Best Surf Spots for Beginners in California
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Download LazySurfer →These 10 California beginner surf spots are at their best on small, forgiving surf — the easiest waves to learn on, clustered around Marina del Rey, Malibu Beach and Newport Beach — ranked by how highly LazySurfer surfers have rated them. Every break gets bigger on a good swell, so open any spot for its live report before you paddle out.
- Lower Jetties — best on a 0–2 ft swell from the west, high incoming tide
- Santa Monica Beach South — best on a 0–2 ft swell from the west, high incoming tide
- El Porto North — best on a 0–2 ft swell from the southwest, high incoming tide
- Malibu First Point — best on a 0–2 ft swell from the southwest, high incoming tide
- Malibu Surfrider Beach — best on a 0–2 ft swell from the southwest, high incoming tide
- Venice Breakwater — best on a 0–2 ft swell from the southwest, high incoming tide
- Venice Pier Northside — best on a 0–2 ft swell from the southwest, high incoming tide
- Venice Beach — best on a 0–2 ft swell from the west, high incoming tide
- Venice Pier Southside — best on a 0–2 ft swell from the southwest, high outgoing tide
- El Porto — best on a 0–2 ft swell from the southwest, high incoming tide
Frequently asked
What's the best beginner-friendly surf spot in California?
By LazySurfer's session ratings, Lower Jetties is the top-rated beginner-friendly surf spot in California. Santa Monica Beach South and El Porto North rank close behind. Each spot's page shows its ideal conditions and a live NOAA buoy and tide report.
What are the easiest waves to learn to surf on in California?
The easiest California waves to learn on are the small, forgiving 0–2 ft breaks — spots like Lower Jetties, Santa Monica Beach South, El Porto North are at their best at that size, the most approachable for a first paddle-out. Bigger swells still reach them, so check the live buoy report on each spot's page before you go.
Where should a beginner surf in California?
California's most beginner-friendly breaks cluster around Marina del Rey, Malibu Beach and Newport Beach. Each of the 10 spots on this list has its own live NOAA buoy report, tide chart and ideal-conditions breakdown, so you can pick the calmest, smallest day to learn.
How does LazySurfer rank surf spots in California?
LazySurfer ranks each break by the surf-quality ratings real users logged there, and trains a custom deep-learning model — a PyTorch neural network with per-user embeddings, retrained weekly on those logged sessions — to predict the 1-to-5 star rating you personally would give, rather than a single average for everyone.
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