James Laird - Adventures at the Lark Ellen Home - Page 2

We spent a lot of summer days at the beach along Santa Monica if someone was available to drive the stake bed truck. Usually the super's son or the coach drove. Just the older kids got to go and would load up in the back with sack lunches and off we would go. Usually it was just at the end of the houses north of the pier at the end of Sunset Canyon near where Marion Davis had her beach house. You could only walk up the beach toward the pier for a short way as several clubs had built walls out into the water to stop the sand from moving and they would not let you around the upper end on their property.

When we learned to swim we went around the outer end if the waves were not too big. There were lots of body surfers then before they invented short light weight surf boards) when the waves were just right. It took me quite a while to get the hang of doing it. Some kid came up with the idea of using a piece of wood held out in front of you to help catch the waves after it broke. This worked well and we were soon getting some nice long rides. Learning to catch a wave as it broke was another story. You were usually standing in water that would be over your head as the swells came in, and you learned to push up from the bottom and float up with the rising water and hold your breath if you sank down until you could push up from the bottom to get you head above the water again.

With a board you could not paddle very well so timing was critical. If you missed judged the wave it would send you tumbling to the bottom. If in doubt let go of the board as you could always get it back when it ended up on the beach. You soon learned to dive up through the breaking wave curl or down under the bottom either one would stop you from being tumbled around in the break and maybe held on the bottom for what seemed forever. We started out using boards about the size of the end of an apple box. Sometimes you could not find a piece that big so you learned to use smaller and smaller ones until you did not need any at all except when the waves were small and weak.