Ocean water lapping against Orange County beaches is the cleanest it’s been in six years, part of a statewide trend toward cleaner beaches likely helped along by dry conditions on land, a new report from a clean-water group says.

In its yearly report card, released today, Heal the Bay says 94 percent of the 103 beach sites monitored in Orange County received A or B grades during dry weather year-round.

“You have almost a 100 percent chance of swimming in clean water if you’re swimming on an open-ocean beach during dry weather,” said Mike Grimmer, a Heal the Bay data analyst and an author of the report.

As always, however, the report comes with a couple of asterisks. The grades during wet weather went down from 2007-2008 — 48 percent getting A or B grades this year, 54 percent last year.

Controlling ocean pollution during wet weather is an extremely tall order, and water quality experts have not yet come up with an ideal way to do it.

And spots near Doheny Beach and Poche Beach in San Clemente received fair to poor grades, including some “Fs,” even during dry weather year round. Doheny Beach again made the list of 10 “beach bummers,” or those considered most polluted.

Still, the report calls out several Orange County beaches for special praise, including the coast from Seal Beach to just north of Doheny, and the four “Baby Beach” sampling sites in Dana Point Harbor, which in the past have received “Fs.” This time, they got As, both for dry weather and year-round dry weather.

Orange County also saw 18 sewage spills that resulted in ocean swimming closures in 2007-2008, up from 12 the year before. More significantly, four of them were major spills, one of them a whopper: 590,000 gallons released in Laguna Beach in October.

“That was kind of an outlier,” said Larry Honeybourne of the Orange County Health Care Agency. “It’s one of the largest we’ve had in quite a few years.”

Despite that and other spills mentioned in the report, Honeybourne said the trend for several years has been fewer sewage spills, with smaller volumes of sewage.

He attributed much of the improvement in water quality along county beaches to diversions of stormwater into sewers to keep it out of the ocean, and to treatment projects by agencies along the coast.

“The Heal the Bay report card is very encouraging,” Honeybourne said. “Water quality trends continue to improve.”

One mentioned in Heal the Bay’s report was a dry weather filtration and ultraviolet light treatment system at Poche Beach, one put in too late for this report but that might improve water quality there in the future.

(Above: Orange County environmental health specialist Dan Yokoyama collects an ocean-water sample for bacterial testing at Dana Point’s Monarch Beach earlier this year; Register photo by Paul Bersebach.)

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