Florida, USA

Northern Florida Daytona Beach had a budding surfriding crew in the ’30s, led by East Coast Hall-of-Fame inductee Gauldin Reid. These guys built their own hollow surfboards then attacked the surf at Main St Pier, providing an unusual spectacle in the growing tourist resort town. These few dozen locals were regularly visited by the Miami pioneers the Whitman brothers who attended the University of Florida, sharing their board building skills and blazing the well worn trail from the campus to the beach. The war temporarily halted surfing’s growth until the ’60s exploded into the mainstream surf scene. The Daytona Beach Surf Shop was one of the earliest East Coast retailers, opening on A1A near Ormond Beach in 1961. The business was started by Viola Horner and her son Albert Salvatore, who soon moved to their present location on Main St after the meat market next door complained about resin fumes permeating their meat! While 90% of boards sold were West Coast imports, local shaper George Miller (he married Viola’s daughter) built boards too, first as Millers and then Kahunas before settling for the Daytona Beach Surf Shop label. Due to the shop’s strategic location (amidst a lot of people who wanted to buy surfboards), the shop got attention from notable visitors and locals alike, including Greg Noll, David Nuuhiwa, Gary Propper, Claude Cogden, Dana Brown, Jim Heath, and George Warren, to name just a few. Main Street competition sprang up when local suntan-lotion entrepreneur Paul Burke launched two surf shops, one grandly dubbed Surfboards Galore. Demand for equipment remained steady in Northern Florida with a definite upturn as the shortboard era arrived, which opened the door for more local shapers and cut through the brand name fever that was feeding the sale of West Coast imports. Ormond Beach local Mimi Monroe was one of very few women chosen to ride on the national Hobie team; she had excellent ability and an usually strong style, even as a young teenager. This same area has produced two of the most successful women surfers in history, Frieda Zamba and Lisa Andersen, both four-time World Champions. In the ’60s and ’70s, few surfers visited the New Smyrna area because of its natural isolation. With no bridge over the Ponce Inlet and the natural barrier of the Canaveral National Seashore to the south, most people stayed on US-1 and headed south. The close-knit community of New Smyrna surfers included Jack Riley, Dave Coffee, Dave and Dan Nichols (who opened the first New Smyrna surf shop), Charlie Baldwin, Ross Pell, Randy Richenberg, plus a lot of core guys who all still surf.

Central Florida The growth of surfing in Central Florida was a little slow in the pre-World War II years, with what activity there was concentrated in the Miami and Daytona areas. By the late ‘50s, Cocoa Beach was becoming a focal point, and the surf industry took its first tentative steps when Jack Murphy (a.k.a. Murph the Surf) opened the first retail outlet in a cabana at a beachfront hotel. He quickly outgrew that beachhead and moved to a factory in Melbourne, feeding boards to his new shop at Indiatlantic. Other board manufacturers like Jim Campbell and James O’Hara sprung up as Murph lost control of his business and moved on to an illustrious career of “other endeavors.” Dick Catri entered the picture in the early ’60s after a tour of duty in Hawaii (as the lifeguard at the Officers’ Club Pool, Pearl Harbor) and opened up Shaggs surf store on the boardwalk of Indiatlantic. Representing the Surfboards Hawaii label for the entire East Coast, Catri went about the marketing and promotion of the label and began building a competitive surf team of local riders. The Surfboards Hawaii Surf Team (later the Hobie team) gained an enormous amount of notoriety for its almost invincible competitive record and unbridled talent. Teamsters included Gary Propper, Mimi Monroe, Mike Tabeling, Fletcher Sharp, and Bruce Valluzzi among a host of other gifted surfers. By 1965, Catri’s success was noted by Hobie Alter and the team changed brands, but it continued with its concerted efforts to raise the East Coast profile among the traditionally exclusionary West Coast media. When Mike Tabeling’s win at the Laguna Masters in California was branded a fluke, little did the California establishment realize that East Coast surfers would become the most dominant force in international surfing competition right up to the present day. Even in the late ’60s, sales of Hobie’s Gary Propper signature model made Propper the highest paid surfer of the 1960s. Propper’s rivalry with Claude “CC Rider” Cogden was legendary at the Cocoa Beach Pier, setting the competitive tone for the continuous stream of talented groms emerging from Cocoa Beach High School. Surfing exploded into the public’s consciousness in the mid-’60s, surging into popularity right alongside the development of the space-program infrastructure at nearby Cape Canaveral. In fact, before NASA moved in, there were great waves to be had out at the fast peeling breaks of False Cape. Although surfing competitions had been held up and down the East Coast for some years (including Cocoa Beach), it wasn’t until the formation of the Eastern Surfing Association in 1967, that a cohesive contest circuit began. Dick Catri became the ESA’s first district director, coordinating the entire state of Florida. 1967 was also the year the big jetty was constructed at Sebastian Inlet. They were halfway out when the quality wedges suddenly appeared. The local surfers were straight onto it and had it to themselves until the completion of the jetty brought the fishermen and ensuing years of conflict. Fortunately (and rather incredibly), state intervention has resulted in Sebastian Inlet becoming a designated surfing area. One of the most notable Sebastian locals has been Jeff Crawford, who continues to live close to the Inlet and surf it regularly. After solid showings at the East Coast and U.S. Surfing Championships (Huntington Beach, California), Crawford made a name for himself at the Pipeline. In the early ’70s he was very much in a class with Rory Russell, Brian Bulkley, and a handful of others who were almost as good as Gerry Lopez. Jeff won the Pipe Masters in 1974 and was twice top-16 on the international pro tour (’76 & ’78). Following the shortboard transition in the late ‘60s, Florida surfers embraced the change. Fact was, shorter boards worked great in Florida’s waves. Dick Catri started his own label and introduced early examples of the fish piloted by team riders like David Nuuhiwa. These were the early years for local shapers like Rich Price and leading epoxy proponent Greg Loehr; both have become modern shaping gurus, particularly for the Central Florida performance surfers. Claude Cogden now shapes longboards for a large number of customers who want more foam for when the summer surf gets marginal. Another Cocoa Beach icon is the sprawling 2-acre vastness of the Ron Jon “One of a Kind” Surf Shop. Opened in 1963 by New Jersey transplant Ron DiMenna at Canaveral Pier, it has become the world’s largest “surf shop” and trades 24/7/365. Despite its perceived weaknesses in wave quality, Florida has remained at the forefront of surfboard development over the past three decades, and the ability to ride Florida’s often gutless surf, has created a long line of successful professional surfers. The most notable so far has been Cocoa Beach local Kelly Slater, the sport’s only six-time World Champion, who developed under the philosophical paradigm that if a surfer can do three maneuvers in five seconds on a 2-foot wave, then it just gets easier in bigger, longer waves. Today’s top-16 Floridians – including 2002 World Champ C.J. Hobgood – might well agree.

Southern Florida Surfing began in Florida in the 1920s with the arrival of Tom Blake in Miami to double for Ramon Navaro in the Rex Ingram film, Where the Pavement Ends. He fell in with a bootlegger, was a lifeguard at the Roman Pools, and came across a surfboard one of the Hollywood crew had left behind. He “got fooling around on it” and was the first to surf here. When he returned in the early ’30s with his patented hollow rescue board, there were still no other surfers – almost. In Miami Dudley and Bill Whitman were into bellyboarding. Bill, the elder Whitman, was good with his hands and shaped the boards. In 1932, two Virginia Beach surfers (John Smith and Babe Braithwaite) passed through with a 10ft Hawaiian surfboard – the standard redwood model of the period. Inspired, Bill crafted a similar board from locally-available sugar pine. This was the first surfboard built in Florida. Dudley Whitman started on his own board-shaping project at the tender age of 13, using spruce instead of pine. A year later (1933), Tom Blake was touring Florida with his hollow boards and paddled up the coast to look for “the Whitmans.” Bill spotted Tom and was blown away by the speed of the Blake board and immediately altered his boardbuilding approach. The resulting hollow boards, based on plans in Popular Mechanics magazine, were tweaked and arguably improved by softening the sharp nose and tail as well as substituting screws for wooden dowels in the assembly process. It was these finely-executed details that opened the door to Dudley’s lifetime membership in the Outrigger Canoe Club in Waikiki. By 1935, the brothers were surfing with their Daytona counterparts, like Gauldin Reid, who was building 40lb hollow boards on a $3 materials budget. The Whitmans continued to push design boundaries by patenting the first underwater camera and inventing the slalom water-ski. In the 1940s, pioneer waterman Pete Peterson happened across a surfboard washed up on a beach in Hawaii. The size and shape of the mysterious find were roughly the same as his own, but it was blond-colored and weighed only 30-40lbs. Apparently the surfboard had been made in Florida from a South American wood called “balsa.” Virtually unknown in Hawaii at the time, this lightweight wood was difficult to obtain, but because of their proximity to the source, Florida’s surfboard builders had access to the material that Californians didn’t. The post-war years were quiet down Miami way, with only the well-off having the means to purchase a board. Dick Catri and Jack Murphy were acrobatic divers at South Beach when one day Murphy showed up with a Velzy Jacobs balsa board to while away the days while they were waiting for clean conditions to dive. Even with the Whitmans, there were barely a dozen boards on the beach in 1958. West Coast East was the first surf shop in Miami, but the growth of surfing was hampered in Southern Florida by draconian laws that completely banned surfing in counties like Palm Beach to placate anti-surfer sentiment among the residents of the elitist beachfront communities. It wasn’t until the ESA lobbied Palm Beach County to change the local laws on the grounds that it had regulated surfing out of existence, which was unconstitutional. The county conceded, paving the way for surfers like Dr John McCranels, who became U.S. Grand Masters Champion.
The modern scene has come full circle from the uncrowded days of the ’50s to severe zooing at breaks like South Beach and Reef Road, which attract surfers from far and wide when conditions are right. Equipment is easy to come by these days, with some large chains operating in Southern Florida along with some quirky, long-established, independent shops.