Under a glaring April sun, perspiring crews at the Point Loma sportfishing landings work on the boats that line the waterfront, painting hulls, sanding decks and making repairs to ready the fleet for the upcoming season.

But when 83-year-old Bill Poole sees them, he gets antsy. If he were still captaining a sportfishing boat, he says, he wouldn’t be wasting time on the docks.

“We’ve had great weather for weeks, and nobody’s going out,” he grouses. “Somebody’s got to get the season started. Somebody’s got to go catch some fish. As I’ve always said: Fishermen don’t catch fish; fish catch fishermen.”

Poole’s get-out-and-fish spirit — and his firm belief that when you catch fish and the word spreads, anglers will come — has made him a giant in the sportfishing business, especially in San Diego, home of one of the world’s largest sportfishing fleets.

For more than half a century, he has pushed the limits, building bigger and better boats and motoring anglers farther and farther out to sea. It’s a legacy that has led many to regard him as Southern California’s godfather of saltwater sportfishing.

“He’s one of the real pioneers,” says Bob Fletcher, president of the Sportfishing Assn. of California. “It was always Bill Poole to make the next step.”

Poole, a tanned man with strong arms and a head of thick gray hair, isn’t one to discuss the pleasures of sportfishing. Either you get it or you don’t. But he’s sensitive to changes he has seen on the ocean that has provided him with an ample livelihood. He agrees with regulations designed to protect species from overfishing.

“We hurt the black sea bass years ago when we fished them real heavy,” he says. “We didn’t realize what we were doing.”

Poole doesn’t spend as much time on the water as he once did, but he still oversees his businesses, including Fisherman’s Landing in Point Loma and Marina Cortez on Harbor Island, where he is building a 100-suite business hotel. He also owns the Excel, a $3.2-million long-range sportfishing boat that recently returned from a record-setting trip off Mexico with 41 tuna, each weighing more than 200 pounds.

When he’s not working, he’s fishing his 1,000-acre ranch in Montana or hunting big game in Iran, Pakistan, Namibia or Mongolia. For Poole, such adventures are the payoff for the decades he spent building a thriving business.

Poole’s father, Herb, taught him to fish off Long Beach when he was 6 years old. Herb Poole owned a truck and hauled fuel for Signal Oil, moving the family up and down the California coast over the years following the work. When Poole was 9, he found his niche. He’d been fishing with his uncle from Oceanside Pier, reeling in more corvina and perch than anyone out there, when an envious angler asked what his secret was.

“Sand crabs,” Poole said.

“Where’d you buy them?” the man asked.

“I didn’t buy them,” Poole said. “But I’m selling them for 50 cents a dozen.”

So began his career. He went on to sell countless sand crabs. He also sold calico bass, and any other fish he caught, to his grandfather, who owned half a dozen butcher shops in north San Diego County.

But Poole’s serious entry into the sportfishing business came in 1946, at age 22, when he returned from military service in the Navy Air Corps and bought a 125-foot sailboat with his father. The two anchored the boat several miles off Oceanside and transformed it into a fishing barge, shuttling anglers back and forth from the pier.

Two years later, Poole and his father moved south to San Diego and invested a little more than $8,000 in a beat-up 50-foot motorboat that could reach the Coronados Islands on day trips.

Shortly after that he bought the Polaris, a 62-foot Navy boat that he quickly refurbished.

From April to September, Poole captained the boat day after day, taking anglers out in search of yellowtail, sea bass, albacore or whatever else happened to be biting, competing with more than a dozen other boats for passengers.

“For five months we beat our brains out, working around the clock,” Poole says. “You’d kiss your wife hello and goodbye at the same time.”

Back then, a chalkboard posted at the landing tracked the number of fish caught daily on each boat. Anglers heading out often checked the board, so competition was fierce. Fistfights occasionally broke out when a skipper was suspected of inflating his numbers. Poole says he never exaggerated his take, but worked hard to keep Polaris near the top.

“When we got our fanny kicked,” Poole recalls, “I’d go down to the dock, and the guys would give me a hard time: ‘The big green racer fell off today, huh?’ ”

When business fell off for other sportfishing boats between September and April, Poole began venturing farther out, chasing big fish such as bluefin tuna and luring anglers who would pay to join him. In 1951 he took his first payload to Guadalupe Island, 150 miles off Baja. It took him 24 hours to get there. “We felt we were at the end of the world,” he says.

But there was just one problem. At the time, the Coast Guard required sportfishing boats to stay within 50 miles of the nearest port. Legally Poole shouldn’t have gone that far south. So he took a low-key approach to the trips, spreading word quietly to regular customers. He eventually was caught and fined, but soon after, restrictions were eased.

In the mid-1960s the Coast Guard began to allow larger engines in sportfishing boats (until then, most boats were conversions) and Poole and others began commissioning more specialized boats with plush sleeping quarters, powerful engines and improved storage for bait and fuel.

In 1973 Poole launched his own boatbuilding company which soon built the 112-foot Royal Polaris, at the time was the world’s largest sportfishing boat. It allowed him to offer trips to Alijos Rocks, 500 miles south of San Diego, and Hurricane Bank off Cabo San Lucas. Today these destinations are popular fishing spots, but when Poole first fished them, they were little-known.

On a recent afternoon at his Point Loma home, Poole strolls among the nearly 200 animals he has bagged in three spacious trophy rooms. On one wall, a 140-pound leopard crouches on a branch, as if eyeing its prey. Nearby, a 9 1/2-foot brown bear stands on its hind legs. But there are some prize marine catches too. The head of a 922-pound marlin he reeled in off the Great Barrier Reef gazes out from one wall. And nearby is the tail of a 341-pound halibut.

“I caught that one off Alaska,” he says, smiling. “At the time, it was near the world record.”

Photo by moonjazz via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

As I studied the 5-foot-tall artificial wave known as the FlowRider outside San Diego’s Wave House Athletic Club, I thought: Riding this will be too easy. I will rip and tear this wave to smithereens. I will carve wicked turns and school all the kooks around me in the lost art of shredding.

Sure, I’d just signed a form stating that “riding may result in the flow of water picking you up and pitching you head-over-heels.” And yes, one veteran rider with a substantial lip piercing had warned, “It’s tougher than it looks.” But over the last decade I’d surfed tasty waves from Central America to Indonesia. How hard could riding a fake wave be?

As a dozen spectators, five FlowBoarders and a lifeguard looked on, I stepped onto a board at the edge of the swimming-pool-sized, foam-padded box and pushed myself onto the stationary wave. I crouched low, feeling a rush of white water under me. Then, as I was about to rip my first turn, I fell flat on my back. In a blur, I shot up the wave and straight into a foam wall, ejected. It was I who’d been schooled.

Riding the FlowRider is indeed harder than it looks. The machine at Mission Beach’s Belmont Park, one of nearly 50 of varying sizes around the world, shoots a thin layer of water over an incline composed of taut fabric. The resulting wave can be ridden prone on a bodyboard, which is the easiest way, or standing on a foam-padded fiberglass board roughly the shape of a big skateboard. Up to 10 riders take turns at a time.

A small cadre of hard-core stand-up enthusiasts has evolved around the machines, including snowboarders and wakeboarders, surfers and skateboarders. Most beginners need at least a few hours of wipeouts before they begin to feel proficient. Even professional surfers can struggle to catch on. The bottom is soft, but riders sometimes fall hard, emerging with bumps and strains.

“It’s unlike anything you’ve ever done,” says Brian Crecely, 20, who rides the wave five days a week. “It’s addictive.”

On its face, the idea of building artificial wave machines located only steps away from real waves sounds preposterous. Charging $20 or more an hour to ride them recalls the old joke about selling refrigerators to Eskimos.

The scene around the FlowRider is surreal. Tourists while away their time watching riders on the fake wave, ignoring surfers gliding across real waves nearby. It’s only a matter of time before a graduate student works up a doctoral thesis on the phenomenon: “Post-Modern Recreation and Meta-Surfing in the Age of NutraSweet.”

The irony isn’t lost on the wave’s creator.

“It’s totally absurd,” admits Thomas J. Lochtefeld, 52, chuckling.

A die-hard La Jolla surfer who has ridden some of the globe’s best breaks, Lochtefeld co-founded the Raging Waters theme parks in 1983. After he left as chief executive, he saw the potential for a wave attraction and soon began dragging hoses into his jumbo bathtub to experiment with designs.

“My wife thought I was nuts,” he says.

He knew he’d have to build gentle waves for families, but the surfer in him yearned to create powerful waves that put the wimpy swells found in many wave pools to shame. Thus, the FlowRider was born. And next month, it will have a bigger, meaner cousin: Bruticus Maximus.

On June 16, the $2-million Bruticus Maximus machine, which spent several years touring the world, will open adjacent to the Mission Beach boardwalk, complete with concert-style sound and lighting effects. Rivaled only by a sister machine in Durban, South Africa, Bruticus Maximus offers a free-standing wave 9 feet tall that enables riders to get completely covered by the curl — the Holy Grail of surfing. Compared with the smaller FlowRider, which offers a more gentle Waikiki-style wave, Bruticus Maximus is the Banzai Pipeline.

Strolling onto the oceanfront site where the wave’s framework is rising, Lochtefeld is equal parts mad scientist, giddy surfer and shrewd entrepreneur. He points to the machine’s water pumps, discussing “force potential” and “super critical sheet flow.” He crouches low where the curl will form, his eyes gleaming. Then he looks out at the spectator area, with its thatched-roof bar and hanging hammocks, and invokes the importance of “ancillary revenue models.”

With Bruticus Maximus and its commercial spectator zone, Lochtefeld has tried to package the California dream in a lot the size of a football field. If it’s profitable, he says, he’ll export similar operations to spots around the globe, including Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

He’ll get his first indication during the opening festivities next month, when veteran riders will perform dazzling flips and spins. I’ll be watching from the bar, a margarita in hand, nursing my bruised ego.

Photo by derekadk via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

By Jim Benning
The Los Angeles Times Magazine

To Pierce Flynn, for whom surfing is nothing less than a form of prayer, the rise overlooking Trestles is sacred. Early most mornings, he pedals through empty San Clemente streets, surfboard riding shotgun on his mountain bike, to this bluff above one of California’s most popular surf spots. On days with curling waves, he’ll cruise down the dirt trail, tug on his wet suit, paddle out and picture in the distance the big change about to unfold here. Soon, despite the intense lobbying of Flynn and his flock at the Surfrider Foundation, the Marine Corps will build housing on this chunk of coast within Camp Pendleton. “Our kids won’t be able to look down and see the waves breaking,” Flynn says. “It’s sad.”

In Flynn’s world, the act of surfing is linked to the battle to preserve beach access, clean ocean water and unspoiled coastlines. Waves, this mellow Southern California native will tell you, deserve the same protective status as gnatcatchers and condors. To promote this agenda, Surfrider practices a brand of environmentalism that Flynn calls “surfer-bohemian-hip.” It’s a term that also describes Flynn–a tan, youthful 44-year-old PhD who thwacks around the small nonprofit’s San Clemente headquarters in flip-flops and counts among his passions Zen and traveling by plane, boat and skiff to hell-and-gone surf breaks around the world.

These days, Surfrider is riding a swell into the mainstream, and Flynn is out front on the nose. Propelled by recent victories against polluters, Surfrider, now going on 15, has won the attention of many government and industrial leaders on the both coasts. Despite having taken some media hits for playing loose with the facts, Flynn has delivered Surfrider’s gospel to America’s masses. He has courted the support of–and surfed with–such recording artists as Chris Isaak and Eddie Vedder. Pearl Jam’s front man donated cash as well as tracks for one of the CDs that Flynn co-produced as fund-raisers. And Flynn helped smooth-talk MTV into airing a short video that coolly spelled out Surfrider’s causes.

All this hype has fueled a hint of fear that the organization is straying from its core, surf-inspired mission. But even the grumblers concede that Flynn is a charismatic, brainy, media-savvy leader, equally at home in the boardroom and on the ocean. Put him in front of a TV camera and he really turns it on. Says Steve Barilotti, a Surfrider member who writes a monthly column about the environment for Surfer magazine: “He’s the master of the sound bite.”

Surfrider’s headquarters consumes part of the second floor of a rustic three-story office building about a mile from the San Clemente shoreline. A stack of surf magazines teeters near the front door. Hanging surfboards cover one wall. Flynn, who moved around as a kid, living with his doctor parents in Westwood, Redlands and San Bernardino, recalls how he got to Surfrider in 1992. The organization had just won a major settlement from two Humboldt County pulp mill operators that had been dumping millions of gallons of untreated waste into the ocean each day. The group tapped Flynn, then a communications consultant, in part to relieve internal squabbling over how to spend a $300,000 windfall in legal fees from the settlement. He loved it. “I thought, this is a real good vehicle for me,” he recalls. “I can serve and give back. It was very meaningful.”

Drawing on his background in media relations and academia–he has a doctorate in ethno-methodology, or the study of knowledge, from UC San Diego–Flynn made friends quickly. In three years, he made the leap from communications manager to executive director, which pays $65,000 a year, learning about the ocean as he went. He met his fiancee, coastal scientist Melissa Gordon, at a meeting in Washington, D.C.; their wedding is next Sunday.

Flynn spends much of his time talking on the telephone to Surfrider constituents, discussing policy with board members and brainstorming PR schemes with record producers and entertainers. (His Rolodex includes Woody Harrelson and Tom Hanks.) In the afternoon, he might meet with a geographer or an oceanographer for a briefing on a coastal issues, then finalize a grant application. Flynn moves easily from the role of inspirational leader to stoked surfer. “We want to reinvent democracy,” he’ll say one minute. Then, the next: “We receive so many bitchin’ letters.”

Flynn wants the organization to become more sophisticated. “We’re probably coming into young adulthood from adolescence,” he says. “I’m trying to be a maturing agent.” His goals include adding to the membership of 25,000 and finding ways to make the chapters more self-reliant. “We’ve been reactive, putting out environmental fires,” he says. “Now we need to look ahead.”

While organizations such as the American Oceans Campaign and the Center for Marine Conservation focus on a broad array of issues involving the ocean, Surfrider homes in on the coastal zone, a narrow strip that begins 10 miles inland and extends three miles to sea. Its tactics are decidedly nonmilitant.

Since winning the second-largest settlement in history in Humboldt County, under the federal Clean Water Act, Surfrider has kept up the heat. Its lobbying efforts led to a finding from the California Coastal Commission that a rock groin built by Chevron Corp. in El Segundo had damaged the surf break. For the first time, some say, the government has recognized waves as a natural resource. All of this has been accomplished without loads of money, on an annual operating budget of about $1 million. Flynn attributes the organization’s impact to its nearly 40 grass-roots chapters–small but devoted bands in the United States and abroad that pick up trash, test ocean water for contaminants and fight developments they deem harmful. Of Surfrider’s membership, a “gnarly” 10%, including lawyers and scientists, are hard-core volunteers; the remainder are less active supporters.

But Surfrider has failed to stop development of the bluff overlooking Trestles, a popular surf spot near San Clemente. Citing housing shortage, the Marines in 1996 announced plans to build more than 100 units for junior officers on the Camp Pendleton site. Surfrider filed suit to kill the project, arguing that it would damage wetlands. Flynn repeatedly described the area as “the Yosemite of surfing.” Although the California Coastal Commission first sided with the surfers, it reversed itself, finding that the Marines had satisfied state environmental requirements and had explored alternative locations. Surfrider concedes that its appeal also may fail.

Flynn has a knack for enlisting the aid of rock stars. Besides Vedder and Isaak, dozens have contributed to two Surfrider benefit albums. Over the years, he has surfed with Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction and Beach Boys member Bruce Johnston. When Pearl Jam rolled into San Diego several years ago, Flynn paddled out at Pacific Beach with Vedder, who would eventually give more than $50,000 to Surfrider. Over breakfast later, “we just brainstormed about how we could affect popular culture,” Flynn says. “We plotted out the ‘MOM’ albums.”

“MOM,” or “Music for Our Mother Ocean,” is the title of two albums that since 1996 have raised nearly $400,000 for Surfrider. A third is in the works. Help on those projects also came from another Flynn surfing buddy: Surfdog Records owner Dave Kaplan. The San Diego producer often has joined Flynn on trips to meet with musicians. “It’s very difficult for an outsider who hasn’t been around music to be comfortable speaking to musicians,” Kaplan says. Not so with Flynn. When the Surfrider leader made his pitch to the musicians, Kaplan recalls, “it was almost a slam dunk. He’s oozing with spirituality and goodness.”

Surfrider’s rock ‘n’ roll approach to coastal activism has won the organization many fans, including Sierra Club board member and former president Adam Werbach, who complains that environmentalism is frequently a grim practice. But Surfrider, he says, knows how to have fun. “It’s lively, full of music and kick-ass,” he says. And sometimes, as Werbach learned, it can be dangerous. After paddling into big surf with Flynn and other members at a rally in support of the Clean Water Act a while back, the beginning surfer insisted on catching a wave–against Flynn’s advice. Werbach wiped out badly and washed onto the sand with a bloody nose. “It was one of the best days of my life,” Werbach recalls, laughing. “I joined Surfrider the next day.”

But as Surfrider becomes more accessible to the mainstream, it has left some members wary. Founder Glenn Hening says Surfrider is backsliding from its original purpose. “The idea was to really say something serious about the values of serious surfing as it benefits our society,” he says. Hening wanted to introduce surfing to inner-city children. But with the passing of time, he says, the group has become less concerned with riding waves.

Hening was particularly annoyed recently when Surfrider’s 15-member board of directors voted to remove a line in the group’s mission statement calling for the “enhancement” of surfing spots, which could mean using sand bags to create new wave breaks. Some in the group felt the move contradicted the group’s goal of preserving wild beaches. Flynn believes that more research needs to be done. Hening’s mind is made up. He still supports Surfrider–he recently helped raise $7,000 for the Santa Barbara and Ventura chapters. But to him, the vote exemplified Surfrider’s push toward the mainstream.

Flynn shrugs off the criticism. He’s used to hearing complaints about the group’s vision and educational materials. Some observers say Surfrider at times overstates health threats posed to swimmers and surfers. And Surfer magazine recently chided Surfrider over a press release calling the embattled Trestles one of the 10 best surfing spots in the world. “I guess that is a relative call,” Flynn says. “We don’t say we’re perfect, but we’re working to be perfect.”

The group’s commitment to protecting and restoring beaches is stronger than ever, Flynn says. Surfrider’s Blue Water Task Force program, which includes storm-drain stenciling to warn people against dumping pollutants, as well as water testing to monitor quality, has been widely praised. Republican Congressman Brian P. Bilbray of San Diego recently co-authored a bill to establish a national ocean-water quality standard, which, he says, was inspired partly by Surfrider’s activism. And the group is documenting physical characteristics of beaches around the country to help gauge changes along coastlines. “This is a first-of-its-kind grass-roots beach-mapping program,” Flynn says. “We’re arming the volunteers.”

Flynn, as part of that effort, is developing a program to teach the volunteers skills such as campaign planning, media relations and fund-raising. The program will lead to a greater show of force around the country, Flynn says. “These people are getting positively politicized.”

Another Flynn goal, doubling Surfrider’s membership over the next few years, might be hard to achieve. The surfer-bohemian mind set is antithetical to joining, some argue. “We used to joke that trying to organize surfers is like trying to herd cats,” chuckles former board member Ward Smith. Flynn says that although that may be true, Surfrider will sign up anyone who enjoys swimming at their local beach–or even carving up epic waves faraway, as he did recently. He looks across his desk and grins.

“Did you see it?” he asks, referring to a photograph of him in the curl of a Fijian wave on Surfrider’s Web site, http://www.surfrider.org. “That was the best barrel I’ve had in my life. I free-fell down the face and pulled into the pipe,” he says. He gestures wildly, forming wave shapes with his hands, struggling to describe the indescribable. “I remember the sound, the vortex. It was an awesome experience. I close my eyes and can feel the thing.”

Flynn leans back in his chair and shuts his eyes. “The longer you live, the more you realize that a {good} swell is a very rare and precious thing,” he says. “You don’t want to miss that.”

Photo by colmsurf via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

SINCE THE dawn of the shortboard, surfers have launched themselves off waves–inspiring later generations of skateboarders and snowboarders to violate a little airspace of their own. And while waveriders eventually went the way of scale–pursuing ever-bigger, meaner, gut-wrenching faces–the landlocked Young Turks perfected style, in the form of spectator-friendly (and, conveniently, sponsor-friendly) acrobatics. It was only a matter of time before the circle closed.

“People want to see blood and guts, and surfers are really going for it,” says professional surfer Jason “Ratboy” Collins, 26, a leading proponent of “progressive surfing” –a mutant derivative of the sport in which riders take off the lips of waves, pull flips, and attempt action-packed, generally whacked-out maneuvers straight from the half-pipe songbook. “It’s pretty cool to watch.”

Indeed. At Steamer Lane in Santa Cruz and Rocky Point in Hawaii, among other breaks, progressive surfers are now launching as high as eight feet (no kite strings attached), pulling airs, alley-oops, and extraordinarily difficult rodeo flips. Surfers debate when this new school took hold — some credit a mid-1990s Kelly Slater — but most agree that only recently has progressive surfing really taken on a life of its own. After years of complaints from pro surfers, the Association of Surfing Professionals, the sport’s rulemaking body, voted last year to tweak its traditional judging criteria to reward more cutting-edge maneuvers. The now five-year-running “Airshow” tour will spotlight the sickest moves at Southern California’s Salt Creek, April 18 to 22. “Surfing is one of those cool things that keeps evolving,” explains ASP board member Ian Cairns. “It’s the continuum of change.”

Photo by Lanpernas 2.0 via Flickr, (Creative Commons).