Nestled at the north end of Santa Barbara Harbor, there’s a mutant wave.
It’s a sand-bottomed righthand pointbreak; a backwash jumbled mess that occasionally lines up for moments of reeling perfection; it’s wildly crowded when it’s on; it breaks in plain sight in a popular coastal beach town; yet it’s heavily guarded, defended.
But how did this wave come to be?
Well, YouTuber Grant Hilling braved a potential barrage of commenters, angry with him for blowing up the spot, to make a historical and contextual breakdown of the wave. And frankly, amidst classic footage of the freak surf spot, it’s quite fascinating.
“In 1925, the US Army Corps of Engineers warned there would be consequences of disrupting the natural flow of sand along the Santa Barbara coast,” Hilling narrates.
“A fair amount was known about the coastal process, but it was largely ignored. The finished project blocked the transport of sand moving east, creating [wave name redacted], rendering the initial mission useless. Fate sure does love irony.
Related: Vanished Surf Spots: The Best Waves No Longer in Existence (Video)
“Now every year, 300,000 yards of cubic sand is dredged to east beach, creating one freak of a wave, running the length of the breakwall, and into the Santa Barbara harbor.”
Down south, in Dana Point, a similar mission went down when a breakwall was built in 1966. Although conversely, when the barrier was built, a wave was not born, but rather died. Killer Dana, as the legendary big-ish wave was known, no longer exists.
But this Santa Barbara mutant does. And it continues to baffle decades later.
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