If you can imagine a dark-haired Sam Elliott,
balanced on a surfboard, holding a leather-bound King James
Version, that was him.
Unless
you’re a VAL, pretty much every surfer’s origin story
starts with another surfer.
A dude or chic who schlepped your little
grom self to the beach and encouraged you to venture out into the
foaming maelstrom, or maybe spotted you shaping sand castles on the
shoreline and offered you a dinged up old beater to help spark the
stoke.
For every legend of Billy Hamilton or
Alexandra Florence,
there’s an anonymous dad, mom, family friend, or maybe even random
kind stranger who launches a grom’s surf journey.
My own surf dad was not my actual father,
but rather a core Florida native who cut his surfing teeth in the
mean lineups of Hollywood (the FL version, not LA) in the early
1970s.
We’ll call him Mr. B (which,
coincidentally, is what I actually called him).
Ironically, growing up a hardscrabble
Seventies-era outlaw surfer didn’t prevent Mr. B from going to
Bible college and becoming a youth pastor, which in the
fundamentalist protestant subculture of the 1980s was a special
kind of minister who focused his energies on saving impressionable
teenagers from hellfire — and, critically, protecting them from the
subliminal satanic messages embedded in Black Sabbath and KISS
albums (identifiable only when the records were played
backwards).
Lucky for me, Mr. B’s spiritual journey
eventually landed him at our little outpost of righteousness
located squarely in the heart of the Treasure Coast.
This being the early 1980s, a newly-hired
fundamentalist youth pastor didn’t just presume he could tool up to
the local and stroll by nubile, bikini-clad, beach bunnies on the
way to paddle out for a quick sesh, at least not without stirring
up hostilities among the faithful congregants employing said
pastor.
So legend has it that Mr. B consulted
with the senior pastor early in his tenure about the propriety of
his surfing addiction.
Word is that the senior pastor* gave Mr.
B the green light, but not without a few cautionary directives
about avoiding carnal temptations (which as far as I could tell,
Mr. B heeded).
Having been cleared for takeoff, Mr. B
didn’t waste any time in casting his surf net widely, roping in us
church kids on his frequent oceanic outings.
He drove an old light blue F-150 with a
beat up camper top and a bumper sticker that read, “Surfing: a
natural addiction.”
And he managed to accumulate an
impressive collection of dinged and yellowed single fins suitable
for clueless groms to straddle and paddle out into the
shorebreak.
He’d shove a half dozen boards in the bed
of the Ford pickup, load us up in the cab, and chug down A1A,
across the causeways, and out to the spot — usually Tiger Shores or
Stuart Public Beach for those keeping score of such things.
On weekends, we would road trip up US-1 a
few miles to Ft. Pierce North Jetty.
The beauty of that break, at least for a
little grom getting his first tastes of fiberglass and salt water,
was the plentiful sand — you could walk out 50 meters and still be
in waist deep water.
It was the perfect place to catch foamy
rollers and learn to stand up.
Those North Jetty outings usually
involved my buddy Donnie, a little tow-headed kid who made up for
his lack of height with a complete disregard for his own personal
safety — he seemed to think that being half the size of his peers
required him to perform stunts that were twice as dangerous,
whether that be jumping off the highest peaks of any given roof or
clambering out onto the weakest, highest limbs of the tallest
trees.
Mr. B would toss us a couple of beaters,
encourage us to paddle for as many insider waves as we could
stomach, and then paddle outside to sit with the rest of the local
crew and gorge himself on tasty groundswell.
He was a healthy dude, a solid 6-2 and
pushing 200 lbs, with a mustache to match his physique.
If you can imagine a dark-haired Sam
Elliott, balanced on a surfboard, holding a thick, black,
leather-bound King James Version, that was pretty much him.
His boards of choice generally were
between 8-0 and 8-6, not classic longboards but enough to propel
his substantial frame along with alacrity in what were often less
than ideal Florida conditions.
Donnie and I would look up from rolling
around in the foamy shorebreak and spot him flying down the line,
pausing only to put his waterborne muscle car on a rail and throw
arcs of spray toward the Florida sky, like a slalom skier at
Cypress Gardens.
On those trips, we always found time to
stop over at North Jetty Surf Shop, an iconic place stuffed with
boards and lined with photos of epic days when the groundswells
would rumble down the coast, the wind would turn offshore, and that
little slice of Florida manmade point break would do its best Cape
St. Francis imitation.
Mr. B would turn us loose to wander — but
not without first sermonizing rhapsodically about how NJSS was a
“real” surf shop, unlike those other poseur retail outlets more
interested in selling tee-shirts than surfboards, more focused on
square footage than square barrels.**
The same sermon, every.single.trip, with
the same blazing blue eyes, intense and emphatic — a prophet in the
old testament mold, full of locusts, wild honey, and core surf
values who over the years permanently branded my soul with a deep
appreciation for surf shop owners who do things the right way.
It goes without saying that, after
“Amazing Grace,” his favorite song was “Big Yellow Taxi.”
Thankfully, Mr. B didn’t just abandon us
to the shorebreak and forever ignore our development.
He helped me evolve from standing up in
the whitewater to that fateful day in 1982 when he ferried me and a
few others from summer camp near Ocala over to Ormond Beach.
It was a sunny and near perfect July day,
with about a two to three foot swell running in crystal clear
water.
I paddled out on one of his collection of
misfit surf craft, a 6-8 red Gordon & Smith single fin, the image
of which is seared into my memory.
With Mr. B’s instructions on bottom turns
ringing in my ears, I dropped in, leaned forward, and found myself
cruising down the line on a perfect glassy wall of clean Atlantic
energy.
If there was a moment in my life where it
all changed, that was it.
I was never again just a human.
I was a surfer, the only real title that
has stuck with me consistently ever since, through all the ups,
downs and sideways turns of life.***
Once I had established my bottom turn
bona fides, Mr. B helped source my first owned board, a 7-0
Sunshine shape, with the requisite single skeg, airbrushed in
eponymous yellow.
Mr. B was, of course, committed to East
Coast boards — anything shaped on the West Coast or, god forbid,
Hawaii, was wholly unsuitable for our Florida lineups: not enough
foam, way too much rocker (he was right).
Natural Art was his denomination of
choice, and I was a convert — I surfed solely East Coast shapes
well into my 40s.
He continued to help me in the water too,
teaching me footwork, helping me understand how to slide my feet
forward on those Morning of the Earth-style shapes both to maximize
trim speed and to wrangle in and out of mercurial Florida
tubes.
One day we ventured farther north in an
attempt to catch some swell that wasn’t cut off by the Bahamas wave
shadow.
During that session, I caught a fun
insider at Ponce Inlet, pulled into position, and stretched my
front foot forward like Shaun T at Backdoor.
The wave curled over my head just as I
slid by Mr. B on his return paddle out.
His pride and excitement were palpable
when I rejoined him in the lineup.
In his eyes, I may as well have actually
been shacked at Backdoor — he couldn’t stop gassing me up about my
perfect position to maximize opportunity in the tube.
He was also there at Sebastian Inlet that
time I tried to establish inside position to grab a wave from the
locals at First Peak on my 7-0 Sunshine cruiser.
After a couple of unsuccessful attempts
to snag a wedge off the jetty from the likes of Johnny Futch (who
just looked at me quizzically and proceeded to take off under my
nose), Mr. B noticed what I was up to.
He paddled over with a pained look on his
typically amicable face and sternly instructed me to get my ass off
of First Peak (in so many words).
Humbled, I paddled down to Second Peak,
and then even further north, honing my skills away from that pack
for years before returning, occasionally, in my later teens.
Mr. B was there when I secured my first
thruster, a 5-10 Ocean Avenue that I eagerly displayed to him as
evidence of my surfing evolution.
“You know,” he said, “everyone who wisely
chooses to ride longer boards catches more waves.”
I shook it off, my adolescent self sure I
had made the right call (FWIW, I did catch a lot of waves on that
board).
When the ASP came to Jensen Beach in
1984, he paddled out for the pre-contest surfs, sat next to Curren,
and asked the young legend whether he had ever trusted in Jesus
Christ as his personal Lord and Savior.
Mr. B reported back that TC said yes,
which was enormously satisfying to my preacher’s kid psyche, since
Mr. B had previously informed me in somber tones that,
stylistically speaking, TC was the only pro surfer worth
emulating.
But Curren was the exception to Mr. B’s
commitment to all things Florida-surf adjacent.
He was insanely proud of Jeff Crawford,
the Florida native who won the 1974 Pipe Masters, and he rarely, if
ever, missed a chance to remind me that being a Florida-born surfer
meant never backing down, no matter how big the swell.
Whenever anyone commented on the
superiority of West Coast waves, he would consistently remind the
speaker (and anyone else in earshot) that, unlike Florida, the
water temps in California never truly warmed up.
And he would suggest (again, in so many
words) that Hawaiian surfers were actually pussies since they could
paddle out with dry hair at tropical reef passes, unlike East Coast
surfers who had to battle the elements every time they paddled out
in even modest swell events.
Whether being able to trunk it on
Christmas Day made up for the often paltry East Coast swell
forecasts was an open question — not to mention the suspect
implication that Hawaiians fell short in the cojones department —
but Mr. B was a Florida surf zealot.
Time passed, as it inevitably does.
Mr. B decided saving Florida groms from
eternal damnation or, worse, a landlocked life wasn’t his highest
calling — he moved on to an overseas mission field (albeit one with
an exposed coastline).
I grew older, more jaded, surfed bigger
waves, made dumber life decisions and moved way beyond Joni
Mitchell folk ballads.
But Mr. B’s core values stuck with me, no
matter where I paddled out:
Respect the locals
Don’t worry about the logo on your tee-shirt
Support surf shops that prioritize the waves
Curren is the answer to most surf-related questions
Be proud that you come from Florida and remember it any time you
might be tempted to pull back from a pitching ledge
Most of all, pass along the stoke
I never won any world titles or invented
new craft to ride waves, and, as far as I know, neither did anyone
else in that motley crew of kids Mr. B turned on to the sport of
kings.
But he still holds the top spot in my
personal ocean pantheon, the guy who handed down a gift that
revolutionized my life — my surf dad.
*I have this on good authority — the
“senior pastor” was my actual father.
**Mr. B didn’t have to say it, we all
knew he meant the Cocoa Beach Ron Jon.
***The surfing stuck — the religion, not
so much.
