resin M10 uses comes from a company called Revchem Plastics based in Southern California. Not only is their epoxy stronger, lighter and more ding resistant than traditional polyester resin, it also contains no measurable amount of VOCs, according to Rashe.

“I can’t say we have zero emissions,” he said. “But they’re below the measurable standard of the Monterey Bay Unified Air Pollution Control District.”

David Frisbey is an inspector with the district who makes periodic inspections of surfboard factories to insure that they are in compliance with air pollution standards. Frisbey agreed that one of the best things surfboard manufacturers can do to minimize their environmental impact is to limit the amount of VOCs released into the air.

“The main thing we look at with surfboard manufacturers is the polyester resin. The primary ingredient we’re concerned with is styrene, which is a VOC,” Frisbey said.

“VOCs are one of the primary pollutants that we regulate,” he added. “Styrene definitely has some toxic risk to it, so we’re interested in controlling the amount of styrene released into the air.”

Rashe has also worked to reduce his emissions of surfboard-sanding dust to zero by utilizing a vacuum collection system. One of the main problems confronting surfboard manufacturers is what to do about the dust that accumulates from the sanding process. Many shops will allow the dust to accumulate around the shop and later ventilate the room with a large fan that passes the air through a huge dust collector and then out through a stack that goes straight up and out of the building, into the air. The higher the stacks, the less likely impact to the area around the factory.

“You have to blow it off high enough and fast enough, according to the Air Pollution Control District,” Rashe said. “Everybody’s doing it. They just have to pay for a permit. It’s a permit to pollute, basically.

“For the most part, dust is flying out of the shop. We’re a zero-emissions shop — no dust or VOCs — so we don’t need a permit.”

At the M10 shop, any tools that create dust — sanders, planers, the bits on the computer shaping machine — are equipped with vacuums so that dust is immediately sucked into a vacuum at the point of sanding or cutting and deposited into dust bags.

“Every previous factory has been an outright dust pit,” Rashe said. “Using vacuum collection systems, we’ve solved the dust problem. On top of that, epoxy dust isn’t flammable so we don’t have to deal with a huge fire hazard.”

The overall tidiness of the factory — the lack of resin caked on the floor beneath the glassing stands and the lack of fiberglass and resin dust often found piled in the corners of many shops in the form of snow banks — definitely caught my eye during my visit.

Rashe claims the factory — his fifth location to date — is the cleanest operation he has ever run. Granted, it has only been in operation for a few months, but Rashe said he now has the tools and the motivation to keep the shop spick and span.

“We’re being really mindful about not wasting any resin and getting it on the ground, Rashe said. “Ninety-nine percent of the resin we use goes onto the board. Epoxy is expensive. I don’t want to pour all my money on the ground. We want to be efficient with our material use.”

Rashe is the first to admit that his process is far from avoiding leaving an environmental footprint behind. The leftover chunks of foam and bags of dust from the vacuum collection system in the M10 factory go into the landfill, just like all the other shops.

But his main motivation, he said, wasn’t just to reduce his impact on the environment but to also create a healthier, safer workplace for both himself and those who work in the M10 factory.

“I don’t want to have to sacrifice my health for my livelihood, and I don’t want to have to ask anyone else to do that,” he said. “I want my surf factory to be a place where you feel OK working there all day. That’s the most important thing to me.”

Justin Vonner worked as a sander in the surfboard manufacturing industry for the past two and a half years and just recently began working for M10 at the new factory. He told me that working in the M10’s all-epoxy factory and using the vacuum collection system has been an eye opening experience — literally.

“The last two or three months my eyes have been starting to get bad. I know that it’s something that affects you in the long term, so it’s important for me to minimize that. The vacuum-sanding setup just makes my life easier.”

For generations, surfers have relied on three main criteria when deciding whether the waves are good enough to put off responsibilities and go surfing: swell, tide, and wind. These factors also play a role in determining where and when the surfer will surf.

In modern times, crowds have become a powerful determining factor that the surfer must also take into consideration. And, although some won’t admit it, the shark factor can at times influence a surfer’s decision on where to paddle out as well.

But lately I’ve noticed another variable taking precedence among all the other traditional factors I normally take into account when deciding if, where, and when I surf — water quality. Take this Thanksgiving for example.

While visiting family and friends in San Francisco for the holiday, I brought along a couple of boards on the off chance the notoriously fickle sand bars of Ocean Beach might offer up a serendipitous Thanksgiving wave feast.

Heading down Sloat Boulevard towards the south end of the beach on Friday, I could see from my vantage point at 19th Avenue that the wind was blowing hard out of the city, grooming the ocean and creating razor sharp visibility. The day was so clear you could practically see the seals wriggling about out on the rocks out at the Farallones, some 27 miles offshore. Down at the beach, the wind was offshore and a dying west swell was fading itself out on the inside sandbars.

Above: O.B. as good as it gets. No need to weigh the variables on this day…

I hadn’t been out to Ocean Beach since the Cosco Busan oil spill just two weeks prior, and was curious to see how bad it looked. I felt like I was visiting an old friend in the hospital and prepared myself for the worst. I expected to find tarballs up and down the beach and the sand stained black. I expected to see hideous, sludge-filled waves crashing on the beach.

To my surprise the beach looked the same as always — far from a virgin beach, but not the apocalyptic scene I had envisioned either. I walked up and down the sand for over a mile but couldn’t spot even the smallest tarball. The color of the water meanwhile was an attractive deep blue.

People were out all over the beach enjoying the beautiful weather and there were probably over a hundred surfers along the entire four mile stretch of beach enjoying the clean, chest to head high peaks. Looking at the scene, it was as if the oil spill had never even happened.

I did notice a swath of black sand around Taraval Street that had a strange chemical sparkle to it. But, honestly, the black sooty sand has been a ubiquitous sight out at Ocean Beach ever since I was a kid. To my recollection, OB has always been a partially black sand beach, and not because of any nearby volcanic lava flows.

The reality is that Ocean Beach has long been a dirty beach. It’s not featured in any calendars and people don’t send you postcards from OB. It’s an urban beach marked by rusted out trash cans, eroding sea walls covered in graffiti, an assortment of trash — mostly plastics and packaging — scattered along the sand, and homeless folks camped out with their shopping carts in the dunes.

Ah, home sweet home. Might as well go for a surf, I thought. The beach is probably cleaner right now than your average day during a wet winter, when all the runoff from the city streets comes washing down the storm drains and into the ocean.

I was headed back to my car, determined to suit up and try my hand at some of the scattered offshore peaks, when I came upon a sign posted on the beach warning the public that it uses the beach at its own risk. Just then the names of toxic chemicals and heavy metals found in bunker fuel went flashing through my brain: sulfur, benzene, toluene, xylene. I began to imagine thousands of tiny globules of toxic bunker fuel oil that were too small to see with the naked eye but remained floating around in the water, sticking to my skin and embedding themselves in my cell walls.

Call me paranoid, but suddenly the waves didn’t seem that good. In fact, they didn’t even seem worth the trouble of paddling out. Thanks to dubious water quality, my standards have never been higher.

• Help clean up Ocean Beach with the John Butler Trio! Save The Bay and the Surfrider Foundation are hosting a trash cleanup at Ocean Beach in San Francisco on Sunday, December 2 from 10 a.m. to noon, followed by an outdoor concert with Brett Dennen and John Butler of the John Butler Trio. Save The Bay is looking for energetic and capable volunteers to help pick up garbage and debris at this popular San Francisco beach and then be rewarded by the upbeat sounds of two great musicians. While the event is free, registration is required to help plan supplies. Contact Jennie Pardi at bayevents@saveSFbay.org or call (510) 452.9261 x119.

Kill the Spill volunteers get to work at Ocean Beach in the days immediately following the Cosco Busan oil spill. photo: Sara Butorac

• Kill the Spill, the grassroots cleanup campaign that formed in response to the San Francisco oil spill and lack of an official effort to cleannup Ocean Beach, is holding a volunteer appreciation night in conjunction with Zuna Surf. Head on down to The Sports Basement in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill (1590 Bryant St. @ 15th St.) on Wednesday, December 5 for live music, beer, free grinds and 15% off everything in the store from 6 to 8 pm. Then at 8:15 pm enjoy a surf movie double feature (titles TBA). Admission to The Sports Basement is free and movie admission is TBA. Check out zunasurf.com for more info.

One week after a cargo ship rammed the base of a Bay Bridge tower, spilling 58,000 gallons of fuel into San Francisco Bay and fouling beaches in Marin, San Francisco and Pacifica, the city finally closed off Ocean Beach to the public. At this point nobody is even allowed to walk on the beach, much less go in the water. All the entrances are fenced off and there are CalTrans signs at the parking lots notifying the public that the beach is closed. The entrances to OB are fenced off with signs stating the beach is toxic to both people and pets. There are official cleannup crews in biohazard space suits trying to clean up the gobs of oil.

Here’s a first-hand account of just how bad things are at the beach from O.B. local Johnny Irwin:

The SF oil spill happened on Wednesday and I was out surfing that day. During the high tide, all the oil remained in the Bay, but when the tide dropped real low in the afternoon, that’s when it all sucked out of the Bay and you’d see chunks of oil like the size of a sandollar floating around.

At low tide, that’s when it’s the worst. My hands and board got oil all over them. That’s how it’s been Thursday thru the weekend. At low tide the oil comes in chunks and patches. Fort Point is totally closed off. You’re not supposed to surf it. Some guy was surfing out there on Wednesday right when the spill happened and didn’t even know about it until he was quickly covered with black stuff. He had to be decontaminated by professionals.

It’s pretty crazy. I surfed Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday. I haven’t had any bad reactions aside from a slippery deck. But I really try not to swallow any water. Officially the beaches are closed, but nobody is going to stop you from surfing (This has since changed, see above). Slowly the oil is making its way north and south. I’ve heard it’s washing ashore up at Stinson and down in Pacifica. It’s tragic. Lots of animals are dying. It’s equally as bad everywhere along the beach. I’ve been surfing at Kelly’s and the end of Lincoln and it’s the same. I hear it’s just as bad down at Sloat. As the tide drops, it just drifts in everywhere.

Check The Green Room column in this Sunday’s Sentinel sports section for an update on how the oil spill is affecting surfing beaches in the city, how surfers/activists are organizing to clean up the beaches, and if/when/how much oil we can expect to wash up on SC county beaches.

Kill the Spill blogspot

Surfrider San Francisco

Zunasurf oil spill blogspot

Here’s the surf column from last Sunday on the intense red tides we’ve been seeing around Monterey Bay. It never got webbed properly on the Sentinel’s homepage…

Wondering what’s up with that strange red hue in the water lately? At many surf spots around Monterey Bay it looks as though King Neptune uncorked a big bottle of Merlot and got a little sloppy while pouring out drinks.

Actually, the murky reddish brown water that surfers up and down the coast have been splashing around in for the past couple weeks is the result of an algal bloom, commonly referred to as “red tide.” Red tides are caused by a rapid increase and accumulation of dinoflagellates, a group of microscopic algae floating around the ocean also known as phytoplankton. These tiny, single-celled plants are subject to annual cycles of rapid growth and decay and their seasonal population explosions can create such a density of these little buggers—literally millions—that they actually appear as a red or darkish brown cloud in the water near shore.

According to John Ryan, an oceanographer for the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) who’s been studying red tides for over five years, algal blooms are a natural phenomenon occurring all over the world, from the Arctic to the tropics.
“We have a few species that are all blooming here,” Ryan said. “We often have red tides in the bay, so it’s not unusual.”

Just like house plants, phytoplankton need nutrients, light and a specific temperature range to grow well. A number of marine conditions can set off a bloom event, including wind-generated upwelling of colder, nutrient-rich water from the deep and the runoff from agricultural fertilizers in our coastal waterways. It’s hard to pinpoint the cause of a particular bloom, and once a bloom starts, it often breaks up into patches and becomes more pronounced at some beaches.

Along the California coast, the most common times for phytoplankton blooms are in the spring and summer, after winter storms have mixed nutrients into the ocean’s warmer surface layer and the amount of solar energy from daylight is on the rise. But it’s not that uncommon to see a red tide in late October or even early November, according to Ryan

“We’ve seen it before,” he said. “It would be more odd if we were seeing this bloom in December or January.”

What some surfers really want to know, however, is whether being out in the water during a red tide poses any health risks.

A few of the dinoflagellate species that can cause red tide blooms also produce natural toxins. These are the same toxins responsible for the seasonal quarantines in California on mussels and other shellfish.

Consuming shellfish that have concentrated levels of toxins because of filtering their food from the seawater can indeed be fatal, but, according to Ryan, the toxins don’t pose a serious threat to surfers or swimmers floating around in the water.

“Even if you do gulp a little sea water during a bad wipeout, you’re not going to ingest enough toxin from the water to hurt you,” Ryan said.

However, the high levels of associated microbes that are found in these slimy, dense blooms can create a higher risk of bacterial infection.

“If you’re in the bloom, it’s not just phytoplankton,” Ryan said. “There are a whole bunch of other microbes that thrive in that bloom. Exactly what those microbes are in each particular plume we don’t know … It’s quite a soup.

“In terms of impacting people, those bacteria could cause infection if somebody gets sea water plunged up into their sinuses.”

Getting sea water up your nose is always possible when out surfing — that’s already a foregone conclusion for this surfer. So, if you have any open cuts or feel like your immune system is down, think twice before paddling out into a particularly dense patch of cloudy red tide, even if a perfect peak does happen to be peeling through it.

Besides, the view from inside the barrel always looks better when you’re surrounded by deep blue instead of rusty red.

Got a surf story? Contact Leo Maxam at leomaxam@yahoo.com.

Man, am I glad to be back in the water. It seems like the waves have been good since the end of September and now we get a macking south swell in November?! Life is good for a Nor-Cal surfer.

It’s hard to believe, but in late September I was land locked for over two weeks after getting injured while out surfing. On a high tide day out at the Lane, with a small long period south swell coming from a steep angle, I managed to tag the cliff while surfing the Slot. While checking it, the lineup appeared flat for the most part, but occasionally a fun looking, chest high wave would crack just behind the cliff and reel through the Slot before quickly petering out. I decided to go get wet simply because not a soul was out–probably a good sign the tide was too high.

After teasing the barnacle and mussel covered cliffs on my first two takeoffs and pumping from out of the corner to clear the cliff, a real backwashy bucking bronco of a little wave rolled through. I could tell it was coming from a bad angle, hugging the cliff too close and breaking more into it than wrapping around it, but I tried to go anyway. End result: I got caught in the lip trying to pump past the section, and the next thing I knew I was getting tossed around underwater and then SLAM! my left side was smashed against the cliff like a ragdoll.

Peeling off my wetsuit back on shore, my fears were confirmed when I saw a deep bleeding gash going into my hip with plenty of blood and stringy white stuff pouring out. I washed it off as best as I could at the shower and drove myself to the Westside clinic.

The wound required five stitches. My entire side was black and blue for a week and it hurt to walk for about the same amount of time. After the doctor had stitched me up, she told me that she had seen a number of surfers coming in recently with bad staph infections. She said she was alarmed at the number of cases of methicilin resistant staph infections afflicting surfers.

Even though I rinsed my wound with fresh water immediately after it happened and then went straight to the hospital within 45 minutes where it was professionally cleaned and stitched up, the doctor was so concerned about staph infection she wanted to prescribe me antibiotics right off the bat. I declined to take the antibiotics (I don’t like to take them unless absolutely necessary) and swore to her that I would be religious about keeping the wound clean and changing my bandages. She told me to return to urgent care immediately if I noticed any signs of infection (e.g. inflammation, pus or swelling).

In an interview in Transworld Surf magazine, Dr. Stuart Watson, the official doctor to the Globe WCT Fiji explains that:

“Staph, or staphylococcus, is the name given to a clan of single-celled bacteria that can cause disease in humans and other animals. It most commonly attacks surfers through fin chops or reef grazes, causing infected cuts, which oftentimes lead to septicemia (blood poisoning) and, fairly rapidly, death-if your immune system doesn’t mount a quick and effective response.”

MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is on the rise in California’s ocean waters. When recognized and treated early, it’s not serious but if not treated at the first signs it can spread and become life threatening.

The particularly nasty thing about this strain of staph bacteria is its resistance to most antibiotics, with a couple of exceptions. It can require IV treatment by potentially toxic antibiotics and other newer, more experimental drugs. It can spread to other organ systems and lead to septic (infectious) shock, stroke and loss of cardiac, kidney and other functions.

I’m sure most of you have probably heard about pro surfer Timmy Turner (above) who made a miraculous recovery from a staph infection that nearly killed him. It’s still unclear how Turner got the infection, it could have originated from his tow-surfing trip to Baja in wintertime runoff water, he could have contracted the bacteria a year earlier while going feral in Indonesia, or even just surfing at his home break, the notoriously dirty water of Huntington Beach. But in December of 2005, when Turner returned from his Mexico surf trip, he had to be admitted to the hospital with a 106.5 degree fever, a temperature high enough to kill most people. He spent a month in the intensive-care unit at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach and had to undergo two brain surgeries. During one of the surgeries, doctors removed about half of his skull due to the infection. He had to wear a helmet until it was replaced with synthetic bone during yet another brain surgery. At his worst point, Turner had lost 40 pounds.

Fortunately, Turner found the best medical care in the nick of time and was strong enough to fight off the infection attacking his brain. He began surfing again and recently made a triumphant return to Indo scoring a few mag shots and securing his sponsorship with Quiksilver.

Unfortunately, the waters around Santa Cruz are monitored for fecal contaminants (coliform bacteria) but not tested for staph bacteria.

The signs of staph attack include: local redness, local swelling and pain, pus formation, red lines traveling up from the infected area, fever and feeling unwell, swollen or tender lymph glands upstream from the area, especially in the groin or under the arms.

Here are some simple steps from Dr. Watson to help prevent Staph infection:
1. Shower regularly and keep clean. Lowering your bacterial and fungal skin population will make you smell better too.
2. Eat and sleep well and keep fit to boost the immune system.
3. Don’t overtrain, get too tired, or surf when you are sick.
4. Don’t surf in sewage!
5. Clean and remove sand, coral, and other foreign material from fresh cuts and scrapes.
6. Use clean or preferably sterile packaged gauze with betadine. Also, 100-percent tea tree (melaleuca) oil is a good, skin-friendly, and safe substitute (or use lime juice if you are desperate and enjoy pain).
7. Protect cuts and grazes with waterproof sterile dressings like Duoderm and Tegaderm.
8. Don’t keep surfing with open wounds, especially in the tropics.
9. See a doctor pronto if you develop signs of infection or have a deep laceration (gash) that may require stitches or staples.

In his Transworld interview, doctor Watson goes on to say that “most of the Top 44 surfers in the world currently have, or in the past have had a staph infection and all of them will have a horror story for you. While a small reef cut may not be a big deal to you at the time, down the road, it can ruin your life, so don’t mess with staph.”

I’m curious to know of any local surfers out there that have contracted staff and believe it was the result of surfing in dirty water. If you or someone you know has any info please email me and let me know when it happened, where you were surfing, and what the conditions were (recent rains, near a rivermouth or sewer outfall, etc.). Thanks, and keep it clean.

Water quality links:

San Francisco beaches

Santa Cruz beaches