The waves at La Jolla Shores are a beginning surfer’s dream. They break far from shore, and the beach’s gradual slope means that when they do, new surfers have plenty of time to ride the gentle shallow whitewater all the way to shore.

La Jolla Shores is a surf instructor’s dream, too. The scenic strip of San Diego’s coast and its oceanfront hotels and boutique shops draw tourists year-round, providing a renewing pool of potential clients.

Those factors make the four surf instruction permits that the city’s Real Estate Assets Department issues there the most lucrative of the 13 citywide. Since 2005, when the city first required permits for commercial surf instruction on San Diego’s beaches, two companies have shared the sands at La Jolla Shores.

But how the city has distributed those permits in the last four years is threatening to put one of those companies, Menehune Surf, out of business, said Darren Fulhorst, the company’s owner. When his competitor, Surf Diva, was granted only two of the three permits it bid on in 2005, the city circumvented the formal bidding process to create a fifth permit at La Jolla Shores, which it granted to Surf Diva, and in the years since has been unwilling to account for how or why it did so.

That decision, Fulhorst said, set the precedent for the city’s move to revoke one of his two permits and grant it to Surf Diva when the fifth permit was eliminated during the 2008 bidding process. Last year, Fulhorst’s company was awarded only one permit to operate on La Jolla Shores, cutting his operating capacity by half. Surf Diva was awarded the other three.

After being diagnosed with autism, Alex was enrolled in the school district’s autism program, but his parents were looking for other ways to break him out of his shell, his mother said.

Then she learned of Surfers Healing, a nonprofit foundation that runs free day camps for children with autism that allows them to ride a surfboard with a professional.

Israel “Izzy” and Danielle Paskowitz have run a for-profit surfing camp for 37 years. They started the Surfers Healing foundation and camp in 1999, after seeing the effect surfing had on their autistic son, Isaiah.

About 60 autistic children from the Las Vegas Valley are scheduled to attend the camp in San Diego on Aug. 5.

Many autistic children suffer from sensory overload. Simple sensations could overwhelm them, but for some reason, being on the water helped Isaiah to focus, Izzy Paskowitz said.

Santa Cruz — A family in Soquel has collaborated to develop an Apple iPhone application that determines how fast the wind is blowing.

The Wind Meter application the Dillers developed uses the microphone on the iPhone to convert the volume of the wind into an accurate measure of the wind speed.

“I thought if stronger wind makes a louder noise on a video camera mic, why not pick that same noise on the iPhone microphone and put it to good use?” said Jon Diller, who presented the idea to the rest of his family.

Diller was initially interested in developing a wind application because of his need to determine the wind speed for his kite surfing hobby.

“When you go kite surfing knowing the wind speed is important because it tells you how big of a sail you should use,” he said. “And there are so many sports where it’s important to know how hard the wind is blowing.”