Aloha and Welcome to the known beginning of surfing on the Queen of The Coast: Rincon – once known to surfers simply as “Three Mile”.
“My dad used to think I was nuts out there in that cold water, riding those stupid boards. But hell, it gets in your blood -- you know how it is, you just gotta do it. If it’s there, you gotta do it. I’d like to have a dime for every mile I ran up and down this coast looking for waves.”
-- Bill Muller
“You could only catch three or four waves, because it was so big and so hard to get back out... I knew it was a huge swell because I counted 13 breaks from the shore all the way out to the Carpinteria reef. It was the biggest surf any of us had ever been in.”
-- Mike Sturmer
The first inhabitants of the Rincon area were the Chumash, who “had a sizable settlement (called Shuku) at Rincon Point, so it’s likely that their ancestors were the first people to ‘surf’ the Point, riding their sleek plank tomols onto the beach after fishing or trading excursions.” (“Queen of The Coast: A Short History of Rincon Point, 1939-69” by Vince Burns, March 31, 2022)
“These days the Queen of the Coast’s biggest claim to fame belongs to surfing. The northwest swells that wrap around her cobblestone point to form perfect, right-hand peelers have made her arguably the best surf spot in the entire surf-crazed state. But wave riding isn’t the first chapter in Rincon’s story.
“Named ‘La Rinconada’ by a member of De Anza’s 1776 expedition, the point already had served as a Chumash village for thousands of years prior to the arrival of Europeans.
“In 1852, the infamous bandit Joaquin Murrieta buried a treasure near Rincon Creek. Murrieta stashed loot up and down the coast, and rarely was it recovered. But in this case, the son of the man robbed of the jewels successfully unearthed them 34 years later.
“Rincon and the sea cliffs to the south stymied coastal travel for decades. Stagecoach drivers between Santa Barbara and Ventura timed their trips around the tides. A low enough tide provided just enough sand to trot along the beach before rising waters closed access again.
“By the 1880s, the railroad was working its way along the coast. Dynamite blasts carved out a bed for the rail lines along Rincon, but when automobiles arrived on the scene, there was still no place for a roadway connecting Ventura and Carpinteria.
“A wooden causeway over the sand offered a temporary transportation solution. The elevated roadway made of eucalyptus planks opened in 1912, finally offering a route south of Rincon Point. In 1924, the state opened a permanent road after constructing massive seawalls and moving tons and tons of earth to create a bed for the new north-south artery.
“Around that time, an inn operated at the point that was more rowdy brothel than tranquil B&B.
“Carpinteria Valley Museum of History Curator David Griggs says that the inn’s wild history may have been colored in the telling and retelling, but legend has it that the property straddled the county line in a most advantageous way. Santa Barbara County lawmen would show up for a bust, and all the bathtub gin-drinkers would hightail it to the safety of the Ventura County side. The scene switched when the Ventura law showed up.
“By the 1930s, beach cottages had begun to spring up along the periphery of Rincon Point…” (“The Queen Sings Her Secrets,” Lea Boyd, February 4, 2021, Coastalview.com. Article originally was printed in Carpinteria Magazine, Summer Issue, 2016).
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In Doc Ball‘s California Surfriders, 1946, California surf spots in the 1930s -- listed from south-to-north -- went like this: Windansea, San Onofre, Dana Point, Corona del Mar, Long Beach, Palos Verdes, Hermosa Beach, Venice, Malibu, Paradise Point, River Hole (Santa Cruz) and Pedro Valley (south San Francisco). Santa Barbara wasn’t even marked on the surfing map, nor was the area’s prime gem: Rincon.
That’s probably because the foremost of California’s surfers were only surfing between Malibu and Windansea. If they surfed up north, it was on surfari all the way up to the cold waters of Santa Cruz, in the summer, and that was basically to Pleasure Point or the Rivermouth.
Nevertheless, others who got into surfing started hitting the breaks near their homes. The first guys to surf Rincon del Mar, south of Santa Barbara, were prime examples. Coming from the lifeguard tradition, these Rincon pioneers were never amongst the most noted of that era. In terms of historical significance as the first to surf Rincon, however, they stand out in the front line of the many great surfers to ride the waves of Rincon.
Gates Foss (1915-1990) was the first person known to surf Rincon. The point break was originally called “Three Mile,” because it was three miles from the Carpinteria train depot.
“According to his son Bob,” wrote Lori Rafferty in an article entitled “Rincon Memories” for Santa Barbara magazine. “Foss discovered Three Mile driving down the coast from Carpinteria one day in the mid-1930s. It simply looked like a good place to surf.”
John Severson, the founder of Surfer magazine and a surf movie maker of the 1960s, in his book Modern Surfing Around The World (1964) confirms that “Gates Foss was the first local Santa Barbara surfer to ride the Rincon. In the late thirties he rode on planks with Mike Sturmer, Bill Muller, and others.”
“Foss had come out from Arizona to attend Santa Barbara State College,” continued Rafferty. “Gates was the college boy chauffeur for my grandma that I fell in love with,” recalled his widow, the former Isabella Bradbury. “After they were married, Foss worked as a ranger at Gaviota Beach, head lifeguard in Carpinteria, manager of Los Baños Pool in Santa Barbara, and coached at Santa Barbara High School for 25 years.
Bill Muller grew up as a “beach rat“ in Santa Barbara in the 1930s.
“My mom would drop us kids off at the beach in the morning with lunch and not come back to pick us up until late afternoon,” Muller recalled, probably referring to the Santa Barbara beaches close to Stearns Wharf and the harbor area.
“Body surfing in the shore break near the East Beach bathhouse led to a summer job as a lifeguard,” wrote Rafferty, “and Muller remembers the day the city pool, Los Baños, opened in 1938. Through the lifeguarding network, many friendships were formed, and the guys would paddle their rescue paddleboards over to the sandbar [Sandspit] and ride the little waves or use the boards as platforms to dive from for lobster and abalone. Soon enough they were looking for more challenging waves, and they heard about the break at Three Mile from a fellow lifeguard in Carpinteria.”
That Carpinteria lifeguard was most likely Gates Foss. The boards they rode were typical of the day; a mixture of 14-foot plywood decked Tom Blake-style hollow paddleboards and slightly shorter solid redwood surfboards. Of course, it was well before wetsuits.
“Back then,” Bill Muller reminded, “there were no such things as wet suits. What we did when it was really cold was to use navy wool underwear. When you were sitting out on the board and it got real cold, you could take that wool sweatshirt off and wring it out real good and then put it back on, and it felt pretty good. But when you got dumped it felt like you were going to drown, because they were so damn heavy. We would stay out 45 minutes to an hour at a time and then come in and warm up by the fire.”
“My dad used to think I was nuts out there in that cold water, riding those stupid boards,” Bill Muller continued. “But hell, it gets in your blood -- you know how it is, you just gotta do it. If it’s there, you gotta do it. I’d like to have a dime for every mile I ran up and down this coast looking for waves.”
For the next couple of years before World War II, Gates Foss, Mike Sturmer, Bill Muller, and Gene Nagle rode Three Mile “whenever the surf was up.”
“Mike Sturmer lived up on the hill back behind Carpinteria,” explained Bill Muller, “and when he saw the outside Carpinteria reefs breaking with lots of white water, he knew there was surf. Mike would call Gates, and Gates would call me, and we’d all get excited and meet in Carpinteria to go down to Three Mile.”
“Rincon was perfect for plank surfing,” Mike Sturmer declared. “It had a nice ‘eye,’ you could get in the hook just right.”
“Riding down to Rincon in Foss’s ‘38 Chevy sedan, Muller, Sturmer, and Nagle became pioneers of California’s perfect wave,” continued Rafferty. “Long before the Malibu hotdoggers popularized the sport after World War II, they had Three Mile virtually to themselves.”
“These fellows,” wrote SURFER magazine creator John Severson, “were around for the big surf in 1939, and like most of the other old-timers, they maintain that nothing since has approached the size of that surf.”
There’s a classic photo of Mike Sturmer on a wave at Three Mile during the big swell of 1939. It rivals, in size, the famous one taken of Rennie Yater, at the same spot, 30 years later.
“You could only catch three or four waves,” remembered Sturmer, “because it was so big and so hard to get back out. I’m six-four so that wave must be a 15-footer [wave face measurement]. I knew it was a huge swell because I counted 13 breaks from the shore all the way out to the Carpinteria reef. It was the biggest surf any of us had ever been in. This photo was taken by a guy on the beach with a 16mm movie camera. When we came out of the water, he came over to talk to us ‘idiots.’ I asked him if he’d cut out a frame and send it to me. This is what I got.”
Gates Foss passed on in 1990. At the time of this writing, Bill Muller still lived in Santa Barbara. Gene Nagel was also still living in Santa Barbara. Mike Sturmer moved from Carpinteria in 1965 and eventually settled in Idaho. “But those memories are etched firmly in my mind,” Sturmer declared.
Rincon saw a second group of surfers begin to hit it, John Severson wrote, “After the war” when “a couple of young surfers from the Malibu area – Bob Simmons and Matt Kivlin – ‘discovered’ Rincon and began to make winter runs there. They brought back reinforcements and by the late forties the Rincon was ridden occasionally by surfers Mickey Muñoz, Bobby Patterson, Joe Quigg, Billy Meng, and a few others.”
ENDIT
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