The City of Santa Cruz has spoken, and it said that instructors who want to teach surfing on the famed forgiving waves of Cowell's must have a permit, starting Thursday.

The City of Santa Cruz has spoken, and it said that instructors who want to teach surfing on the famed forgiving waves of Cowell's must have a permit, starting Thursday.

Those teaching at Cowell Beach — a city-owned property famous for those long, slow, ruler-clean waves ideal for beginners but also perfect for noseriding bliss — will have to pay a $500 fee, have a $1 million city liability insurance policy, provide evidence of workers' compensation insurance for employees and ensure that all instructors are CPR and first-aid certified, among other requirements.

So if Santa Cruz regulates and charges surf schools, won't the schools just go to other county beaches where there aren't such burdens?

No, said Ed Guzman of Club Ed surf school and camps in Santa Cruz. That's mainly because their choices are so limited.

To teach on state-owned property, such as the beaches south of town, "they have to have a contract with State of California, which is even more expensive," Guzman said.

Guzman has a contract with the state, and Club Ed is excluded from the new city surf school rules because it has a separate contract with the Parks and Recreation Department to set up its school on Cowell Beach. Club Ed pays the city $20,000 each year for the exclusive rights to conduct business on the sand.

How about the Pleasure Point area, which are county beaches? Well, we saw what happened when surf schools got a little too thick for the local surfers there.

"Pleasure Point's already had its public voice heard, and the last thing they want to have is surf schools over there because it's already overdone," Guzman said. "The people at Pleasure Point would just like to be able to surf, even though it's already very crowded. The schools have made agreements with the local surfers that there wouldn't be mass numbers of people"

Those agreements are still in place, said Brian Waters, a spokesman for the Pleasure Point area surfers.

"The verbal commitment they made to us was intended to hold true through what's happening at Cowell's," Waters said.

There are no other county beaches that are suitable for teaching, Guzman said. The North Coast? "There's more sea critters up there, which is not the environment that you bring new surfers into," Guzman said. "It's more advanced surfing up there. And if anybody did bring schools up there, the guys who surf there would regulate them"

For his part, Dylan Greiner of Santa Cruz Surf School has no plans to change locations.

"I'm just going to keep teaching at Cowell's because that's where I teach," he said.

Greiner received a ticket in 2005 from a city lifeguard for not having a permit to teach surf lessons.

The permit process, which Greiner called a community effort to design and implement, is "what I've been wanting the whole time. At first, they were writing me tickets saying, 'No, no, no, you can't do it.' Now they're saying, 'You can do it.' I'm very happy about that, because I knew I had the right to do it the whole time, I just wanted some sort of permit procedure"

It's a positive thing, said Guzman.

"I think it's good there's a little standardization starting to happen, where people need insurance and CPR as a minimum requirement," Guzman said. "The more prepared everyone is, the better it is for the whole community"

However, Guzman said, teaching this summer anywhere in town may be a moot point because this isn't a good sandbar year for Cowell's.

"The wave selection is going to be meager, and I think the other surf schools are going to have to have some kind of agreement with State Parks so they can teach there," he said.

• MAUI VIGNETTE: You know you're desperate to surf when you're walking across the parking lot with a 9-6 under your arm and the wind is gusting so strong that your board very nearly takes out side-view mirrors, car bumpers, picnic tables, people and small animals.

This was the case in Maui a couple weeks ago when a girlfriend and I hit the islands. We were each sorely in need of R&R since we're both stressed-out reporters in this crazy news environment that's going on right now.

We wanted to surf. We needed to surf. But April isn't usually the best surf time — strong winds and lack of swell combine for not much wave-riding potential. We surfed a teeny day at a spot just outside Lahaina, with knee-high lefts breaking over sharp coral reef. But that spot was clotted with surf school people. It's the same everywhere with the surf schools, I gotta tell ya.

Once I got used to the mushy, slow, tiny shape of the waves, I caught a few little lefts. My friend Nancy snared a few, too, which she was stoked on since she hasn't surfed since starting a new job in a place far from any coast.

I have to say that the reef-booties-with-bikini look is not good for me. I hate booties in the first place, because I like to feel the board under my feet, but the shallow reef made them necessary. My inner surf fashionista cringed.

So we satisfied a little of our surf jones that day. The next day, we heard a south swell was on its way for Friday. So on Friday, we again rented a couple logs, piled them in the convertible and headed to Puamana, a cool little beach park south of Lahaina. This is where we came to blows with the ill wind.

The beach is about two or three feet down a little embankment, with large rocks piled up along the rise. With the wind, it became quite a feat to get down that miniature cliff. We were actually lowering our boards down the normally harmless embankment to one another, which was ridiculous and embarrassing. I'm not kidding, we're talking about two or three feet here. Anyway, once we conquered the killer two-foot cliff, we were home free. We leashed up and paddled out to the waist-high, offshores-battered waves to join five or six other surfers. We were the only kooks wearing reef booties. Fashion disaster aside, I'm still glad I wore mine because Puamana can hide a few rocks in its sands.

Sitting in what seemed like gale-force winds, I thought it was going to be one of those sessions where you're like, "Oh well, I'm glad I at least paddled out" Some guy out there commented that we were going to get blown all the way to Wainae, or somewhere. We paddled to keep in place. I tried to catch a wave, but my epoxy chip didn't have the weight to keep me in, and I blew right off the top.

But then a Maui miracle occurred. The wind died. Suddenly there were piles of rideable, waist-high waves, with lefts and rights for the taking, and no wind. It went from "I'm glad I paddled out" to "This is about as fun as it gets"

I caught a bunch of little waves. I surfed til my sunburn-o-meter went off. But I also realized I was actually tired. With the pressures of work and general life, it's not often anymore that I get to surf until I'm just plain tired.

I savored that simple pleasure later in one of the best ways I know how: With some kind of pineapple-mojito-tini at our hotel's open-air bar with the island trade breezes rustling the palm leaves above me.

Thanks, Maui. Aloha, for sure.

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