A single wave at First Point Malibu may or may not be on your personal bucket list. You’ve probably surfed the place at least once in your life if you’re within driving distance of Los Angeles, so that makes the experience way less exotic for a large portion of the surfing population. And then there’s the aspect of eight-hundred people crammed into a single lineup to confront. Suddenly, you read a few snarky comments about the place and a session there goes from “do it before your days are up’ to ‘avoid the place like the plague.’ But Malibu, the wave, not the town, is one of surfing’s most written-about and romanticized places.
L.A.-based filmmaker Brad Jacobson is a guy who’s sat behind a camera filming just about every wave on the Southern California coast at its best. He knows every step of each journey there: days of scouting forecasts, gathering enough info to form his own hunch about when and where to catch a swell, the early morning alarms, the drives. And once that whole process is done, he’s the guy standing on the beach with a tripod that most surfers won’t run past without stopping to say hello and catch up.
I paint that whole picture because Jacobson’s a guy that’s seen and knows the rhythms and the experiences that make a lot of California’s waves unique. And one of those is the morning drive out to Malibu. For starters, there isn’t exactly a plethora of routes to get there. At one point you’re either taking PCH north, which is really, technically, driving west. Or you’re driving PCH east. It’s mundane but that’s also the very thing that makes the experience universal. And things we all share can carry a certain extra weight once we start to recognize that.
“There’s something pretty special about driving up the coast in the morning,” he says. “The way the sun hits everything, it’s kind of like golden hour…in the morning,’ pointing out the shift of California’s coast to East/West between Santa Monica and Point Dume. “So, when that sun is rising this time of year it actually looks like it’s rising up over the water. When you get to Malibu, (the sun) looks like it’s rising up over the pier. And not only that, all those colors turn into the water, giving it this vividness, adding beauty to an already beautiful area.”
Is it crowded? That word doesn’t even do it justice. Is the wave good? Sure. Will you get one all to yourself? If you’re lucky. Is that morning drive worth it? Absolutely.
