How a jacked six-foot-two youth pastor became my “Surf Dad”

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.