Surf Break Map: Trestles Surf Area The Trestles Surf area is easily the most consistent surf area in Orange County (or North San Diego County if you are going to be a picky geo-nazi). It is exposed to a whole range of swell directions, it has rights, lefts, points, reefs, sandbars. There are no houses [...]

Lets face it…if you live south of LAX there is probably a good chance that you paddled out at San-O at least once when you were learning how to surf. It might have been Old Man’s, it might have been Trails…but you know you were drawn to the slow forgiving surf, laid back atmosphere, and [...]

Surf Break Map: Middles Middles is another sort of safety valve wave for the Trestles area. It is a decent break to surf but it isn’t as good as any of the breaks around it. It offers up another option to surf if the other spots are too crowded. Located south of Lowers and north [...]

Surf Break Map: Lower Trestles Lower Trestles is one of the “Crown Jewels” of California surfing. Generally referred to as Lowers the wave is located south of Uppers and north of Middles. Lowers is the most well-defined point/reef in the Trestles surf area. The point sticks out a bit further than the others in the [...]

Surf Break Map: Upper Trestles Uppers is one of the most consistent waves at Trestles…and while it isn’t quite Yin to Lowers’ Yang, it is a pretty good ride. The wave is a long right-hander that breaks along a rocky section of point just to the south of Barb-Wires and Cottons. It breaks on both [...]

Surf Break Map: Barb-Wires Barb-wires is a short sectiony wave that breaks on the reef that, if the point was more developed, would have been the left off of Uppers. Located between Cottons and Uppers, Barb-wires is sort a crowd bleed-off wave…it is right in front of where the Cristianitos trail ends and it is [...]

Surf Break Map: Cottons This is the most northern break in the Trestles area…and the most fickle. Cottons is generally known as a left that breaks along the most northern part of San Mateo Point. It will break on a bigger SE through SW swell’s but it takes a very large swell to get it [...]

Heroins is pretty much a gadget wave…it can get good, and you can get pitted out of your gourd on the right swell, but it doesn’t break that often and really most people don’t even take the time to try and surf there unless there is a macking WNW swell in the water. The wave [...]

Lets face it…if you live south of LAX there is probably a good chance that you paddled out at San-O at least once when you were learning how to surf. It might have been Old Man’s, it might have been Trails…but you know you were drawn to the slow forgiving surf, laid back atmosphere, and [...]

I think if you went back to a lot of the 1980’s surf mags and sorted through all of the photos, Salt Creek would be one of the top 10 most photographed surf spots. At the same time you probably wouldn’t see a lot of photos crediting that they shot the little hollow-barrel-slash-closeout covershot at [...]

Gravels is the most northern section of the more consistent Salt Creek surf area and is generally considered to be more of a bodyboard spot…or at least most of the Salt Creek surfers wish they could herd the spongers into a semi-contained area over that way. The wave at gravels is one of those classic [...]

Sometimes the sheer laziness of surfers, when it comes to naming our surf breaks, is almost embarrassing…there are a lot of breaks simply named “middles” out there. Hell if you are standing on the beach looking at the surf in between two other people you run the risk of being named middles. Oh well…not much [...]