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I grew up surfing Dana Point cove before that darn boat harbor was built. Dana Point might have been THE best surf spot on the California coast. It had two breaker lines. One was a right breaking point break, and the other was an open cove where the waves just came straight in. The point break was more fun. "Big Cove" was usually mushy, and when the swells got huge, it was walled out and nearly unridable. My dad nearly got killed in Big Cove on a big day once, while I was watching it happen from the end of the pier. He pearled on takeoff, standing at the very back of the board, and the board flung him out into empty air like a pea off a plastic spoon, and then the wave, about a 15 footer, passed over him and ground him down into the bottom for a while. It took a while for him to pop back up on the surface......scared the heck out of everyone watching from the pier.

On an average day, breakers off the point ran in the 3-4 ft range and they were just a hoot, but when the big south swells came in off the south Pacific storms in September/October, Dana point was commonly breaking at 12-15 ft, and occasionally produced a 20 ft day. Those waves were terrifying to watch from the beach. For those who don't know how the vertical face of a wave is measured, it is from the top all the way down to the bottom of the trough, which is well below the mean waterline. So a 10 ft wave has a front surface 15-20 feet high......and that was about as big as I wanted to ride. When the waves got above 10-12 feet, I came in and watched the pros. If you haven't been in surf like that, you can't even begin to understand the power in those waves. It can and will kill you if you're not paying attention, and sometimes they'll do it even when you are.

Phil Edwards had a house overlooking the cove right at the cliff's edge. He'd sit up there tootin' coke all day until the waves got big enough, then he'd come down to ride them. Back in those days, Hobie Alter, the maker of Hobie Catamarans, had just one shop on PCH, right in the middle of Dana Point, where he and his crew still handmade Hobie Surfboards. I used to hang out there when there was nothing else to do, the shop being just down PCH a few blocks from where our house was on Golden Lantern street, a couple of blocks up from PCH.

I remember surfing with Corkey Carrol and other big name surfers of the 1960s when I was a kid.

There are a number of Tall Ship shipwrecks off of Dana Point. Back before California became a state, three masted schooners would put in at Dana Cove to collect stacks of bullhides from southern California ranches, and beaver hides trapped up in the High Sierras, and ship them back around the Horn for the east coast markets. One of my friends at the time had dived on most of those wrecks and had a bunch of artifacts from them on display right in his front yard......big iron anchors, old cannons and cannon balls, stuff like that.

Life was good back then.