When it comes to riding killer waves, David Skelly totally rips. It's only when he surfs the paper swells of bureaucracy that he gets full-on thrashed.
Skelly, an Encinitas marine engineer, has designed what is expected to be the nation's first artificial surf reef: a 2,000-ton pile of sandbags to be submerged off the shores of El Segundo, near Los Angeles International Airport.
The proposed reef is intended to reverse the wave-flattening effects of a 17-year-old jetty there and transform Dockweiler State Beach into a surfing mecca, a place where overjoyed wave riders won't even notice the blast of jets overhead or the smell of the bordering Hyperion sewage plant.
Trouble is, members of the San Clemente-based Surfrider Foundation, which conceived the idea and hired Skelly for the job, figured the warehouse-sized reef would be finished four years ago. Instead, they've found themselves caught in a protracted funding and environmental riptide.
"They've been talking about that reef for years," surfer Joey Bellissimo said as he sat by his board on nearby Manhattan Beach recently. "Everybody's pretty skeptical about it ever being built."
The holdup involves skyrocketing sand prices, the breeding cycles of fish and long-delayed funding from a major oil company, via the state government's California Coastal Conservancy, for the $300,000 project. The Surfrider Foundation finally received the bulk of that money last week as recompense for the oil company's jetty. But the money arrived too late for work to begin any time before this fall.
"There's something very wrong here," said Skelly. "It's like they've done everything they can to make this more difficult than it is."
Since reef plans were drawn up six years ago, the price of construction sand has tripled. As a result, the reef's overall tonnage was cut in half from 4,000 just to meet the budget, a development that will mean shorter wave rides for surfers. The reef, which will be shaped like a V, will affect only that area of the surf between it and the beach, about 300 feet away. The structure will stand 7 feet off the ocean floor and each arm of the V will extend 150 feet.
Reef builders blame funding delays on Chevron Corp., which was ordered to pay for the reef because it built the surf-destroying jetty. They also complain about the state coastal agency, which held the oil money in a trust account. Chevron and the state suggest that Surfrider's mishandling of paperwork caused those delays.
