EDITORIAL:Wetlands add waves

Not every community has a successful large-scale environmental restoration project to call its own.

Friday marks a year since the re-opening of the Bolsa Chica wetlands to tidal flushing. The end of a year seems a good time to evaluate whether the restoration plan has worked. Nobody seems to be implying it hasn’t, in spite of some pesky mosquitoes that were recently found breeding in the area.

And while everybody can feel pleased about the wetlands, one group has been rendered seriously ecstatic: surfers.

Their issue was water quality. Bloggers bemoaned the inevitable “tons of bird [feces]” they feared would wash into the ocean once the dam was removed. They also feared what a half-century of oil drilling on the mesa did to soils that would now slip into the sea, right where they were surfing. Choke.

But surfers had been more worried about what a development of more than 4,000 homes would have done to the water, and even more daunting, what that development would have done to the shape of the waves they coveted.

All of that, of course, is yesterday’s argument.

At first, surfers who paddled out in the area near the new jetties that flanked the inlet were occasionally getting sucked by tidal forces into the wetland basin. That was a little scary, until they and realized they were in waist-high water.

Eventually they figured out the tides, just like surfers do at the Seal Beach river jetty and other spots. And by the time they did, something much more amazing was going on.

Over the last year, sandbars have built up on the ocean bottom around the mouth of the new jetty. That translates to new surf breaks. And that means more happiness throughout Surf City.

Ask a surfer. The north jetty picks up a northwest swell better than a lot of other spots in the area. In the wintertime it can be a high-performance wave that breaks shoulder-high when other places are breaking waist-high. Surfers who might usually seek out waves at the pier are now making their way a little farther north; what used to be a mellow little section is now firing.

The value in the fact that the act of surfing is better dispersed along a cramped section of coastline because of the Bolsa Chica wetlands restoration project shouldn’t be overlooked.

Bolsa Chica already had some of the best water quality in Southern California, due to a lack of nearby storm drains or other runoff sources. Now it also has a few more waves.