LA JOLLA — The Pacific scares the nail polish off my fingers. That's been my dirty little secret since I moved to Southern California 31/2 years ago. I love beaches and can swim like a guppy, but have you seen the waves at Zuma and Topanga?
Being afraid--especially of something millions of people seem to enjoy--aggravates me. So in the dog days of August, I decided to face my fear by coming here for a weekend clinic at Surf Diva, a school for women at La Jolla Shores a few miles north of town.
Izzy Tihanyi, a tall, muscular 30-year-old with sun-streaked hair, founded the school with twin sister Caroline in 1996. Izzy, a competitive swimmer and surfer since she was 8, noticed that women didn't always fare well in coed classes she taught with male instructors. "The women students were really intimidated to ask 20-year-old surfer dudes questions," she says.
Hence Surf Diva, with headquarters in the La Jolla Shores neighborhood. The school offers intensive weeklong programs, five-day surfing camps in Carlsbad, surfing safaris in Mexico and popular weekend clinics, which consist of two hours of instruction on a Saturday and a Sunday for $98, including equipment. The goal is for women novices to have fun without breaking any nails and to get confident and competent enough to practice surfing on their own.
I never expected to become a Marge Calhoun or Linda Benson, Southern Californians who were among the first women surfers to brave the big waves on the North Shore of Oahu in the late '50s. I just wanted to get comfortable bodysurfing and bodyboarding in the big ocean at my front door. I wanted to better understand Southern California beach culture. And I needed to get baptized in the Pacific so I could finally call myself a "California girl" with authenticity.
Besides, the shopping's good in La Jolla.
Scoff if you like. But Izzy, who designs women's surfboards and sells Surf Diva T-shirts, thinks surfing and shopping are dynamically related. "You used to have to pick between being a jock and a girl," she told Andrea Gabbard, the author of "Girl in the Curl: A Century of Women in Surfing" (Seal Press, 2000), "but now you can be both."
On the 100-mile Friday afternoon drive to La Jolla, cruising by San Onofre, I heard on the radio that a shark attacked a Florida surfer.
