CHILD ON BOARD

The thought slaps Lisa Andersen with the force of a Pipeline wipeout.

Her daughter, Erica, is squealing about an imperiled Disney character on TV, but Andersen is facing her other demons, trying to punch through the nightmare notion that her daughter might some day make the same choice she did.

“Yeah, I know what I did when I ran away,” she says, softly, “but, hopefully, she’s being brought up differently and won’t have to turn against me like I did against them.”

Her mother and brother were on vacation and her father was too drunk to notice she was gone. By the time they found the note, she had already used her one-way ticket from Florida to LAX and was crashing with a “very strange guy” in a “disgusting” room on Main Street in Huntington Beach.

“I wrote that I was running away to become the world champion of surfing. I was 16 and I wanted something huge to make it sound like I had big, important plans. But I didn’t really know if there was a world champion of surfing.

“My father drank abusively, but he managed to keep it from me and my brother for a while. Mom knew, but we thought she was crazy. Then, when I started to catch on, when I stopped believing anything he said to me, all I wanted to do was be in the water.

“I could have turned out to be a rotten kid, but I wasn’t into drugs or being a party animal. I just wanted to surf away from all of my problems.”

Now, Erica is running circles around her mother with a handful of yellow flowers pilfered from the Huntington Shores motel landscaping. She stops to remind everyone that Barney came to her 3rd birthday party, but she isn’t sure what surprises are in store on her 4th, which is today.

Andersen’s mother, Lorraine Lemelin, watches her daughter and granddaughter at play and smiles wearily.

“It was a very hard time for me,” she says. “I didn’t know where she was for almost a year and had gotten to the point where I started to believe no news was good news, expecting that when I did hear something it would be horrible. I think now Lisa understands what it was like.

“But we had problems, my husband’s alcoholism. She ran away to prove she could become No. 1 and she did it, the hard way.”

Andersen has made it to the peak of women’s professional surfing and surfed her way into a whole new set of problems along the way. Now--with an entourage that often includes Erica and sometimes her mother--Andersen is chasing a record-tying fourth Assn. of Surfing Professionals world championship title.

The pro surfer’s yearly trek has wound its way back to Surf City. Andersen is walking the streets where she spent so many of her teenage years.

She’s watching those same waves roll through the pier--a decent southwest swell, really--but with a different eye. Once these waves meant an escape from real-world problems. Now they represent them. And today she’s thinking about work, specifically the U.S. Open, which runs Monday through Aug. 10 at the Huntington Beach Pier.

After 10 years on the Assn. of Surfing Professionals World Championship Tour and more hard-earned frequent-flier miles than she can use in a lifetime, Andersen, 28, says she is tired of the grind. But she has stopped predicting she will retire “after next year,” because the next years have come and gone and she’s still rocketing off the lip and carving cutbacks for a living.

She made a record $55,510 in World Championship Tour prize money last year, almost $10,000 more than the previous single-season record, and more than double that in a couple of endorsement deals.

“I guess I’ll just keep doing it until I can’t do it anymore,” she says. “The prize money is still a good motivation, although the guys make all the money. I’m making a living, I’ve got Erica, and I need to continue doing that. The travel is definitely not motivating me much right now.

“Mainly, it the satisfaction of winning and just the way surfing makes me feel.”

*

What’s left of Maxwell’s restaurant, a longtime Huntington Beach landmark at the base of the pier, sends a last-gasp dust cloud up to hang in a windless morning sky as it collapses.

“All those years and I never ate there,” Andersen says. “You know, valet parking and that stuff wasn’t in my budget back then.”

Most of old downtown Huntington--the streets Andersen knew so well 12 years ago--is only a memory. There’s an empty lot on Main Street where the building that contained that shabby one-room apartment once stood. The Italian restaurant/saloon where she worked as a bus girl is vacant.

But the Sugar Shack cafe is still there.

In 1986, Ian Cairns found her, he says “in the fetal position,” under a bench on the beach at the end of Ninth Street one morning before a National Scholastic Surfing Assn. contest he was running. “It sounds very dramatic, but I was just trying to keep warm,” she insists.

Cairns noticed that Andersen’s mother’s signature on the entry form looked a lot like her own, but he allowed her to compete. Cairns, the top money winner ($8,100) in the first year of the ASP (1976), long has embraced the surfers-help-surfers-in-need credo and this was “a nice kid who could surf.”

Andersen won the event--and with advice and guidance from Cairns--went on to win NSSA state titles in the Explorer and Open divisions that year. The next year, she won the U.S. Championships, an amateur event.

When she beat four pro surfers in the 1987 Katin Challenge at Huntington Beach Pier, Andersen decided to turn pro. She was 18 and finished the season ranked 12th in the world and was named ASP rookie of the year.

Nice start, kid, and welcome to the big leagues. There are 11 talented and determined surfers between No. 12 and No. 1.

“It took me three years on the tour to get into the top eight and five years to win an event,” Andersen says. ‘Let’s just say I wasn’t too good at handling all the distractions. All the travel, staying with a lot of people you don’t want to to save money and spending more than you’re making, it can make you miserable.”

But the waves always had the answers and she could always find solace at the nearest beach break. In December 1992, however, Andersen discovered she was pregnant.

“My first reaction was pretty much shock and disappointment,” she says, “but, even then I was a little bit excited too. I considered having an abortion, but I just had this weird feeling that this was something really special.”

Erica, chasing pigeons now, has become the center of the universe--as 4-year-olds will--and her mom, who is separated from Erica’s father, ASP head judge Renato Hickel, hasn’t been doing much to foster the gnarly-party-time-surf-dude image.

“I rarely find any reason to party, unless I win,” she says. “The main reason to party is to meet guys, and I know too many guys already. I guess I just need some time off from that. It never seems like there’s time for something serious, anyway.”

But in almost the same breath she adds: “Of course, everybody needs somebody, and it is really hard to be alone so much of the time.”

*

Andersen has distanced herself from the other girls in the water because she surfs like a guy. That’s what everybody always says about her, anyway.

You could almost hear the screams when Surfer magazine’s mucho macho readers picked up their copies of the February 1996 issue. For only the second time in a 38-year history, Surfer had a woman on the cover. And next to Andersen’s picture was this headline: “Lisa Andersen surfs better than you.”

Watch Andersen surf and you’ll understand the term “shreds.” At the same time, there’s a polish and an economy of movement that makes it look almost easy.

She was the only girl on her Little League team in Fork Union, Va., and was always a wild child.

“I just found out two years ago that she and her brother started the woods on fire there,” says Lemelin, who now lives in Andersen’s Ormond Beach, Fla., home. “Thank God no one was hurt. She was always up to something.”

When she was 14 and the family had moved to Florida, she rode the first wave she ever caught all the way to the shore. A year later, she won the first surf contest she entered.

But she always surfed with boys.

“It’s not like I’m thinking, ‘Let’s go get aggro and get manly looking,’ ” she says. “I’m just trying to learn and improve. This sport is such a challenge because every day, every wave is different. I just try to have fun and express myself.”

Andersen will continue surfing with the boys at the U.S. Open, where she plans to compete in the women’s and men’s divisions. She became, it’s believed, the first woman to surf in a major men’s pro event at last weekend’s Katin Team Challenge in Huntington Beach.

She took out several highly regarded competitors before being eliminated in the sixth round.

Is Andersen the best female surfer ever? She says, “I can be, at times,” but win or lose, Cairns argues that she clearly is, simply because she’s the first to earn total credibility from all of her peers of both sexes.

*

Andersen met Hickel after cutting him off on an eight-foot wave at Jeffreys Bay, South Africa, in July 1992. She forced him into a nasty spill while she rode the wave to the beach. An inauspicious beginning for a relationship maybe, but it was a turning point in her career.

She surfed through the first 5 1/2 months of her pregnancy, and a month after Erica’s birth she made the final of an event in Japan. Andersen returned to the water with new enthusiasm and dedication. The lack of focus that once haunted her career was replaced by a single-minded determination that has become one of her greatest strengths.

She has won her world titles with consistency rather than the flash-and-burn approach that marked her early years as a pro. Four-time world champion Frieda Zamba of Florida won five WCT events in 1984 and four-time titlist Wendy Botha of Australia won seven in 1989.

Andersen has never won more than three in a year.

She has two victories, a second-place finish and a third in the first six events this season, good for a 900-point lead over Australians Layne Beachley and Trudy Todd, who are tied for second.

Last year, Andersen finished in the top five in 10 of 14 WCT events. In 1995, she won three and made the finals in four others.

In 1994, Andersen--who had flirted with the title but never been able to end the season on top--won three of the first eight events and took what seemed like an insurmountable lead into the last third of the season. Eight years after leaving the note predicting she would one day be champion, Andersen was poised to fulfill her prophecy.

“It was right after Erica was born, which had set me back, but I had gotten off to a huge start,” she says. “Then I was free-surfing before an event in Brazil and felt something snap in my back.”

She tried to compete but was taken from the beach in an ambulance. An MRI exam showed two herniated disks in her lower back. There were two events left in the season and Pauline Menczer had to win them both to overtake Andersen, even if Andersen lost her first heat in both events.

Andersen, who was in a wheelchair, flew to Hawaii for the first event and managed to paddle out for her first heat--earning points she would not get if she didn’t compete at all--and then paddled back in.

Menczer won the contest.

Andersen then flew to Australia and began working with a personal trainer, her sights set on winning one round of the season finale in Narrabeen, Australia.

“I didn’t surf until the day I had to go out and I had no idea how my back would react, I just knew I had to get through that round,” Andersen says. “So I get the best trialist, a local girl [Yvonne Rogencamp] who knew the break. I just followed her around and used my experience to get the score I needed and held her off in the last 30 seconds.”

It hurt, but the pain was worth it because Menczer won again.

*

Surfers call it G-Land--short for Grajagan--a spot on the Southeastern tip of Java where waves peel perfectly over a coral reef.

Andersen is one of the four top women surfers in the world bobbing in the lineup. They are the first females to compete in this break.

“It was the Quiksilver Pro, a specialty event,” she says, “and we were the guinea pigs. That was OK if it had been a smaller day on a different part of the reef. But this was the heaviest day. It was so epic. It was like Pipeline and the waves were like sucking the reef dry.”

The promoters give the women a chance to back out, but they decide to ride the wild surf because “we were already there and we didn’t want to look unprofessional.”

“The guys, who were going to compete after us, were out free-surfing and they were yelling, ‘Go, go, go,’ and coaxing us into waves we didn’t really want. We were under pressure.

“You just have to conquer your fear. [Former world champion] Tom Curren once told me that in order not to get hurt, you have to go for it. When you’re trying to play it safe is when you get injured.”

Andersen drops in on a wave, carves a couple of turns until the crashing lip overtakes her and flings her face first against the reef.

While Andersen swims to recover her board, the others suffer similar fates, give up and return to shore. But a bloodied Andersen paddles back out and rides one more wave, faces and surmounts one more obstacle.

Lisa Andersen no longer runs away from her problems, she shreds them.