Walk the bluff above WindanSea Beach in late May and the Shack looks freshly born. New Canary date palm fronds catch the light in a green that will not last the summer. Walk the same stretch in December and you will find something stranger: a hole, cut on purpose, low on the north side of the roof. Nobody vandalized it. Nobody forgot to fix it. A small crew of volunteers put it there, deliberately, because the alternative is worse.
That contradiction, a landmark that gets rebuilt every spring and wounded every winter, is the actual mechanism keeping the Shack standing after eighty years. Most visitors treat it as a photo op. Residents of Lower Hermosa who pass it on a dog walk or a paddle-out know it as something closer to a living structure with its own maintenance calendar, one that has nothing to do with the city and everything to do with a handful of people who decided, decades ago, that this particular pile of eucalyptus poles and palm thatch was worth the trouble.
A controlled wound, not a collapse
The Shack went up in the mid-1940s, built by a small group of returning World War II surfers, among them Woody Ekstrom, Fred Kenyon and Don Okey, who wanted shade for their families and a place to keep the wax on their boards from melting in the sun. They built it from eucalyptus branches and palm fronds because that was what was on hand. It has been rebuilt with the same materials ever since, and it still stands roughly where it started.
The trick to that longevity is not resistance. It is surrender on a schedule. Every winter, caretakers cut a hole into the north side of the roof before storm season hits its stride. Melinda Merryweather, who leads the maintenance nonprofit Friends of Windansea, has explained the logic plainly: the hole lets storm waves pass through the structure instead of tearing the whole roof off. The Shack takes a wound it chose, on a date it chose, so that it does not take one it did not choose in the middle of a January swell.
Come spring, the same crew reverses the damage. On May 24 this year, Friends of Windansea volunteers, credited by name on the group's own site including Jim Neri, patched the hole on the northwest side and began the seasonal re-thatch with fresh green palm fronds that will brown naturally over the following months. It is not a repair in the sense of fixing something broken. It is a reset, timed to a calendar that has nothing to do with when the damage looks bad and everything to do with when the next storm season starts.
The people who do this for no pay
None of this is a city program. Friends of Windansea was founded in 1997 by locals who wanted to continue a stewardship tradition that surfers had kept informally since the Shack went up after the war. It is a small independent organization, not a city department, and its stated purpose is to preserve the natural character of the beach park as much as the structure itself.
The city has recognized what the volunteers protect. The San Diego Historical Resources Board designated the Shack a historic site in 1998. In 2017 a plaque went up reading that it was built by returning World War II surfers for shade and aloha. In 2022 the city replaced it with a permanent version and Mayor Todd Gloria declared March 20 as Surf Shack at Windansea Beach Day, calling the structure a quintessential embodiment of surfing culture and the oldest continuously used shelter of its kind on the West Coast. That same year, the La Jolla Historical Society gave the Shack its Jewel Award for Preservation.
None of those honors change who does the actual labor. The plaque does not cut the hole in December or thatch the roof in May. That work still falls to a volunteer group operating on donations, the same arrangement that has held since 1997.
The gala that keeps the tradition funded
The maintenance calendar has a companion, a social one, run by a different but overlapping group. The Windansea Surf Club was founded in 1963 by Chuck Hasley, ahead of the Malibu International competition, with founding members that included Mike Hynson, star of The Endless Summer and the club's first vice president, and Skip Frye. That club still holds an annual fundraiser, and this year's, the fourth, took place May 2 at Duke's La Jolla, honoring longtime local surfer Hank Warner, whose own history runs from his earliest days as a Mission Beach grom to the present.
The timing is not incidental. The gala lands in the same three-week window as the Shack's own spring reset, which means the same stretch of late spring each year carries both the physical upkeep of the landmark and the social event that helps fund the people who do it. Residents who know both dates are tracking something most visitors never notice: a community that maintains its own landmark on a rhythm nobody outside it has to think about, twice a year, without asking the city for money.
What the beach itself asks of you
None of this changes what WindanSea actually is to swim or surf. The break runs over rock and reef rather than sand, which makes it steeper and more powerful than nearby beaches like La Jolla Shores. Local guidance is direct about who it suits.
The shore break here is heavy and the rip currents are invisible but powerful.
That warning is not seasonal caution talk. La Jolla Parks and Beaches has flagged rip currents at WindanSea, Marine Street and Sea Lane as a recurring summer hazard along this same stretch of coast the Shack watches over. A few practical notes worth carrying if you are heading down this month:
- There are no public restrooms, showers or drinking fountains at WindanSea. Plan accordingly before you go.
- The small parking lot sits on Neptune Place between Nautilus and Bonair Streets. It fills fast, though street parking nearby is usually available.
- Big Rock lies to the south and Simmons to the north, both distinct breaks with their own character, meaning the reef in front of the Shack is only one option among several within a short walk.
Two calendars, one community
The Shack's winter wound and its spring repair are not really about the structure. They are evidence of a group of people who show up on a schedule nobody pays them to keep. The surf club's gala is not really about a party. It is the funding mechanism that makes the other calendar possible. Together they explain something a scenic photo of palm fronds against the Pacific never will, that the landmark residents pass on their morning walk survives because a specific, named group of neighbors has decided, year after year, that it is worth the trouble to let it break a little on purpose so it does not break for good.
That is the kind of detail that does not show up on a map or a listing sheet, but it is part of what makes a stretch of coastline like Lower Hermosa feel lived in rather than merely scenic. If you are weighing a move to this part of the coast, or simply curious what else shapes daily life here beyond the view, Cohen Albrecht Real Estate Group can walk you through it. Schedule a private consultation whenever you are ready to talk.
