Nude Sunbathers, Deputies Play Hide and Seek : County Sheriff Increases Patrols to Stop Nudity at San Onofre Beach

SAN ONOFRE —  For a group of dedicated Southern California nudists, the sunbathers at the south end of San Onofre State Beach spend a lot of time with their clothes on.

This summer they have had to, at least on the days when San Diego County sheriff’s deputies swing by on their newly aggressive beach patrol, employing stealth and binoculars to catch the nudists with their pants down.

Deputies start their patrols by spying on illegally exposed bodies from the edge of the steep bluffs overlooking the beach, just south of the Orange County border. Some of the nudists, on the lookout since the deputies stepped up their efforts in June, wave back and even point their Polaroid cameras up at the cliffs.

By the time the deputies reach the bottom of the cliff, the nudists either have discreetly covered themselves or have moved a few feet over the state property line to the neighboring Camp Pendleton Marine base, out of the deputies’ jurisdiction. The deputies then ask for assistance from the Marines, who often route the bathers back over the line so the deputies can issue citations.

The game is repeated each weekend, and the score so far is: deputies, 88 citations; nudists, 88 protests. The deputies want the nudists off their turf. The nudists want the deputies to take their rules and go home.

“What we’re saying is, leave us alone,” said Larry Shrader of Laguna Niguel in Orange County, standing in hastily pulled-on shorts. “These are really super people--lawyers and stockbrokers. They’re not a bunch of deviants.”

To the deputies, the days in the ‘70s when San Diego briefly opened the state’s only legal nude beach south of Torrey Pines Beach State Park are a quirk of history. But to veteran nudists, the new enforcement efforts seem a step backward in a state that historically has led the way in claiming nudity as a cultural birthright.

“We have more people practicing nudism than any three or four states,” said Hap Hathaway, a Los Angeles resident and past president of the 30,000-member American Sunbathers’ Assn. “Yet we’ve got this kind of hassle. I would think we would go the other way.”

Bolstered by tradition and an unbending belief in their right to peel down, the nudists who come from as far away as Los Angeles County have vowed to keep their on-again, off-again ritual going until the deputies wear out. They see San Onofre, where they bask half a mile away from the eyes of other bathers, as their last stronghold.

San Onofre has never been designated a legal nude beach, unlike Black’s Beach, 20 miles to the south. But the southern end near Trail No. 6 attracted hundreds of nudists each weekend from Orange, Riverside and Los Angeles counties even before it was leased to the state by Camp Pendleton in 1979. The World Guide to Nude Beaches and Recreation describes the area as “an ideal spot for nude sunbathing,” with only one drawback--the view of the San Onofre nuclear power plant to the north.

In 1979, state Department of Parks and Recreation Director Russell Cahill announced public hearings to designate areas of six state beaches, including San Onofre, as clothing-optional beaches. But Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. called the idea “inappropriate,” and nudity has remained illegal on all state beaches, although the law is not always strictly enforced. Last summer at this time, sheriff’s deputies had made 28 arrests at San Onofre.

Capt. Bill Knowles, commander of the sheriff’s station in Encinitas , said his deputies are just doing their jobs.

“It would be silly to have just a carte blanche, open, public nude beach in violation of the law,” he said. “Don’t pass a law, hire me to enforce it, and then come back and complain that it doesn’t mean anything because it’s victimless.”

Knowles, who is in his first summer in command of the station, said the increased citations are not part of a purposeful crackdown. He said he thought there were more nudists on the beach this year but said he has not received complaints from other beach goers.

Other agencies have shown little interest in enforcing the law. The nudists, arguing that their crime has no victims, want the deputies to adopt the policy that state park rangers have followed since 1979, ticketing nudists only when they receive complaints from other bathers. Ticketing nude sunbathers “seemed as though it were of lesser importance,” said Paul Muspratt, a Parks Department spokesman.

At Black’s Beach, which still attracts more nudists than San Onofre does, city police have adopted the same attitude.

“As far as standing there, waiting for people to take their clothes off and citing them, that wouldn’t be our posture,” spokesman Bill Robinson said. Black’s Beach was voted a legal clothing-optional beach by the San Diego City Council in 1974, but that decision was overturned after a voter referendum in 1977.

State lifeguards at San Onofre say they have received few complaints about beach nudity. Though Marines run off the trespassers at Camp Pendleton on the deputies’ request, Capt. Russ Thurman, a Marine spokesman, said, “They’re not like the top of our priorities.”

Not all of the sheriff’s deputies are enamored of the enforcement practice, either. “It’s something the boss tells you to do, so you do it,” Deputy Denise McGehee said. “For every single (citation), there’s a report that has to be written. It takes a long time.”

Nevertheless, sheriff’s deputies have taken off the gloves. Plainclothesmen clad in shorts have infiltrated the ranks of the nudists. Deputies have lined up patrol vehicles on either side of the bathers to outflank them and timed their no-panty raids to coincide with the Marines’ sweeps, enabling them to issue as many as 24 citations in one day.

“They know we sneak around and use all kinds of tactics to catch them,” Deputy Rob Ahern said. “I can’t see loading up 30 people in the back of the truck and taking them in, (but) it may come to that.”

Nudists have already given deputies more of a fight than they bargained for. When deputies took one man into custody for resisting arrest last month, Ahern said, they were quickly surrounded by “a whole wall of people.” When the patrol truck broke down in front of the nudists, “They loved it,” Ahern said. “Those guys were taking pictures and their girlfriends were lifting their shirts so they’d have a sheriff’s car in the picture.”

The nudists so far have made no organized effort to combat the arrests. About a dozen people represented by a court-appointed attorney in Vista Municipal Court last week had their charges reduced from misdemeanors to infractions and were fined $25 each.

“What you’ve got is a situation where the only people offended are the deputies,” said Terry Scott Allen, a Vista attorney. “It would not seem to be a situation of Sodom and Gomorrah. These people seemed very middle-class.”

The nudists last weekend included several families and adults of all ages, who said the pleasure of bathing in the buff outshines the hassle of wrangling with the deputies and Marines.

“The feeling is super,” Shrader said. “It’s a feeling you can’t describe unless you’re here.”

Among the sunbathers up the beach, reactions to the nudist colony ranged from anger to acceptance. Some people thought the nudists were far enough out of the way, while others said the nudists should stay in their own backyards.

Glenn Marquardt of Costa Mesa suggested a legal solution: “It should be almost like a non-smoking area, an area that’s designated just for themselves.”

That would be fine with the nudists and fine with the deputies, who are finding it harder to issue citations now that the nudists are on the lookout for them.

But Ahern said that unless the nudists quit their quest for the all-over tan, the siege on skin will continue.

“You take a lot of abuse and sometimes you go home not feeling so good,” Ahern said. “(But) that’s our job: to patrol the beach.”

The nudists were just as determined to assert their birthright, no matter how expensive their birthday suits get.

“This is the only place we can come,” said Mike Poff of Huntington Beach. “We’ll be here when (the deputies) have gone. This has been a nude beach for 15 years, and they’ve never been able to stop it.”