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By, Holly Beck

Chic Chat:
Holly's First Surfing Adventure

When I was three years old, my family took a trip to Balboa Island for Labor Day weekend. One afternoon, I put my pink, Kmart boogie board in the ankle-deep water, carefully stepped on top, thrust my arms in the air triumphantly and said, "Look Dada, I surfing!" Two ladies walking by saw me, and one started laughing. The other quickly stopped her saying, "don't laugh, that's how they learn". It must have sounded strange at the time and I am sure that my Dad, born and raised in Kansas, had no idea that in a few years he would be driving me up and down the coast every weekend for surf contests.

I didn't try surfing again until after twelve years of dancing and singing lessons and four years of competitive horseback riding, the summer before high school, when I was 13 years old. My uncle had an old 7' twin-fin from the 70s, in relatively good condition, hanging in the rafters of my grandparent's garage. I wanted it. It didn't take much to convince my uncle to let me have it, but it was over a year before my mom would agree. She still thinks that girls should be beach decoration; sitting on their towels in cute little bikinis, while the boys have all the fun in the surf. She would constantly say, "you don't want to be out competing with the boys, you aren't going to get any boyfriends that way." Fortunately, after months of begging and pleading, she realized that I wasn't going to give up, and she eventually agreed.

My best friend Lisa Tully borrowed a neighbor's board, bought a few bars of sex wax, and even though we had no clue what we were doing, we were stoked. We were also shy. We were afraid to look like the kooks that we were in front of all of the boys from our school. So we did the only thing we could think of, we went to the beach really early in the morning. Somehow, Lisa talked her sister into getting up at 4am to drive us to the beach. That way we could walk to Rat Beach, be in the water by 4:30, have a few hours to flounder in the shore break, and leave by 6:30 when all the "real" surfers arrived. It was a perfect plan and it worked wonderfully. No one ever saw all the nose-dives, we could pretend to be Lisa Anderson, and no one knew the difference. For the remainder of that summer, we only surfed in the dark.

I caught my first wave in the light he following spring at Waikiki during a trip to Hawaii with my family. I rented a huge 4" thick surfboard and rode my first wave all the way to the inside. This time, I didn't feel so bad about trying to surf in front of all the other people because it seemed like everyone else out there was just as much of a kook as I was.

That summer I decided that if I was going to surf in the daylight, I needed a new board. I bought a 6' hot pink T&C surfboard with four fins from a garage sale with $20 dollars that I had earned babysitting. I was stoked, but I still could barely stand up. Lisa and I took a camping trip to San Onofre with a few other girls who were also just learning how to surf. It was then that I caught that magical wave that addicted me to the sport forever. It was the second day of the trip, and until that time I had only been riding whitewash. All of my friends were on the beach with grumbling stomachs, waiting for me to come in so we could go back to the camp and make dinner. In the fading light, I paddled for a waist high wave, took off, and actually angled left. I rode the green face all the way to the beach, jumped off on the sand, stuck my arms out in the air triumphantly and yelled, "Did you see me? I was surfing!"

The rest of the summer, Lisa and I went to Rat Beach almost everyday. I don't think Lisa ever successfully stood up, but I have to admire her companionship. She would just lay on her board on the outside as I caught wave after wave, and I would paddle back out and say, "Did you see that one? I almost turned!"
At the end of that summer I entered my second year of high school. I found out that my school offered the option of taking PE first period at the beach. Two guys from my church heard that I had learned how to surf, and offered to give me a ride to the beach every morning to Surf/PE. Next to Lisa, they had the biggest impact on my improvement. They would go out everyday no matter how small, windy, cold, or choppy it was. Surf team try-outs were a month later, and they convinced me to try out for the team. To my surprise, the other girls weren't much better than I was, and I made the team. There were four other girls on the team, all of whom had been surfing much longer than I had, but they rarely went surfing. They usually sat on the beach and talked, if they even went to practice at all. Even though some of them were better than I was, the coach commended me for my determination, and let me surf in the first contest. I got second and improved steadily over the course of the year.

My natural competitive drive pushed me to find more intense competition. After the high school season ended in February, I tried surfing in the National Scholastic Surfing Association. In the first two contests I entered, I only beat one other girl. But, I didn't get discouraged, the losses just made me more determined to improve. I wanted to take home a trophy at the end of the day. So I laid off the rest of the NSSA season and went to work on improving my surfing. I surfed everyday, sometimes twice a day, as much as my Mom would let me. No matter what the waves were like I would always go surfing. I learned how to surf in all types of conditions. I immersed myself in surfing. I wallpapered my room with surfing posters, surfed all the surfing related web sites, and got a job at a surf shop.
The next fall (my Junior year in high school), I started surfing NSSA contests, and started to make the finals. I even won once. I ended the year ranked 5th in the NSSA Explorer season.

At the end of the next summer, some of my friends convinced me to answer an ad that said Rusty was looking for models. I went for an interview and got invited on a photo shoot to Cabo. I was the only one of the 4 models who could surf. I went out every morning with all the Rusty guys, and they decided to sponsor me. I got to go on more trips to Hawaii, and northern California on photo shoots.

I had so much fun traveling and surfing, but I never let my obsession interfere with school. I incorporated surfing in my education wherever possible. I wrote stories and poems about surfing for my English classes, researched the history of surfing and the Hawaiian Islands, and gave Spanish oral reports on imaginary surf trips to Costa Rica. Finally, I graduated from Peninsula High School with a 3.8 GPA and was accepted to UCSD, the most strategically located surf school in the country. Between Spanish and Calculus classes, my roommate and I can walk from our dorms down the cliff to Blacks and surf for hours.
Last summer my younger sister, Heidi, decided that she wanted to learn how to surf. I gave her a wetsuit I had won in a contest, and bought her a surfboard. I took her to the beach with me every day before school and coached her on how to paddle into a wave and stand up. Like Lisa, she mostly just sits on the outside and talks to the other surfers, but she always paddles out. It doesn't matter that she doesn't catch a lot of waves, she is out in the ocean, enjoying herself. It is great to be sponsored and to surf competitively, but not everyone can be a world champion. When I see how stoked Heidi is, just being in the ocean, I realize that that is what surfing is all about.