Pity the poor Florida surfer.
Stuck with short rides on weak waves. Knee-high to flat surf.
Close out, washing-machine slop.
All true usually, but on a good day, all wrong, says Paul Aho, who’s a bit defensive about Florida’s waves.
He’s been surfing them since 1965 at age 11, when he first charged into the surf near his Ocean Ridge home on a borrowed surfboard.
And found a lifelong passion.
An artist and academic, Aho, 59, has just published a 264-page love letter to Florida’s waves called “Surfing Florida.”
With a trove of rarely seen photos, Aho lovingly documents more than a century of Florida surfing history.
Surfing here began in 1909 when a Daytona Beach couple constructed their own surfboard, becoming the state’s first documented example of stand-up surfing.
He includes a 1919 “surfboarding” photo from Palm Beach, in which modestly dressed riders carry blunt-nosed balsa wood boards into the foaming ocean. “The Hawaiian sea sport promises to be increasingly popular at Palm Beach this winter,” the caption reads.
Aho’s book demonstrates that, while Florida’s surf may not be as consistent as Southern California’s, when it’s good, it’s pretty darn great, especially on his home beaches.
“The Palm Beaches have the best surf in the state,” Aho said, “but it’s not as frequent good surf as other places.”
It’s indisputably the prettiest, though. Many of his local photos show surfers atop waves of clear, liquid turquoise, thanks to our coastline’s big bump eastward toward the Gulf Stream.
The book is an expansion of the 2012 Florida surfing exhibit Aho produced with Ron Faulds, director of University Galleries at Florida Atlantic University, when Aho was an FAU adjunct art professor. The exhibit later went on tour throughout the state.
“We felt the perception of Florida (surfing) was unwarranted,” said Aho. “Part of the incentive (to do the book) was to re-position surfing in Florida within the international context. And to deflate some of the West Coast arrogance.”
Disputing jibes about Florida’s flat seas, Aho includes photos of champion surfers riding famous breaks around the state, including on the Gulf Coast.
He crisscrossed the state to meet several generations of surfers and assure them he would include more than Brevard County’s famous surfing beaches.
“Surfers are kind of a tribal group. They keep to themselves, so we had to earn their trust to get introductions,” said Aho. “We had to assure everyone this wouldn’t be just ‘The Cocoa Beach story.’”
It’s obvious Aho has a soft spot for Florida’s first surfing boom in the 1960s.
Nostalgic photos from early West Palm Beach surf photographer M.E. Gruber evoke a time when teenage life was set to a Beach Boys soundtrack and Singer Island was Surf City, thanks to a beached freighter called Amaryllis.
The Greek ship ran aground during Hurricane Betsy in 1965. For the three years before it was sunk to create an artificial reef, the freighter’s 441-foot bulk created the perfect wave for a generation of local surfers.
“Those people are in their 60s now,” Aho said. “One of our goals was to capture this history before it disappeared.”
It was also a time when surfers’ reputation as sandy, sun-burned renegades made beach towns so nervous several enacted “no surfing” rules. Surfing was banned off Palm Beach, Riviera Beach and Palm Beach Shores.
“North Palm Beach has an ordinance against owning a surfboard within the city limits,” said Aho, who as a teenager knocked on doors to prevent a similar ban from being enacted in Ocean Ridge.
A subsequent court case against the Town of Palm Beach, led by attorney Joel Daves, who would go on to become mayor of West Palm Beach, went all the way to the state Supreme Court, where in 1970, surfers won. From then on, municipalities could regulate but not ban the rapidly growing sport.
“I see the book as an affirmation for the people who pioneered the sport here, as recognition for their participation in the corpus of surf history,” said Aho. “And I hope people get over the idea that there are no good surfers or good surf in the state of Florida.”
Aho still surfs whenever he can, but as dean of Paducah School of Art & Design at West Kentucky Community and Technical College, he’s landlocked. But he’s still riding a board.
A longboard skateboard.
“Instead of waves,” Aho said, “I’m tackling the hills here in western Kentucky.”
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