The Windansea Shack Loses Part of Its Roof Every Fall. On Purpose.

"The shack is the center of the universe for surfing in San Diego."

Hans Newman said that to a television crew a few years back, standing on the sand at Windansea with the palm-frond roof behind him. He wasn't exaggerating for the camera. Newman is one of the people who helped make sure that shack is still there to stand next to.

If you live in Barber Tract, you already know the shack. You've walked past it on Neptune Place a thousand times, maybe watched a proposal happen on the rocks below it, maybe wondered why San Diego's most photographed structure north of the Hotel del Coronado still doesn't have a bathroom anywhere near it. What you might not know is what happens to that roof every year around this time, and why the people who take care of it do it on purpose.

The Hole Isn't Storm Damage. It's the Plan.

Every winter, the volunteers who maintain the shack cut a hole into the north side of its roof. They do this before the big northwest swells arrive, not after. The idea is to vent pressure out of the structure so an entire winter of storm surf doesn't tear the whole thing off its posts. A partial, controlled opening beats a total loss.

Then, once storm season eases in spring, the same crew comes back and closes the wound. This year that happened on May 24, when a Friends of Windansea work crew patched the hole on the northwest side and re-thatched the roof with fresh Canary date palm fronds, the kind that start bright green and slowly bronze as they age through the summer.

So the shack you're looking at right now, in late September, is wearing its spring coat. In the next month or two, someone is going to walk up there with a ladder and open it back up again. That's not neglect. That's a maintenance calendar nobody wrote down, running on a rhythm the neighborhood has kept for decades.

Nobody Owns This Landmark. That's the Whole Point.

The organization behind the hole and the patch is called Friends of Windansea, formed in 1997 by two residents, Hans Newman and Melinda Merryweather, who got tired of watching the beach erode and the shack rot with nobody responsible for it. The following spring they succeeded in getting the shack designated a historic landmark by the San Diego Historical Resources Board, which is the only reason the city can't quietly let it disappear.

Friends of Windansea has no staff, no office, and no city budget line. As the group puts it on its own site, it "operates on a shoestring budget; money is donated and lots of locals volunteer to maintain tranquility of the beach." Nearly all of what it spends comes from residents who write small checks because they want the shack standing when their grandkids are old enough to surf under it.

One of the group's earliest fights explains something else about Windansea you've probably noticed: there are no public restrooms, no showers, no drinking fountains anywhere near the beach. In the late 1990s, the city floated a plan to install them. Neighbors organized against it in a campaign locals still refer to as Ban the Can, and they won. The absence you deal with every time you go for a sunset walk isn't an oversight. It's the result of people in this neighborhood deciding, on purpose, what Windansea should and shouldn't become.

Here's how that calendar actually runs, based on what the caretakers themselves have documented:

The 34th Menehune Arrives October 3

The other fixture tied to this same stretch of coastline is the Windansea Surf Club, the group that has run junior surfing in this neighborhood since 1963, when local surfers including Mike Hynson, who later starred in The Endless Summer, and Skip Frye formed it to get ready for a contest at Malibu. That club is still active, and this fall it's hosting the 34th edition of the Menehune, its junior surf contest, on Saturday, October 3. Registration closes September 25, and the club's own reminder to procrastinators is blunt: get up and register, because, as they put it, boards shred way more than the couches.

The name is a small piece of history worth knowing. Menehune are the mythical little people of Hawaiian folklore, and the naming isn't decorative. Windansea's surf culture traces straight back to Hawaii, starting with the legendary 1949 luau the original Windansea Surfing Club threw on this same sand: roughly 600 people, two beach fires, 300 pounds of beef short ribs, and a 206-pound pig roasted Hawaiian style. The shack existed to give that crowd shade. Seventy-seven years later, a contest named for Hawaiian folklore's smallest caretakers is still crowning the next generation of surfers who will, eventually, be the ones cutting the hole in the roof.

The Same Pattern Shows Up Every July, Too

If the shack feels like an outlier, a folksy anomaly, the neighborhood's Fourth of July tradition should convince you otherwise. For more than 50 years, Beach-Barber Tract has run its own Independence Day gathering, founded and still hosted by a resident known simply as "Uncle Sam" Max Elliott. It isn't a city-permitted parade with floats. Ron Jones, who owns Voice of La Jolla Internet Radio and emcees the event every year, described it as something closer to "a large moving mass of locals marching behind a golf cart bearing amplified Sousa." The route runs down Monte Vista, Fern Glen, and Olivetas, ending the way it always has, with cookies, watermelon, and lemonade.

Different season, different organizers, same underlying fact: the things that make Barber Tract feel like Barber Tract were built by residents who decided to build them, not by a parks department calendar.

If You're Watching From Neptune Place This Fall

A few practical notes if you're planning to catch any of this in person over the next two weeks:

• Registration for the Menehune closes September 25, with the contest itself on October 3. Details are handled directly through the Windansea Surf Club.
• La Jolla Parks and Beaches, the nonprofit that partners with Friends of Windansea on erosion control and the parking lot, holds its next regular meeting on September 28 at the Riford Library, open to anyone who wants to hear what's planned for the shoreline this year.
• Parking at the shack itself is limited to a small lot on Neptune Place between Nautilus and Bonair, so street parking is the realistic plan on contest day.
• There are still no public restrooms at the beach, a direct legacy of Ban the Can, so plan accordingly.
• For a pre- or post-beach bite, The Promiscuous Fork on La Jolla Boulevard, just west of La Jolla High, is the neighborhood's go-to for a poke bowl or the restaurant's well-known triple bacon BLT before or after a morning on the sand.

The Shack Standing Is a Decision, Repeated

None of this happens because the city budgeted for it or because the shack is somehow storm-proof. It happens because a small, unpaid group keeps choosing to show up, year after year, and cut the hole, patch the hole, register the kids, and run the parade. October 3 is this year's version of that choice. Nobody is required to watch it, volunteer for it, or even know about it. But if you live two blocks from that roofline, it helps to know what you're actually looking at.

If you're curious what a home in this stretch of La Jolla is worth, or you're weighing a move within Barber Tract itself, the Nelson Brother Team knows this neighborhood at street level, not just on paper. Let's Connect.