Paradise Beach skimboarders take a little off the top

At first, it doesn't look like much: Throw a thin board onto the water near the shore and jump on it, gliding down the beach a bit.

A moment's diversion for most. But there are people in the world for whom boards are infinitely fascinating.

"Just give me a board, and I'll ride it," says Danny Kay, 33, a Sacramento-area skimmer. "I grew up in the Bay (Area), so I grew up surfing, boogie boarding, skateboarding a little -- but now I mostly just skim."

Skimming. More properly, skimboarding. Taking something almost impossibly simple and turning it into a sport.

Skimboarding was born in the '60s on the West Coast. There, surfers and other board-crazy kids took boogie boards and, instead of riding off the waves, rode toward them, catching a bit of air when they hit the break. Nowadays, skimboards are manufactured and sold for roughly $100.

When skimboarding moved inland is open to debate, but Kay says that when he came to Sacramento 14 years ago, he quickly fell in with the skimmers. And he found inland skimming to his liking.

"You can get a good, long ride, but it's the tricks that we're in it for," he says. "If you run hard, you'll get a longer skim. You get out what you put into it."

Lon Porteous, 35, was way ahead of him. A local, he'd long ago discovered Paradise Beach on the American River, on the northeast corner of River Park. He found its shallow eddies just right for a different kind of skimboarding.

"Here it's more skater-style; there it's more wave-oriented," Porteous says. In fact, at Paradise Beach, they aren't looking for waves, they're looking for the shallowest possible water. And at Paradise Beach, the water's depth changes from day to day, depending on the releases from Folsom Dam upstream.

"A half-inch is best," says Zach Crooks, 29. "You want it as shallow as possible, just a film."

Say Porteous, "People from the Bay couldn't figure out how we could ollie without waves. We don't have waves, but we still ollie."

Skimmers from across the country

Indeed, they don't just ollie (pop the board into the air), they ride rails and execute 360 shove-its, kick-foots and other street tricks, less like surfers than like skateboarders who like to keep it cool.

They know enough tricks, in fact, to have started their own annual event, Skimfest -- in its 11th edition when it comes around on Saturday. Skimfest will draw people from Seattle, Southern California and Utah, say its organizers.

Porteous and his pal Matt Ratoni, 23, sort of make Skimfest happen. It's a series of heats in which skimmers compete to see who can exercise the most creative, difficult moves.

This "jam format" is peer-judged, the riders voting on who they think is best at the end of each half-hour heat. They can't, of course, vote for themselves. One gets the sense that they wouldn't even if they could -- this is a group that hands out mutual respect and admiration freely.

"Nice one!" calls out Crooks, who lives in nearby River Park. "He's really good," he says admiringly of another skimmer.

A casual, friendly competition

On a recent Wednesday evening, as the sun sinks toward the western horizon, bathing everything in a golden light that evokes the endless California summer of surf legend, there they are. The group consists of a couple dozen guys -- and maybe one girl -- running through their tricks, hanging out as they do most evenings. There is simply nothing they'd rather be doing.

Ratoni, his tall, tanned and lean frame capped by a broad, white smile and a jaunty fedora, takes fly after fly at the overturned white plastic barrel that is the goal of most of the skimmers this evening. His is one of the stronger performances, admired by others. Through it all, spill after spill -- for every jump ends up in the drink -- his hat remains inexplicably atop his head. Cool.

While there will be prizes at Skimfest -- "good swag," promises Ratoni -- the competition today is casual and friendly. These are people, most in their teens and 20s -- Porteous and Kay refer to themselves as the "old men" of the group -- who prize the camaraderie of the group more than the will to triumph.

About the writer:

• The Bee's David Watts Barton can be reached at (916) 321-1154 or dbarton@sacbee.com.