While some students spent the summer in an office chair, behind a register or in a cabin, freshmen Felix Key and Jacob McCall and sophomore Andrew White spent their summers on surfboards.
“I started surfing my sophomore year of high school,” McCall said. “I’m an adrenaline junky — I snowboard, mountain bike, scuba dive — and I wanted to go surfing all my life. Eventually I got to go to Hawaii, where I learned how to do it. When I got back I was able to keep going all the time, since I’m in California. I found a buddy of mine to go surfing with there, and now we go about three to five times a week when I’m home.”
White and Key said they also learned to surf in Hawaii. Key said the two of them eventually began making annual trips to Hawaii together about four years ago, when White’s sister and brother-in-law moved to Hawaii for a job.
“I just started surfing a few years ago when Andrew and I first went to Hawaii,” Key said. “His sister’s husband got a job at Verizon Wireless in Hawaii, so every summer for the last few years, we’ve gone and hung out with them and surfed. They have two surfboards, so we go out early in the mornings and surf. I already skated before we started going, and I guess there’s kind of a trifecta between skating, snowboarding and surfing, so I think the skills kind of transferred over quickly.”
White said that on most days, he and Key would wake up around 4 a.m. to go surfing and watch the sunrise. Afterwards they usually went back for breakfast and spent most of the day hiking, exploring the islands or just hanging out with people.
While their days were mostly relaxing and uneventful, White said, surfing can still be risky, and wild and scary situations did occasionally arise.
“One day, just after we went out and surfed, I was getting out of the water when I saw a floating board, which is bad,” White said. “You don’t want to see a board floating out there. So everybody was freaking out, looking for whose board it was, and next thing we know, this dude pops up with his leg bitten off. It was all over the news. It was scary to just be at the beach surfing when someone else just got attacked by a shark. Nobody knew what to do, and we were all just sitting there on the beach until the ambulance came. But then, like an hour later we got back out there. I guess that’s just the Hawaii mentality: to just get back out there.”
While surfing does have its risks, White said the experience that comes with surfing outweighs whatever dangers one might face. He said that for him, surfing is often a time for meditation and time with God.
“The reason why I surf is that when you get out in the ocean, it’s just you, your board and nature,” White said. “It’s less about actually surfing, to a lot of the people in Hawaii. For me, it’s just me and God out there. Usually, me and Felix go out early in the morning, and we go out there and surf and watch the sunrise. It’s a good time to pray, and when you’re out there you don’t have any worries. It’s a great way to start and spend the day.”
