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The surf wasn't epic, but after the poor hurricane season, it would do. Brian Luckey, a freelance photographer from Sag Harbor, had surfed the East End of Long Island for twenty years and knew that when the wind switched to the southwest, the North Bar would serve up clean lines. Last October, Luckey and his childhood friend William Lucey paddled out to an empty lineup and began trimming the glassy walls.

Then the Boys in Blue showed up with a bullhorn. They called Luckey and Lucey out of the water and wrote them both a ticket. The officer said he didn't want to do it, but he had to cite them. Surfing on the North Bar, apparently, was a criminal offense.

The Sag Harbor boys weren't the first—that was sometime Brooklyn resident Nancy Opitz, who was cited last June. In the end, there were eight surfers cited last summer and fall—"The Montauk 8" as they came to be known.

"We knew a few people had been hassled," remembers Luckey, "It was sad that they had to resort to ticketing people on a beautiful day with no one out."

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Joe Giannini knows all about the North Bar. In 1989, the same year he moved full time to East Hampton, he caught a 400-yard right at the break. No one cited him for it. A 64-year-old lawyer who has surfed since 1961, Giannini is one of the few Vietnam veterans to have actually surfed the famed China Beach during the war. He's worked on behalf of surfers before. From 2002 to 2004, along with the Surfrider Foundation's Eastern Long Island Chapter's co-chair, Tom Naro, he successfully fought to open Camp Hero State Park to surfing. Giannini took up the case of the Montauk 8.

The police didn't simply target surfers for sport. Local surf fishermen have power in numbers, a strong legacy on the East End, and have leaned on the state to prohibit an activity they consider detrimental to surfcasting.

"Fishermen have taken this area to be their own," says Naro. "The fishing lobby has been making the State Parks policy on the East End. The parks have always been fishermen-centric."

According to Willy Young, President of the Montauk Surfcasters Association, casters can't angle with surfers around. The North Bar remains the last spot where surfing is at issue, and the fishermen are intent on staking their claim. "Surfers already have half the park," says Young. "It's not that we don't want them to surf, but when the surf's up they all go there. They've ruined it for themselves."

Giannini points out that there is no statute on the books banning surfing, despite the presence of "Surfboarding Prohibited" signs posted on the beach. The point of contention is whether or not "swimming, bathing, or wading," which are legally restricted, are the same thing as "surfboarding," which is apparently what the State Park thinks surfing is called.

"We don't believe it's illegal to surf there just because there's a sign," says Giannini.

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The North Bar isn't one of those East End gems that produces quality surf more often than the locals would have you know. Far more striped bass than waves are caught there. "If you get it once in a while, you're stoked," Luckey admits.

Though none of them would speak on the record for this story, several locals questioned the wisdom of pursuing the issue at all. They prefer to appease the surfcasters to avoid a backlash that might lead the fishermen to threaten their right to surf the more serious breaks clustered around the South Side and The Point. The fact that only a few of the Montauk 8 are locals adds to their ambivalence.

The reality is that surfcasters outnumber local surfers and have far deeper roots in the Montauk area. The current balance that allows surfers access to the more wave-rich areas was hard-won and remains fragile. There is an undercurrent among locals that this issue could shatter it.

But Luckey likes to fish as well as surf. He's baffled that there should be such a fuss over a spot where the swell and the fish rarely coincide. He feels that fighting the issue is for the greater good if it allows the surf population to spread out. And, whatever they might say off the record, locals engaged with the issue agree with him. When the question of pursuing the case was raised at the local Surfrider meeting, those in favor won 47-to-3.

That's likely because the surf population is growing across the Eastern Seaboard. For most of the year, the Montauk area is sparsely populated, but come summer the numbers as much as quadruple. The more popular surfing becomes in the mainstream (see: Crush, Blue and Kelly Slater's 329 Outside Magazine covers), the more the summer population in the area wants to surf. Most of the communities have dealt with this by specifying specific beaches for the surfers, thereby protecting huge numbers of swimmers from fiberglass projectiles with sharp fins ... by exposing surfers to ever-growing numbers of fiberglass projectiles with sharp fins.

It's not as if large surfing populations are uncommon. California has many times more surfers than all the eastern states combined, and the most popular beaches will use "blackball flags" to limit surfing on particularly crowded weekends. But surfing is a legal right anywhere in the state (coastal military installations excepted), so when the blackball flags come out, the surfers simply spread out.

"I am so grateful that the state recognizes our coastline should be the public domain," says Nancy Hastings, the Southern California Field Coordinator for the Surfrider Foundation. Hastings grew up in the Northeast and remembers private beaches on Cape Cod where the public couldn't even walk across the sand, let alone pick off peaks. "It should never be over-managed by an agency."

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On the eighth of May, Judge Catherine Cahill sided with Giannini and the Montauk 8, ruling that the current law forbidding "swimming, bathing, and wading" does not apply to surfing. Surfrider issued a statement declaring victory, but this controversy is far from over.

"The state has already told us they're going to pursue it," says Young. "They will just write the ticket differently. If they don't, then we'll pursue it ourselves. Whatever we have to do [to fight this], we will do."

If the fishermen request that the current laws be rewritten to preclude surfing specifically, policymakers will be required to initiate public hearings and due process. The fishermen and the surfers, it seems, may have a few more days in court ahead of them.

Opitz, for one, is not fazed. "When I go back, I'm going to paddle out if it's breaking," she states plainly. Surfing may be civil disobedience as long as the dispute lasts, but as far Opitz is concerned, it can never be a crime.