Spot Check: Trestles, San Clemente
All you need to know, and a lot you don't, about the location for tomorrow's WSL Finals.
Trestles is a collection of waves located in California’s San Onofre State Park. Its best wave, Lowers, has become a byword for performance surfing, and tomorrow will host the Lexus WSL Finals, the World Title showdown.
It is an A-Frame right and left that walls for 200 yards over a sand and rivermouth cobblestone rock, with a mix of pace, crumbly lip, perfect wave pitch and forgivable power that make most surfers feel like they are surfing like Kelly Slater. Of course, one can only imagine what Kelly Slater must feel like when he surfs the place. Probably like Kelly Slater.
The wave is prized in California for its quality and consistency. That's because California has very small quantities of both. Because it sucks in any hint of south swell and holds any size, it has become one of California’s prized jewels, like Snoop Dog and fascist social media owners.
But what elevates it to almost mythical status in American surfing is its almost bubble location and rare atmosphere. It is located at the edge of Orange County's suburbia nightmare, an ugly commercialised zone of density and excess unrivalled in the modern world. And that includes Gosford.
And yet Trestles, lying in the protected State Park is a very different experience free of the excess. The locals call it one-and-a-half miles of God's country, with no Maccas, neon piers, hypodermic needles, men in muscle tees, Baywatch lifeguards or the usual bullshit that surrounds the OC’s other waves.
It was first surfed as far back as the 1930s and has been called Trestles since at least 1951, after the wooden trestle bridge (now a concrete viaduct) that surfers had to walk under to reach the beach. Personally, I prefer the name Viaducts, but what are you going to do?
For a place addicted to cars, it is different to most spots in that it takes a bit of effort to surf Trestles. You park at the Cristianitos exit in the State Park and then can either walk, run, crawl, roll, bike, or skate down the trail to the wave, making sure not to be run down by the Amtrak Train as you cross the tracks. More recently e-bikes have become the normal mode of transport, to the point where prominent surfer and Trestles local Tyler Warren recently started to have a petition to have them banned.
"One day they will understand when it’s a 5mph state park speed limit n 11 olds go 20mph on a beach trail n hit old ladies, & there is no open space left in the line up and on the beach. Oh wait were all ready there."
With, or without assistance, people love going to Trestles. It is always crowded during summer, particularly at Lowers. And the rest of the breaks -- Uppers, Middles, Cottons, Churches and everywhere in between, which don’t pack the ego-boosting quality of Lowers, still have their share of hungry groms, competent locals, greedy longboarders and increasing numbers of SUP’ers .
Still, it's possible to get your share of quality waves; the kind where you hit the lip a half dozen times and start to think you're much better than you really are. All of the breaks at Trestles have that magic -- the ability to keep you coming back, the effort of the 20-minute walks, dodging the train and the surfers, being repaid ten times over.
No surprise then that it has become a competition favourite, and host to a World Tour event for the last two decades. Christian Fletcher famously won a Pro Am here in 1989 with his aerials, signalling a new era in surfing.
The wave absolutely perfect for allocating waves of similar shape and size, left and right, time after time. It magnifies imperfection in style but allows sections for the world's best to try stuff they’d only imagined in their, well, imaginations.
“It’s such a high-performance wave and I think everyone acknowledges that,” says Joel Parkinson, “but it’s also a great ‘flow’ wave. It’s a great wave to flow your turns together and choreograph a wave and make it look great from beginning to end.”
Kelly Slater does that quite well, winning his first major pro trophy here and another has won six World Tour events at the break, and the last three in succession.
When you think of a combination of a perfect surfer and a perfect performance wave it’s hard to beat their relationship, though local Griff Colapinto is starting to wrestle the mantle off the GOAT.
Trestles remains one of the waves that most surfers want to surf before they die. The apex of performance in surfing in a part of California is special for so many different reasons. You simply have to walk down the track, sign the guestbook (the quarter mile of graffiti), snaffle a wave and enjoy the ride, live the myth.