Surfers and well-wishers gathered Tuesday to pay their last respects for surfer Jay Moriarity. Sentinel photo by Dan Coyro

SANTA CRUZ — Pleasure Point is a noisy place, full of barking dogs and old vans with bad mufflers.

Surfers, skateboarders, bicyclists and walkers crowd the place every summer day. At 9 a.m. Tuesday, the point was as packed as ever, but the street was quiet, as if the whole block was attending church.

That’s because the crowd was made up of 2,000 mourners, including 500 surfers in the water. All had turned out to honor pro surfer Jay Moriarity, who died June 15 while free diving alone in the Maldives, a group of islands in the Indian Ocean. It was the day before his 23rd birthday.

Moriarity was a waterman, specializing in big-wave surfing. But he was also a favorite son of the Santa Cruz surfing community because of his lack of big-time surfer attitude. He was friends with pros and beginners, and avoided territorial spats.

Friends said he was an antidote to the bad vibes that come between some long- and shortboarders.

"If you surfed with him, you knew him," said Paradise surf shop owner Kristina Marquez.

When he was featured in surfing magazines, Moriarity often asked for all the copies at Paradise so he could give them to relatives. But he never wanted freebies, insisting he pay full price, Marquez said.

Moriarity was supposed to arrive in Europe June 17 to take part in an O’Neill Inc.-sponsored surf academy for kids in England, Belgium and Italy.

Instead, his ashes were scattered off Pleasure Point.

In the water, surfers formed an enormous circle with two smaller ones inside. From shore, the formation looked like a giant ship’s shadow.

Jay’s widow, Kim, led a procession of close friends and family, most wearing wetsuits and leis, up East Cliff Drive, which was lined five deep with people from 30th to 36th Avenue. She stopped near her home, held her husband’s longboard, looked up at the sky and closed her eyes.

Kim was one of the last to walk down the wooden stairway and paddle out. She scattered a portion of Jay’s ashes in the water, just a block from their home.

She didn’t scatter them all.

Kim held some in reserve to scatter at Maverick’s, the break near Half Moon Bay where Jay had his infamous wipeout on a 40-foot wave. He escaped without injury and paddled back out to surf some more. A photograph of the free fall landed him on the cover of Surfer magazine.

Terry Caretto, one of Jay’s uncles, watched the human circle from shore. He’d taken a Greyhound from Eugene, Ore., and said he hadn’t seen his nephew in years.

"My good crying’s already pretty much out," he said as he wandered through Pleasure Point.

Ted Ackley, a member of Moriarity’s free-diving club, spoke of how dangerous free-diving — deep diving without scuba gear — can be in clear water, in places like the Maldives, "when it gets deceptive how deep you’ve gone down there, when the water is alluring. You just want to stay down there forever."

Anticipating a big crowd, sheriff’s deputies blocked off the point, turning East Cliff Drive into a walking mall.

Mourners crowded the middle of the street if they couldn’t find a spot on the cliffs. They stopped to look at the birds of paradise, roses, sunflowers and notes attached to a white fence that serves as a shrine to Moriarity.

Some stood under tiki torches and swapped Jay stories.

Neighbor Christine Helm remembered a time in 1996 "when my son said, ‘Mom, I surfed Sewer Peak.’ I said, ‘Oh my God, that must have been 15-feet waves.’ My son said, ‘Yeah, and I snapped my board. But I was with Jay.’"

Helm was so relieved her son was with Jay, she didn’t mind much that her son had snapped a $500 surfboard the very first time he took it out.

Her son, now 18, was not among the mourners. "He had such a deep loss that he couldn’t even come here today."

Helm has planted a garden in Jay’s memory, including two blue flowers that remind her of his eyes.

In the circle, Kim poured Jay’s ashes, and the surfers let out a yell. Later, they raised their arms to the sky.

Just after the yell, four brown pelicans flew above the circle.

They passed over the crowd and headed along the cliffs toward Santa Cruz.

Contact Dan White at dwhite@santa-cruz.com.