One Swell Weekend : Waves That Might Reach 5 Feet Should Make for a Festive Mood at the $35,000 Body Glove Summer Pro Surfing Contest in Ventura

It was an olive drab day at a Ventura beach Wednesday during preliminaries of the $35,000 Body Glove Summer Pro surfing contest. Crowds were small and lethargic. Surfers were glum about the puny waves. And Ronnie Meistrell was ready with the appropriate music, a loud jolt of a heavy-metal band called TSOL, cranking out of large portable speakers.

“When we want to pump everybody up, we play heavy metal,” Meistrell explained. On the other hand, “If it’s a large crowd, if it’s been drinking, we want to mellow them out, tone them down . . . we play reggae.”

And Meistrell has had to play a lot of reggae in the past few years. Vice president of Meistrell Sports Promotions, he runs the Bud Pro Surfing Tour, staging contests all over the world. In Puerto Rico, he recalled, beer-fueled spectators “were as close to getting out of control as you can get” before Meistrell turned up the volume on the reggae.

Meistrell didn’t really expect to haul out the reggae tapes in Ventura, where alcohol is forbidden on public beaches. But the Ventura contest, the sixth stop in the 1991 tour, is supposed to heat up this weekend. With a swell coming in, Meistrell predicted four- to five-foot waves, crowds of about 2,000 and serious competition among the top-seeded entrants, including Shane Beschen, Mike Lambresi and Chris Brown, and unseeded Kelly Slater, an 18-year-old surfing sensation from Florida who is “probably the most dynamic surfer in the world today,” Meistrell said.

Slater will meet No. 2-rated Matt Archbold today at 8:30 a.m. in heat 9 of the main event.

Not only did Ventura crowds stay cool during the preliminaries, local surfers did not go into tantrums over outsiders using their ocean. Notoriously territorial, surfers are sometimes to be feared more than sharks. Tour events have even been disrupted by local surfers muscling in on the competitors’ waves. “It’s like a guy riding in the Long Beach Grand Prix because he wants to drive his car around the streets,” Meistrell said.

Although beaches in neighboring Oxnard are “heavily localized,” said Jesse Conlan, an 18-year-old contestant who recently graduated from Ventura High, Ventura beaches are more popular with families and tourists and therefore less hostile. And the site of the Body Glove contest, a popular area called “Stables,” just west of the Ventura Fairgrounds, is known for its laid-back surfers, including longboarders who began surfing in the ‘60s.

Not all Stables regulars, however, were entirely thrilled that their home surf was selected for the contest. It’s not that they mind sharing, but the commercialism of a sponsored competition, complete with TV coverage and 25-foot-tall inflatable Budweiser can, apparently conflicts with the spiritual qualities of surfing.

“There’s a soul-surf attitude in the water here,” said Ron Edwards, a local surfer. “Some locals don’t look with much favor (on the contest).”

Although he too had mixed emotions, Edwards was one of several members of the Ventura Surf Club put in charge of keeping the locals in check. His job was to paddle into the ocean on his longboard--bobbing around in the DMZ between competitors and locals--and serve as a combination water safety patrolman and security guard. Edwards completed a 30-minute shift without incident.

“You did a helluva job,” club President Mike Conlan said to him as Edwards dried off on the beach.

The locals, Edwards told Conlan, “were being fairly respectable. I think I scared them away. I couldn’t even yell at them,” he said, adding with a smile: “They’re taking all the fun out of this.”

But Edwards wasn’t sure if his confederates would be as cooperative on the weekend, when larger waves can be expected to whip up a surfing frenzy and the locals might resent contestants hogging the prime surf at Stables. “It’ll be tougher keeping them back,” said Edwards, a surfboard maker who lives on a boat in Ventura Harbor.

Because of the beach configuration, spectators were not on top of the action, having to sit on cobblestone rocks about a hundred yards from the surf. From there, and from bleachers set up for the event, the surfers looked like frolicking seals as they lounged on their boards awaiting turns in the preliminary heats.

Competitive surfing is scored subjectively by five judges using a scale of one to 10. Contestants are rated on style and substance, which are factored into the size and speed of the wave. To get high marks, a surfer must “ride in the most critical section of wave and do the most radical maneuver in a controlled style,” Meistrell said.

Although 10s can be given when waves are small, larger waves provide more and better opportunities for creativity and daring. “Bigger waves allow the better surfer to do his performance,” said Chris Brown, 20, a third-year pro from Santa Barbara.

Considering nature’s fickle behavior, it is somewhat of a minor miracle that not one event in the tour’s seven-year history has been canceled because of flat surf. According to Meistrell, events are scheduled a year or two in advance--the 1992 tour is already set and ’93 is being planned--after careful consultation with meteorologists and Meistrell’s own intuition. A year ago, Meistrell said proudly, a contest at Lower Trestles in San Diego County had “possibly the best surf in the history of U.S. contest surfing,” four- to eight-foot breakers.

Surfers in the preliminaries at Stables had to contend with dull two-foot waves but still managed to occasionally wow the crowd and the public-address announcer: “He’s up and riding on a macho wave, grabbing a good-looking right-hander . . . he finds the open face . . . look at that nice snap in the pocket!”

Watching the action was Mike Conlan, who founded the Ventura Surf Club two years ago. Conlan, who works for Caltrans and lives in Oxnard, sponsored his two sons, Jesse and Josh, in the contest, paying their entry fees. With shoulder-length hair, a Fu Manchu mustache and a deep tan, the Hawaii-raised Conlan is the quintessential surfer dad, initiating his sons into surfing at early ages. But while dad stayed with the traditional longboard, the kids preferred modern short boards.

“Dad’s a little too heavy for the short board,” Jesse teased.

Conlan watched Josh’s heat but was disappointed that the gods of surfing were not on his 16-year-old son’s side. “I think he went down,” he said.

Heavy metal rocked over the speakers. This was no time for reggae.