The Lucky Fellows to Catch the First Waves at Malibu

First Surfers at Malibu

May Rindge had bigger things to worry about that day in 1926. The owner (actually, they called her “the Queen”) of all coastline from Malibu to the Ventura county line, she sat in her spacious house overlooking a rocky headland where, so a native Chumash Indian song told, “the surf sounds softly.” Ms. Rindge, however, did not. A noisy 17-year court battle with the state of California to keep a public highway from traversing her land — and to maintain Malibu itself as wild and isolated as it was — was just about lost. Her notorious armed cowboys still roamed the ranch on horseback; basically vigilante rent-a-cops, brazen enough to once even give the Los Angeles D.A. himself a glimpse down the barrels of their shotguns. But the private railroad she built to move livestock from Malibu to Ventura country was idled. And that damned highway — and everything it would bring — was coming. An end-of-era gloom must have pervaded the mansion. She probably never even noticed that, just outside her window, a new one was beginning.

Tom Blake, surf pioneer and board innovator — the man many consider the founding practitioner of the “surf lifestyle” — rolled up to the east gate of Rindge’s ranch at Las Flores canyon that day. He was accompanied by fellow surfer, Sam Reid. This seminal event was not as random as it might seem: Blake already knew there was surf breaking on the Queen of Malibu’s property. He’d seen it with his own eyes, in hikes in the overlooking Santa Monica mountains, far above the jurisdiction of May’s gun-toting guards. Just as the bulldozers building the Roosevelt Highway (now known as the PCH) were coming for her land, Blake and Reid had arrived for her waves. They put boards in water and paddled.

The genesis moment of what was to become arguably the premier classic surf spot in North America begins with an appropriately cinematic description: “Visualize, if you can,” Sam Reid recalled years later, “a beautiful September day in California.”

“On this day,” Reid continued, “the first wave was ridden at what was then Malibu Ranch, stretching from Las Flores Canyon to Oxnard, and owned by Samuel K. Rindge. The coast highway was then a two-lane road, dirt most of the way. Tom Blake had stopped by the Santa Monica Swimming Club to pick me up. In those days, cowboys with guns and rifles still rode the Malibu Ranch, and the gate at Las Flores Canyon had a 'Forbidden -- No Trespassing' sign on it. We took our 10' redwoods out of the Essex rumble seat and paddled the mile to a beautiful white crescent-shaped beach that didn't have a foot print on it. No buildings and, of course, no pier! There was no audience but the seagulls."

Tom Blake picks up the story in characteristic, just-the-facts style: "The Malibu Ranch had recently opened-up,” Blake wrote. “Sam and I drove up there. The road was black-topped. I had previously noted surf there. The day we arrived, the waves were about 3' high. The area was deserted except for seagulls and pelicans and the Rindge house. To be the first to ride it, I caught a 3-foot wave. We played around in it for an hour or so. Real exclusive riding."

The deed was done. Blake and Reid both rode varnished flat redwood; Reid’s eventually (lamentably) was covered with fiberglass. You can catch a glimpse of it — a sword pulled from a stone —on display at the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum.You can still catch a reasonable facsimile of Blake’s first wave at Malibu Surfrider Beach, too. The sand isn’t as white as when he and Reid put their first footprints in it. And you probably won’t have that wave to yourself, either. But it still holds up pretty much the way it did for Tom and Sam one beautiful September day in 1926. “Real exclusive riding,” you might say.