Surfer dudes chill out on the cool waves of Alaska

YAKUTAT, Alaska — The chill of seawater mixed with glacial melt doesn’t faze pro surfer Josh Mulcoy as he launches his board off a beach piled high with whole spruce logs and multihued rocks smoothed by the grinding of ice.

“Right now it’s not that bad,” said Mulcoy, of Santa Cruz, Calif. “It probably gets worse in the winter.”

Mulcoy in 1992 was one of the first people to surf Alaska waves. His appearance on a cover of Surfer Magazine the following year helped establish Yakutat as the state’s main surf stop.

Since then, a mom-and-pop surf shop has become a community landmark, Outside magazine named Yakutat one of the top five U.S. surf towns, and riding the chilly waves has gone from a fringe to mainstream leisure sport in this seaside hamlet of fewer than 700 people.

Yakutat passed another milestone when it hosted its largest group of pros and media, in town for photo and video shoots, near the end of September.

Surf industry heavies included the first bunch of pro women to surf Alaska, about a dozen male pros, three surf magazines and the extreme sports channel, Fuel TV.

At a barbecue for the visitors, Mayor Casey Mapes announced a resolution welcoming the surfers and presented awards to Mulcoy and female surfer Layne Beachley, who’s won six straight world surfing titles.

The city hopes this visit will “open the door to establishing Yakutat and Alaska as premier surfing destinations,” the resolution said.

Alaska’s waters had remained largely untested by surfers until the early 1990s. Just before Mulcoy’s arrival in Yakutat, a few locals had scrounged up used wetsuits, along with old surfboards from the town dump and the rear of someone’s garage, and started sampling their backyard breaks.

“Then the place got discovered by outside surfers,” said Mapes, a lifelong Yakutat resident. “We wound up getting together with those guys and learned some tricks from them.”

Yakutat is a commercial fishing town that sits on a peninsula yielded up by a receding glacier in southeast Alaska. Its roads peter out near city limits along Yakutat Bay and Tongass National Forest. Just two flights a day roll in on the local tarmac, making it more difficult and expensive to reach than most warmer surf breaks.

Driving out to Yakutat’s beaches can take up to 40 minutes on a packed dirt road pocked with potholes. The road muscles through a thick undergrowth of alder, large-leafed devil’s club and bushes of cheery red salmonberries. A canopy of Sitka spruce and hemlock towers overhead.

“It’s so opposite of any other place I go,” Mulcoy said. “It’s nice to go someplace where there’s not a whole bunch of surfers.”

Yakutat’s waves are the progeny of storms brewing in the North Pacific. The faces of water can rear up at heights of 25 feet or more, especially in the spring and fall when the storms are most fierce.

The waves are decent, surf pros say, but they visit mostly because Alaska is an exotic change from the sunny surf sites in California, Australia and the Pacific Islands, where photo shoots and contests are normally held.

“These waves are a little bit difficult to surf because there’s no real hollowness to them until they get to a bigger size,” Beachley said. “But it’s just beautiful. You have staredowns with seals. There are bald eagles. It’s just like you see in the postcards.”

Surf culture is spreading from Yakutat slowly along the southeast and south-central Alaska coast.

Scott Liska, who operates Alaska Surf Adventures out of Anchorage, ferries increasing numbers of surfers out to waves lapping islands and coastlines in south-central Alaska.

Surfers, along with kayakers and windsurfers, have also ridden the wave formed by the incoming bore tide as it races up Turnagain Arm near Anchorage.

“More and more people are surfing each year,” Liska said. “Five years ago people thought you should be locked up. People thought you were crazy.”

Shops stocked with surf gear have opened in Anchorage and the island of Kodiak to serve Alaska’s cold-climate clientele.

In Yakutat, Icy Waves surf shop sells hooded sweatshirts, fleece vests and wetsuits, but there’s no sign of the drawstring board shorts or skin-baring swimsuits found in surf shops at lower latitudes.

There’s even a board designed specially for local surf conditions. The yellow and white-striped longboard by California shaper Jed Noll was dubbed the “Yakutat model” because it’s thicker and more buoyant than a normal board. That’s to compensate for the extra weight of a wetsuit and the reduced flotation caused by the lower-than-normal salt content in Yakutat’s waters, said store owner Jack Endicott.

City finance director Connie Klushkan is one of a few dozen Yakutat residents who have picked up the sport in the past few years.

“With Endicott opening his shop and making all the equipment available to us, that’s what opened up the sport,” she said. “It’s good exercise and it’s relaxing, challenging and mostly it’s fun.”

Sam Demmert, who rented his first equipment from Icy Waves, now owns three boards. He’s confident enough to surf alone off beaches with no lifeguards, but still likes checking out the techniques of visiting pros.

“It kind of legitimizes the place, that they’re willing to come up here and surf,” Demmert said. “You and your friends want to get better. Well, there’s the pinnacle of the sport right there.”