Santa Surf Off brings gnarly waves and holiday cheer – The San Diego Union-Tribune

Posted On: December 24, 2019

Forget about lovely weather for a sleigh ride together. Santa spends Christmas Eve in Coronado carving through epic surf on a longboard.

For the last nine years a local T-shirt company called URT has hosted an annual Santa Surf Off. The event features dozens of surfers — ranging from kindergarteners and grandparents — dressed up in thick white beards, red hats and wetsuits while parents and friends cheer on from the shoreline.

“This is how San Diego does Christmas,” said Ian Urtnwski, a lifeguard and the company’s founder. “We’re a beach city and it just makes sense to have surfing Santas.”

More than 200 people attended Tuesday morning’s event. But the annual Santa Surf Off has not always been so popular.

Only five people attended the inaugural event, according to PJ Erskine, a local carpenter and jokester who initially told a reporter, “I don’t know, why don’t you give me a $20 to refresh my memory,” when asked about that first Santa Surf Off.

Inspiration for the event came from an old photograph that showed a group of surfers wearing Santa hats and sharing the same wave. The photo was shot somewhere either in Hawaii or Southern California, Erskine said.

Urtnowski thought it’d be fun to recreate the photograph. That first year, the surf crew had no beards. Instead they rubbed white zinc oxide on their faces, wore Santa hats and paddled out.

Since then, the event has grown every year. More than 200 people attended Tuesday’s Santa Surf Off. Some of them wore red noses for Rudolph and even reindeer onesies.

Every participant got free donuts and a red Santa hat. This year, URT collected toys for the Polinsky Children’s Center, a 24-hour temporary emergency shelter for children who must be separated from their families for their own safety or when parents cannot provide care.

“It’s awesome,” Erskine said of the event’s growth. “It’s just great to have some sort of community event with free coffee, free donuts and a pile of toys for kids who need them.”

Finding an organization willing to accept toy donations on Christmas Eve was actually more challenging than Urtnowski anticipated. He called seven places before finding the Polinsky Children’s Center.

It was important to incorporate an altruistic element to this year’s Santa Surf Off, he added.

“We decided that with all of the people coming out here, we might as well do something good for our extended community and people who are less fortunate,” Urtnowski said.

Another addition to this year’s Santa Surf Off was free coffee from Jetty Bay Coffee, a Chula Vista-based shop that sells coffee beans from Ethiopia, El Salvador and Guatemala directly sourced from the farms where people make living wages.

Jetty Bay’s owner, Patrick Erskine (who is related to PJ Erskine), said coffee and surfing are a classic winter combination.

“You go out in the ocean to shred as much gnar as you can and they you eventually get all tired and cold so you need to come in to warm up,” he explained. “Coffee gives you the energy and warmth to go out there and keep surfing.”

Shredding “gnar” means having a really good surf session, Erskine added.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if people showed up for the surf, coffee, toy drive or free donuts. The point of Santa Surf Off is to bring people together.

“For some people, there’s not really a sense of community or people meeting up for a special occasion,” said PJ Erskine. “It seems like that’s kind of been lost for some people so setting this thing up and just having it be a tradition for a lot of families in San Diego is kind of neat.”