Aloha and Welcome to this chapter on the surfing history of Virginia Beach, Virginia, East Coast USA -- probably the most visited chapter in the LEGENDARY SURFERS Collection:
THE SURFING LIFE
THE SURFING LIFE
By Stewart Ferebee
John T. Ferebee, Virginia Beach 1944
Boards in arm, three teens in their twenties go cycling
along the feeder road leading into the low-rise suburban sprawl of the
Northend, past the balmy low-slung Live Oak grove and the frilly bejeweled
Mimosa, speeding by, on windless endless days of summer. Light northwesterlies
now hone clean the aquatic corduroy of an oily slick daybreak Atlantic,
countering sideways with sideways, wind for swell. Drawing lines in their heads
as they pedal in anticipation; there already in psychic momentum before they've
ever even touched the water. This is what we pray for.
The story of surfing in Virginia Beach is one of dedication.
Because in the grand scheme of things its not a place known for its
quality surf by the world class standards of California or Hawaii, Australia,
South Africa or Indonesia. The culprit is a 300 mile wide energy-sapping
joy-killer of swell-reducing shallows known as the Continental Shelf which
mockingly insinuates itself off much of the East Coast. Virginia Beach may
not have the best waves but surfing here has a history—a
formidable one that goes back 100 years and comprises multiple generations. And
there is a story to go with the tradition—one of dedication by a handful of
intrepid thrill-seekers in the early decades of the 20th century, and now, by
modern throngs seeking their own stoke or recognition. Surfers here assiduously
seek those small windows when the conditions are right; where light
opposing winds compliment a maximum swell at optimum tide. And then just hope
you don't get busted for missing work, skipping school or backing out of those
plans you made with your sweetheart.
As surf journalist Matt Warshaw points out, “The jaded and
enervated surfers sprinkled throughout California are nearly
impossible to find on the East Coast, where waist-high waves are often treated
as a gift, not an insult.” Marty Keesecker, a Virginia Beach surfer
and surfboard shaper of nearly 50 years, is even more pragmatic: “There is
something to be said for tenacity,” he says. “If you put the time in, and you drive
enough, you’ll find something to ride. If you’re patient and you don’t expect a
lot, you’ll have fun and it’ll be enough to keep you in the water for an hour
or so. In Virginia Beach, you can’t expect it come to you, you have to go
to it.”
Not a great deal is known about the strange, imported
coffin-like parcel Walter F. Irvin brought back east from Hawaii in 1912 that would signal the coming
phenomenon known as surfing. Irvin’s consignment, which must have flummoxed
terminal baggage handlers upon his disembarkation in Tidewater, was a
9-foot-long, 110-pound redwood olo, Hawaiian for longboard. It was a
gift for Irvin’s young nephew, James M. Jordan Jr. According to brothers
Jimmy and Shep Jordan in their 1974 book Virginia Beach:
A Pictorial History, it was the first board of its kind on the East
Coast: James M. Jordan Jr. was their grandfather. While the 1912 board was
unique, it wasn’t the first hint of the sport of surfing. In the essay “A Royal
Sport: Surfing in Waikiki,” published in a 1907 issue of The Lady’s Home Companion, adventure writer Jack London detailed the aquatic feats of
early surf pioneer George Freeth and brought news of the
Hawaiian art of wave riding to the new-century masses, writing: “I saw him
tearing in on the back of a wave standing upright, with his board carelessly
poised, a young god bronzed with sunburn.” Word spread.
In the following years, James Jordan would become locally
famous for his exotic arm-paddled water-craft and wave riding abilities. For
most eastern Victorians however, many of whom did not even swim, the spectacle
must have all been taken with a novel whimsical shrug. Only as time moved along
would the fact begin to resonate so thoroughly on a local level, that it was
Jordan’s flag planted which might very well stake Virginia Beach as the
birthplace of East Coast surfing. Imagining the vast spaces of that era’s
oceanfront, imagining the scene; the place, the pace, the parcel itself; a
lithe young man, soaked from the Gulf current’s warmed brine, hauling
shoulder-hoisted the deftly balanced olo proudly in a terse and yet aloof
sand-scrinching, midday jaunt, from waterline back up to cottage line. Toweling
off, considering the tides; ‘Perhaps another go-out later,’ he winces through
the a.m. glare. Victorian ladies stroll by the grassy beach-lined lawns
sheltered beneath parasols, palming their hats gaily in the summer breeze. Genteel
glances and leisurely nods; the casual elegance of a time which moved to a
different time. ‘Come Josephine, In My Flying Machine’ crackles warped and
softly from a distant Victrola.
In the 1920s and 1930s, amidst the cedar shake grandeur of
the Virginia Beach cottage-hotel era, each little redoubt had its own
stationed lifeguard. During that time, enterprising individuals like Babe
Braithewaite, Hugh Kitchin, Dusty Hinant, John Smith and Buddy Guy would be the
first to organize a formal beach service of lifeguarding and
chair/umbrella/float rentals along theVirginia Beach oceanfront. The
occupation known as “beach bum” was a long way off, but essentially those guys
were pioneers of the surfing and beach subculture that would become a craze in
subsequent decades, culminating in the cheesy fun of the late 1950s to
mid-1960s “Gidget” era.
Thanks to the design innovations of paddleboard maker Tom Blake, surfing was attracting new
devotees. Blake, a Wisconsin native who moved to Hawaii in the
mid-1920s, revolutionized surfing by making hollow boards that were much
lighter than the traditional, solid redwood and Olo
boards, the kind Irvin brought from Hawaii in 1912. These new
boards were much easier to carry and transport than the old ones, thus spawning
surfing’s first micro boom. “Blake changed everything,” former Surfer Magazine editor Drew Kampion
wrote in 2000. “He almost single-handedly transformed surfing from a primitive
Polynesian curiosity into a 20th century lifestyle.”
And it wasn’t long before a new crop of lifeguard/surfers
and fun addicts began heading to the oceanfront from Norfolk and various
rural Princess Anne County communities. One of them was
a Chesapeake Bay harbor pilot, Capt. Robert Barrett Holland, who
would head one of the most prodigious surfing families the sport has ever
known. His son Bob Lee has been a prominent member of the Virginia
Beach surf scene for more than 70 years—from the 1930s to the present. Now
in his 80s, Bob Lee Holland is still surfing—and most notably not on “logs,” or
the traditional longboards that are the preferred gear of the “old guys,” but
on contemporary shortboards.
Bob Lee Holland’s children, Bobby, Johnny and Honey, all
followed in their dad’s footsteps and set the bar for surfing performance and
competition at the beach from the mid-1960s through the 1970s and beyond. Mary
Sydney Barker, a niece, recalls that when she was very young, in the mid-1960s,
“My grandfather, Capt. Holland, said to me, ‘When you can stand on an
inflatable mat and ride the waves in, I will buy you your own surfboard.’ I
surfed on the mats for a few years and when I was 12 he bought me my first
surfboard—a 9-foot-2-inch Hobie. There weren’t many girl surfers around then;
Becky ‘Bobby’ Mellot and I surfed at the North End with a girl named Leslie
Thurston. We would surf in the mornings before the wind came up.”
In contrast, modern surfboards are very thin, short and
relatively inexpensive—about $500 to $600. Contemporary surfers buy new boards
fairly regularly. Jordan Brazie, a 23-year-old surfer-shaper who has been
surfing since he was 12, owns 11 boards and uses all of them—“whichever is the
most functional for the waves of that day,” he says. “You have to have a quiver
if you want to surf all year.”
But in the early days of the sport, boards were cherished
items—hand-made and regarded more like boats. Surfers personalized them with
artistic touches much like airmen created nose-art for World War I-and-II-era
planes. Hugh Kitchin whitewashed the name “Hugh Boy” across his board from rail
to rail. Capt. Robert Holland’s board was emblazoned with the twin flags
insignia of the Chesapeake Bay Harbor Pilot Association.
My late father, a Norfolk native, was an
avid Virginia Beach surfer from the mid-1940s through the 1980s. He
hand-painted the French word coquette (flirt), on his board in a
two-tone gothic script. He began surfing when he was 15 then became a lifeguard
at the Cavalier Hotel and Beach Club on 43rd Street. The majestic old
structure, the most iconic landmark of the entire oceanfront, was built in 1929
(the same year brewery tycoon Adolph Coors threw himself from an upper floor),
and of course it still stands today. One prays it always will.
Legend has it that my fathers introduction into surfing
concerned one blustery December morning during the august years of World
War II, following a saturday night which got so late it became the next day. A
night which concerned pipes and tobacco, Lucky Strikes and Stan Freeberg
records. And powerful, clear, amber liquid poured over ice into tall glasses.
Fellow Norfolk native Mason Gamage of Algonquin Park was onboard for that weekend’s
oceanfront festivities. Gamage, several years older than the rest, fresh out of
the Coast Guard, was an outdoorsman and sailor, and already surfed. Nursing a
hangover and yet full of bravado, Gamage and my father both paddled out into
the cold stormy brown Atlantic conditions on two 13 foot wooden boards. In this
modern world of high tech neoprene, the winter protection for a surfer, it is
almost impossible to even begin to comprehend this anecdote, decades before the
wide spread use of the now vitally indispensable cold water wetsuit.
Nevertheless, a seed was planted; and as veteran surfer Mike Clark points out,
"Once you get salt water in your veins, it is hard to stay away from
it."
In 1950, my father forsook his beloved beach boy lifestyle
in Tidewater to fly F-86’s out of Kimpo in Korea. He returned about five
years later and began his career in the insurance industry, resuming his
surfing on weekends. He met my mother, Ann Meredith Stewart, in 1956 and they
spent their first date sanding old varnish off his Tom Blake surfboard
at a place near Rudee Inlet on the oceanfront’s south end, near the Sandbox—a
café and home for years to the annual and infamous Subway party. It was an
epic, if charming, first-date faux pas.
“At that time,” says Mike Clark, “there was no inlet and no
pier at the south end. We could walk over to Croatan at low tide. Later, in the
1950s, I remember the building of the Steel Pier 15 blocks south of the wooden
pier. You can tell a real native when they say Wooden Pier; that is how we
referred to them—steel and wood.” Clark adds, “Shooting the pier was
a hoot. My dad bought our first board from Dawson Taylor at Fuel Feed Hardware,
a Hobie. It was before the Smith & Holland
shop opened. My brother and I shared the board.” Norfolk native Scott
McCasky, a competitive surfer for more than four decades, also has fond
recollections of the south end’s golden, post-war era: “Every day you were
there, surfing at the steel pier gave you the undeniable feeling you were in
the right place at the right time.”
Pete Smith, age 71, is a mid-century “grom”—an old-timer who
still retains a youthful stoke. In recent months he has shared with me many
anecdotes about the early days of surfing in Virginia Beach and the
ways in which the scene has changed. Looking at photos from the 1960s, he can
name practically every individual who surfed in that decade. In a shot taken in
front of the erstwhile Mariner Hotel, Smith points out the different types of
boards displayed by the diverse group of surfers in the picture: The first
generation of wooden hollow boards are held by the guys in the back row, and
the new fiberglass boards are held by the guys kneeling in the front row.
Three Hollands are in the photograph, along with Scott Taylor, Frank
Butler, Skip Rawls, Snooker Turner and Babe Braithwaite’s son, Forbes. Says
Smith: “The early years were amazing, because there was just so much community
stoke and you knew everybody. It was a really good vibe. There weren’t any
crowds; you’d be looking for people to surf with just to have someone to hoot
and holler with. It was that transformative era where the old wooden boards
were still around but the modern fiberglass boards were starting to show up. It
was just a really special time.”
Significantly, a Californian named Les Arndt, then stationed
at Fort Story, is also in the group picture. According to Forbes
Braithwaite, Arndt was from Malibu and worked for top board maker Hap
Jacobs before coming east for his military duty. “Arndt was driving past one
day with another soldier,” says Braithwaite, “and saw me going surfing, carrying
Scott Taylor’s balsa-wood board. He yelled, ‘Hey kid where’d you get that
surfboard?’” Arndt himself recollects that Forbes was about 12 at the time, and
was walking across Atlantic Avenue at 49th Street. The chance
meeting prompted Arndt to spend two years with Virginia Beach surfers,
especially Bob Holland and his family, during which time he helped to get
“modern Malibu surfing started in Virginia Beach,” according to Arndt.
How? Thanks to Arndt’s West Coast connections, the group
started importing and selling what was at that time a rare and exotic
item—modern fiberglass boards from California. The group stored them in a
garage owned by Forbes Braithwaite’s mother. In 1963, Pete Smith and Bob Holland opened the
area’s first dedicated surf shop—Smith & Holland—one of the first
businesses of its kind on the East Coast.
Not long after, Smith wrote a letter to Surfer Magazine, in California, trumpeting
the burgeoning surfing scene inVirginia Beach. He wrote the note on the
letterhead of the Golf Ranch Motel on Laskin Road, which was situated on
the southeast end of Birdneck golf course and owned, along with the Mariner, by
Pete’s uncle, John Smith. Pete worked there. John Severson, then editor of Surfer Magazine, showed the letter to Hobie
Alter who was the top California board maker at that time. Some
months later, Alter showed up at the Golf Ranch Motel on a day when Pete was
working. For Virginia Beach surfing, that was a monumental moment.
Alter was on the East Coast pushing his boards, and he negotiated a deal with
Smith and Holland to carry his boards exclusively.
The early 1960s were a pivotal time in modern surfing. In
addition to the new availability of Hobie Alter’s boards on the East Coast, the
first East Coast surf contest was started in 1962 on Gilgo Beach on Long
Island. Bob Holland drove a group of Virginia Beach surfers to New
York for the event, including Butch Maloney, Gary Rice and an 11-year-old
whirlwind talent named Ronnie Mellot, a future Golden Gloves Army boxing champ,
local board shaper and all around wild man. Many of the VB guys took trophies
at Gilgo—they dominated the field. In 1963, with cooperation from the local
chamber of commerce, Holland, Maloney and Pete Smith managed to move the
pro-amateur surf contest to Virginia Beach, re-naming it the Virginia
Beach Surfing Festival. Two years later they changed the name again, to
the East Coast Surfing Championships (ECSC).
2012 will mark the event’s 50th year, drawing high-ranking surf talent from
around the globe. While ever-increasingly upgrading its carnival-bling to
include many non-surf stage-draws such as BMX biking, Jet-Ski antics, and even
Cornhole contests (beanbag), presumably in hopes of enticing more diverse and
consequently larger audiences, such distractions on the other hand, threaten a
diffusion of what is still implicitly touted, according to what it’s very
initials imply, as a surfing championship. Prophetically harking back to 1972
and Chuck Dent’s antic rant-alogue from MacGillivray Freeman’s classic surf
film, Five Summer Stories, surf-culture and surfing itself often find
themselves at curious odds. A hallowed tradition to some, a three-ring
spectacle to others; the ECSC is the East Coast’s longest running surfing
competition.
Even from its very early years, the ECSC attracted
world-class surfers such as David Nuuhiwa, Corky Carroll and Mike Tabeling,
along with the best locals. Near the old Cue South, Pete Smith would preside
from atop a simple lifeguard stand at the Steel Pier site with nothing more
than a clipboard, a visor and a microphone, uttering witty, surf-speak-laced
Southernisms in his consummate, slow-mo Tidewater accent. “It was just a
special time in those early days of the ECSC,” recalls Smith, “when some of the
real hot West Coast and Floridian surfers started coming to the contest. It was
such a thrill meeting some of those guys we’d seen in all the magazines, and
getting to see them surf.”
By the middle of the 1960s, the West Coast-informed surf
boom was fully realized here in the East. In 1965, the Academy Award nominated documentary
surf film “The Endless Summer” opened at the madly mod, and
very much missed, Buckminster Fuller-designed Virginia Beach Dome; the
tragically decommissioned and dissected artifact of what would nowadays be
considered a world-renowned tourism-draw of exemplary Mid-century
modernism. Filmmaker Bruce Brown traveled with the movie in those early days
and narrated live over a speaker system in his laconic west coast style,
as the mellow twang of The Sandals soundtrack played from a reel-to-reel tape
machine. My mother and father were there on opening night. My mother recalls
Bob Holland’s youngest son, Johnny, zooming around barefoot on his skateboard,
the newest must-have accoutrement of
1960’s surf culture. Johnny would become a standout competitive surfer, one of
the most gifted wave riders this area ever produced, competing in the World
Surfing Championships in California in 1966 going neck to neck along the way in
preliminary events with many of this areas best surfers such as Billy Foote,
George Desgaines, Fred Grosskreutz, Jimmy Parnell, Bobby Chenman, Billy Almond
and Nat Meakins.
In June of 1968, Sports
Illustrated did a cover story titled “Surfing’s East Coast Boom.”
The cover photo, taken from the steel pier looking south, shows visiting
California and Hawaii legend Phil Edwards gracefully negotiating the
micro-curl of a fun-looking right-hander breaking in the once sacred, now
mythical, 75-yard zone between the north side of the First Street jetty and the
south side of the pier. (Roughly 10 years later, the rickety Steel Pier would
catch fire and be demolished, prompting locals to rename the popular surfing
spot as The Jetty or simply First Street. Surfing
Magazine once referred to the area as a “a two-block surfing insane
asylum.”) Edwards is quoted in the article, speaking to the core of what
surfing is really all about—beyond the contests, sponsorships and
commercialism: “I think maybe the best surfer in the world right now is some
little kid whose name nobody knows. . . who is riding out there by himself;
locked in some curl somewhere, having the ride of his young life. God, it’s the
neatest thing.”
Almost as quickly as the change in surfboards took place as
the post-war 50s entered the Pop era, so did the Longboards begin to obsolesce
at the dawn of the speed-conscious mind shift which presaged the shortboard
revolution. Spearheaded on a local level by pioneer board shaper Bob White and
his Wave Riding Vehicles quiver of space-aged teardrop foils, lines would be
defiantly be drawn in the sand denoting stances in style and of generation gaps;
and drawn in the water in ways hitherto unimagined. The area’s first nationally
recognized surfer of the new high performance generation, was a lithe,
flame-haired, scat-talking wild child named Jimbo Brothers. Something of a
prodigy, a beach-blanket ragamuffin of Dickensian proportions, Brothers would
dominate local and interstate competitions of the late 60s and early 70’s; a
sponsored team rider since the 7th grade, profiled in Surfer magazine by the
time he was 10. “One year the newspaper published a picture of me with my
trophies and I was struggling to hold up the silver bowl and the wooden plaque
at the same time,” says Brothers, now in his late 50’s. “And the caption read,
‘Jimbo had more trouble with his loot than he did with the waves.’"
As the swinging 60's dwindled and the existentially
ambiguous 70's reached cruising altitude, the contemporary Shortboard milieu
would dominate the kinetic surfing scene at both the Steel Pier and the Wooden
Pier, as well as on early pioneering ventures to the sometimes world-class
conditions of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. As my brother Terry Ferebee would
always point out, “You can’t really talk about surfing in Virginia Beach
without talking about OBX.” Even for Norfolk boys Gregg Bielmann and his brother
Brian, a future world-class, Hawaii-based surf photographer, early-era Hatteras
road trips were instigated fairly often in hopes of scoring ‘Hassle-less’,
crowd-free, proper surf. As the kaleidoscopic decade of changes pressed on,
standouts such as Marc Theriault, Joe Marchione, Chucky Charles, Ed and Chip
McQuilken, Bill Frierson, Ronnie Mellot, Ray Shackleford, Bennet Strickland,
Allen White, Kurt & Tim Schmalz, Jeff Duff, Paul Darden, Ed Townes and
Christian Binford would set the performance bar as surfboards would go smaller
and more spearishly radical. Through Marshall McLuhan’s rear-view mirror,
decade’s stack up in idyllic compression like so many Smithsonian
diorama’s, where diverse transformations occur in time-lapse, all at once, both
cultural and technological. Tail-ending the 60’s and front-facing the
70’s, a revolution in both surfboards and wetsuits will transpire; both,
ironically, the by-products of the very military-industrial complex so derided
by the inner circles of Vietnam War era surf culture bohemia. A cast of
characters straight out of Tom Wolfe’s Pumphouse Gang rule the Steel Pier
parking lot, that sacred ‘our turf’ zone consisting of stray dogs,
ramshackle vehicles, surfer drop-outs, and fishermen-widowers. Al’s Surfshop
beneath the ramp of the pier smells of resin, bloodworms, incense and wax; and
nearby foosball tables rattle and clatter with roll-fake's, shout-out’s,
shut-up's and crank-shots. While Trampled Under Foot by Led Zeppelin blares
from the Jensen Tri-axles of Jeff Duff’s forrest green Karmann Ghia
as it sputters its way off the Loop road towards fifty-cent tacos at
Speedy Gonzales at Great Neck and Mill Dam. Dusk soothes everything,
and in the days before video killed the radio star, BYOB surf movie nights
at the ironically designated FOP hall (Federation of Police Hall) rounds out
nicely the any-day of all-days, of the seemingly never-ending ever-present
summer of the early-mid-late nineteen-seventies.
The most notable stylist and competitor of the late years of
the decade’s new guard, was a 6-foot-4-inch paddling machine named Wes Laine
who brought serious recognition to Virginia Beach and East Coast surfing in general. Laine placed
ninth in the world on the pro tour circuit in both 1983 and 1985 competing in
line-ups as far flung as Hawaii and South Africa. “Wes was the
first Virginia Beach guy to make it in the big time,” says Tim
Sullivan, a local surfer turned guitarist for the New York City-based surf
music band, Supertones. “He paved the way for other East Coasters, and even
10-time world champ Kelly Slater.” Through Wes, vicariously, directly, or
otherwise, The Free Ride generation found one of its exemplary representatives
right here at our own beach-breaks. A local lineup was never more proud.
While competitions are one aspect of surfing, they do not
figure extensively in the lives of most surfers, who simply surf for the sake
of surfing—art for art’s sake as it were. “Are there any soul-surfers still
among us; still expressing the original vision?”, as free-thinking local
legend Chip McQuilkin once ruminated on the ever-encroaching influence of
commercialism on surfing. “For without soul,” he warned, “there IS no
vision.” Still, owing to Laine’s pro-circuit success, there was a sharp rise in
competitive intensity among surfers at the beach in the 1980’s and 1990’s. By
then it was not at all unusual for local surfers to explore Hawaiian-alternative
big-wave training grounds such as Puerto Rico and Barbados, following in
the footsteps of early 1970’s pioneers like Marc Theriault and Ronnie Mellot.
Adding also to the area’s distinct identity was a continuing tradition of local
surfboard making—niche-specific wave-tools better suited to
the corporocity of Virginia's swellular vernacular than many of the
imported shapes built in California or Hawaii. The same tradition is alive and
well today, noting talented young shapers such as Jordan Braizie and his
Valaric label, and Austin Saunders at Austin. Throughout the golden era of
the shortboard revolution, Bob White, Rosi, Con, America, WRV, Westwind,
Bearcraft, Seasoned, and Hotline all bore the local standard. The surfer-shaper
reigns in the days before automation.
As another era exerts itself inexorably towards the
future, and another checkered decade comes jangling to a close—another balmy
Tidewater day at the Oceanfront wanes, as Allen White smooths another wave to
pieces.
As the 80s forced its way in on the preceding decade, some
people stuck with the beach music program. With the pinks, the greens. And the
Shag. Others moved on. Others still, never went there in the first place. Punk
rock changed everything. So did the Thruster. The revolutionary three-finned
board developed by Australian surfer-shaper Simon Anderson would
hegemonistically dominate surfboard design for the next two and half decades.
The 80s new modernity was exemplified locally by the
enigmatic, freeform genius of Pete Smith’s son, Pete Jr., known colloquially in
surfing circles as simply “young Pete Smith.” As Les Shaw, the owner of Wave
Riding Vehicles, says, “You gotta understand, the most unsung raw talent to
ever come out of this area was young Pete Smith, with that stream of
consciousness surfing style he had. He was just light years beyond everyone
else in his approach.” Of the Blaster era and the early Quad, there were other
dynamic standouts as well: Jon Klientop and Charles Kirkley dominated local ESA
(Eastern Surfing Association) contests as well as ECSC events. Other notables
of the era included Jay Monroe, Lad Swain, Rich Rudolph and Tommy Rainwater, as
the culminating decade of the millennium would introduce a whole new crop of
competitive upstarts, including Chris Culpen and Jason Borte who would go on to
dominate in contests, both locally and nationally.
And what of today’s young surfers? Interestingly, a
free-thinking new crew of stylists would seem to at least potentially defy
Oscar Wilde’s maxim that youth is wasted on the young. Theirs is a teen milieu
which seeks retrieval from the past in order to move flowingly into the future;
its creed ingrained by a reverence to history, tradition, and for the old guys.
Semi-pro longboarder Cam Fullmer, who is 17 and a senior at Norfolk Academy,
for example, grew up at the Northend and was taught by resident local Bud
Easton, whose daughter Kate is—like Fullmer—a team rider for Freedom Surfshop.
Fullmer and his tight circle are primarily longboarders, a neo-retro discipline
which leaves many diehard Thruster-era types in a state of bemused
stupefaction. That’s because the longboard is, to all appearances, an aquatic
reversion to the horse and buggy. But given the consistently modest surf
at Virginia Beach, it is a tool which is actually both efficient and
functional. And there are other implications—both philosophical and
cultural—that reach down into the very core of the user. “It’s less jock-like,
maybe,” says Fullmer of the longboard wave-riding technique. He often uses the
word ‘motionlessness’ to suggest what it is he is after in his surfing. Of a
slight generational gap past Fullmer, fellow Freedom Surfshop team riders Sam
Cocke and Mikey Hansen likewise exemplify the super-soulful and stylish
aesthetic of the new sincerity, ever-touting the merits of the old-school.
Contrary to some prior generations' nonchalance towards
their predecessors, Fullmer speaks reverently about local, old-school veterans
like Bob Holland, Mike Clark, Mike Kalana and Bobby Holland Jr.: “Mike
is—what?—like in his 70s?” says Fullmer. Gesticulating with glancing, flat-hand
motions the way all real surfers do, he adds: “I mean, he can crank a turn; he
can cross-step to the nose; he can ride in the pocket and work it with his
knees and just ride a wave like its supposed to be ridden…ride a board like its
supposed to be ridden. Those guys are always the best ones to talk to. I’d
rather talk to them than 99 percent of the surfers my age. They always have
something good to say about surfing or about life.” Glancing around at the
radically changing psychic contour of the ever-developing oceanfront, he says:
“Old Virginia Beach must have been just the coolest thing.”
He would get no disagreement on that point from Dave
Shotten, who opened Freedom Surf shop in 2005. Shotten, who by his own
admission is an eternal grom in a 44-year-old body, laments the fact that
contemporary surf culture has become homogenized. “It’s been diluted
with Orange County propaganda that caters to a naive young audience
who want conformity.” Freedom Surf sells imported boards yet sports a community
vibe, selling gear relevant to the area’s surf conditions. “We are the new kids
on the block,” says Shotten. “But at the same time we’ve been gifted a legacy
and tradition that has been handed down from some of the original pioneers who
put boards in the water in Virginia Beach. Our vision is to look back into
the past and celebrate what a surf shop means. We’re about taking a different
path.”
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