Old Guys Surfing?
You Betcha!
By David Gibbons with photos from Michael Rovnyak, MJR Photography
It’s a little before 6 A.M. on a muggy late July morning, and I’m dragging my creaky bones out of bed in a tiny motel room in Montauk. The air is so heavy and fog-laden that it has left a blanket of huge droplets covering my SUV. I turn on my headlights and wipers and inch my way along the silent, steamy streets for a cup of coffee (to go) from Mr. John’s Pancake House, where the early crowd is just assembling. A big, warm, fuzzy glow from the east, in the direction of Montauk Point and its famous lighthouse, signals the sun’s efforts to burn through. Faint sloshing sounds carry on the humid air from the beach.
There’s no guarantee of any real surf and I doubt I’ll find time to jump in the water today, but I’m still pretty psyched — “stoked,” in surfing parlance. Why? Because I’m headed down past the jetty at Ditch Plains, scheduled to meet Ed Fawess and a few other local legends who are entered in the all-day ESA (Eastern Surfing Association) contest there. They are my role models, my sports heroes; they’re also regular nice guys, happy to share with you their passion for the sport and the joy it brings them — as long as you show up early, that is before they’re out chasing waves, before time stands still and nothing else matters but catching the next one and riding it in style.
Surfing is a young man’s sport. Its twin meccas are the pristine sands and glistening waves of California and Hawaii. Conditions up and down the Atlantic seaboard are spotty at best. These are a few of the “immutable truths” of the surfing world. Yet old guys who surf is not an oxymoron. Neither is East Coast surfing. In fact, there is a thriving, vibrant surf culture starting right here in New York City and extending out to Montauk at the eastern tip of Long Island. Some of its most passionate adherents and expert practitioners form a core group in the over-50 set. Prominent among them is Fawess, age 57, who has been entering and winning scontests since he was a teenager. Two of Fawess’s surfing buddies are Grant McClellan, 51, a contractor who lives on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and Tim Cominos, who turns 51 this month, a self-employed electrician and Queens native now based in Huntington, Long Island.
Cominos, the founding member of the Central Long Island chapter of the Surfrider Foundation (www.surfrider.org), is a gentle bear of a man who surfs two or three days a week from mid-May to late November. If the lithe, agile Fawess is a sports car out on the water, Cominos is a pickup truck. His family moved to Rockaway Beach 124th Street in the late ’60s, and he remembers surfing hurricane waves till his father came out and yelled at him to come home. He was part of a fraternity of young surfers, 11 and 12 years old.
“Growing up in Rockaway, I used to be able to roll over in my bed, look out the window, and see what the surf was doing,” he says. “If it was good, I’d get on my bike and ride around, waking up all my friends, so we could go surfing together. It was really wonderful. Now that window is my computer screen.”
The fickle nature of East Coast surfs renders the new Internet-based sources of information extremely useful. The first place that most committed local surfers go to check for waves is the Surfline Website, which provides beach webcams at key area breaks, and a wave forecasting model, among many other services for subscribers. The government’s NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has a Website that provides satellite images as well as wave heights and periods (the time between swells) from strategically positioned buoys along the coastline.
Grant McClellan, a former neighbor in the East Village, who keeps his weather radio constantly tuned to the marine- forecast loop, first introduced me to Cominos in the parking lot of Robert Moses State Park on Long Island. It was a blustery November day, with waves whipped up by a nor’easter. Cominos had peeled his wetsuit halfway off and was dousing himself with hot water from a giant thermos to warm up for the drive home. The antidote to this type of craziness, of course, is a trip to warmer climes. Fawess, McClellan, Comminos, and a modern-day fraternity of up to 25 New York surfers, most of them in their 40s and 50s, have instituted an annual trip to Costa Rica, which usually takes place in February, when the water temperature off Long Island drops into the upper 30s.
What is it about surfing that keeps these old guys coming back for more punishment? “You could give a thousand different answers,” says Cominos, “but basically once you’re stoked, once you’re hooked, there’s something really special about it … You spend how many minutes paddling out through the waves? Sometimes you get all beat up and it takes you 20 minutes to get outside. You catch one wave, it lasts 10 seconds. But that 10 seconds is way beyond any other thrill in life.”
After a good session, a euphoric, endorphin-fueled energy wells up from within. It’s a phenomenon you’ll hear described in as many different ways as there are surfers who can articulate it, and one that accounts for their virtually mystical devotion to this frequently difficult and demanding sport. “You feel exhausted, tired, extremely happy, and at peace with the world,” says Cominos.
“You know, it’s just a feeling of enjoying that you’re alive,” says Fawess. “It brings pure exhilaration, a cleansing, an energy, into your body. It’s a tough one to explain.”
McClellan’s in-laws retired to Hawaii, and he had his surfing epiphany on a family trip there in the mid-’90s, when he was 39 years old: “I’ve always loved the water; that’s my thing. I was a lifeguard, I taught swimming, and then I got involved in masters swimming. But when I’d see the surfers out there, I’d just look at them in awe. One day I went down to Waikiki and took a lesson. When I got up for the first time, that was it. It was like ‘Oh, my God!’ Once you catch your first wave, you never look back. It was all I wanted to do.”
When asked how surfing changed his life, McClellan replies, “That’s hard to tell. because you don’t know what your life would have been like without it. But it’s been a big focus for me ever since. It’s provided a lot of solace or peace in my life. A lot of crazy stuff can be going on and maybe you don’t feel good about certain things. But I know that when I get out on the water, I’m always going to feel good. You feel good about yourself, especially when you’re learning. You see yourself making these great leaps and bounds. It’s very exciting. As you get older, you don’t get that feeling so often.”
Surfin’ Eddie Fawess grew up in the Babylon area and learned to stand up on his styrofoam boogie board at Cedar Beach at a young age. “My mom drove us to Gilgo Beach one day in ’64,” he recalls. “When I walked over that dune and saw all those surfboards, I was hooked.” The competitive highlight of this winner of several East Coast amateur championships was in 1988, when he won the U.S. Amateur Championship in Hawaii, in a final heat against all Hawaiians. He stays active in competition, and this year has qualified for the Eastern Surfing Championships that are to take place at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, beginning September 23.
Most surfers face the challenge of finding a day job compatable with their habit. Fawess is proprietor of a small Sayville, Long Island, firm that manufactures counter tops, and says that after 35 years he’s developed some flexibility in his schedule: “I’m surfing more than ever. I go out as many times as there are good waves, which is at least a couple of times a week all year round.” Over the past few years, he’s taken up a fascinating and elegant sideline — tandem — with surfing partner Kim Romagnesi, who’s in her late 20s. Tandem surfing involves fancy moves and lifts, not unlike those performed by figure-skating and ice-dancing pairs.
Fawess reflects on surfing’s persistent allure:
“It keeps the kid alive inside of me, which is absolutely critical. A lot of adults lose that kid. It keeps my life in balance. It doesn’t lose any of its charisma or charm, it doesn’t grow old. There isn’t a surfer out there who can’t describe a particular day, a particular wave, a particular ride that he’ll remember forever. It can be as mellow and as tranquil as enjoying a day of surfing one- or two-footers with friends, all the way up to riding your life-threatening big waves.
“The other thing about it, which I haven’t heard many people speak of, is that surfing encompasses almost every other sport you can think of. Take hunting, for example. Some guys love to go hunting. As surfers, we hunt for waves. I’ve found there’s some aspect of each and every sport that you’re doing when you’re surfing.
“Surfing, to me, is a beautiful sport, an exciting one, and a dangerous one. It’s also an art form. You’re involved with nature. There are very few activities like that — maybe mountain-climbing or snow-skiing. In those sports, people get into nature but not on it. In surfing, we’re actually engulfed in it.
His advice for older surfers is to keep doing it: “You can’t not do it consistently and expect to get back what it gives in terms of fitness. I don’t think people realize until they actually do it -- whether it’s at the beginner level or as a life-long surfer — how physical it is. It’s amazing how it builds and tones your body.”
With his striking mane of silvery hair and far-off mariner’s gaze — perhaps reflexively scanning the horizon for coming swells -- Tony Caramanico, 57, is another instantly recognizable local legend. He started surfing at age 13, over Labor Day weekend, 1963, at Gilgo, which is almost directly across Long Island’s Great South Bay from his hometown of Amityville. At 21, in 1971, he moved to Montauk to surf, opening a surf shop, then a restaurant and a motel to pay the bills. Caramanico’s surfing career has spanned the globe, yet he always returns to his home breaks Out East.
“Back in the ‘Endless Summer’ days [mid- to late ’60s],” he says, “there were only a few places on the planet that people actually went to surf. Then it colonized the world. Now, for instance, in Indonesia, there are a hundred islands you can go to. I’ve been there a bunch of times, but I’ve still just scratched the surface. I love Bali, I love Costa Rica, and I have a place in the southern Caribbean that I love, although I don’t really want to give away which island it is.
“Montauk is also one of my favorite places. It has the most consistent wave on the East Coast. On average, I’d say there’s a surfable swell at least two or three days a week, year round, because of where we stick out off the continent. It’s just canted out enough that we pick up all the different swell directions and we can handle a lot of different wind directions.”
For Caramanico, often referred to as T.C., surfing’s allure merely begins with that initial adrenaline rush. “It develops into a really exciting lifestyle, and you just keep following it. Maybe you’ve heard the saying: ‘Do what you love and the rest will follow?’ Well, that’s what happened for me. It gets better every day and I’ve been doing it for over 40 years.
He has won competitions in four countries over five decades. His first title was the Gilgo Beach Surfing Championship in 1969. He went pro in his early 40s, winning his first contest at that level in 1991, around the time of the resurgence of longboarding, of which he is an acknowledged master. (For competitive purposes, a longboard is defined as being 2 feet or more in excess of the surfer’s height.) His line of TC longboards is manufactured by Channin, and he recently inked a contract to appear in ads and promotions for Prudential Real Estate.
Caramanico’s take on the rewards of wave-riding goes like this:
“First of all, it’s physically fulfilling. After a good day of surfing, you really feel you’ve worked out and you feel extremely clean from being in the salt water. You’re dog-tired, probably sunburned half to death, but inside you have so much of a different type of energy, and that’s what we call the ‘stoke’ of surfing. There’s nothing like it. It’s also very creative. Surfing is self-expression. It’s a dance with the sea. If you’re tapping into that level, it becomes even more rewarding.”
Some of Caramanico’s collage-like surf diaries, in the style of Peter Beard, who was his employer in the early ’80, are featured in the June-July 2007 issue (#61) of The Surfer’s Path magazine. Caramanico gives surfing lessons and sells his artwork and boards out of his studio-museum in Montauk. [To make an appointment, call him at (631) 921-6618.]
Charlie Bunger, Sr., 66, is considered an early pioneer of Long Island surfing. A native of Brooklyn who grew up in Lindenhurst, he was among a handful of hardy beach boys who, starting around 1961, led the prototypical surfers’ life, catching waves locally and also on trips out to Montauk, where they camped out and had bonfires on the beach. Bunger opened his surf shop on Main Street in Babylon the following year, paving the way for the rest of us.
“When I first went to this little bank in Lindenhurst to borrow money,” he recalls, “the guy said: ‘Surfboards? We don’t know anything about them. If you were making garbage cans or something like that, we could probably give you the money. But surfboards?’” Charlie eventually found the financing, and Bunger Surf Shop is still a thriving family business, a must-stop for New York surfers. “It was supposed to be a fad. That was 45 years ago.”
Most of the original Long Island pioneers are gone now; Bunger quit a few years ago owing to an injury and having got sick of the cold water. But a new generation frequents the shop, buying boards for themselves and their children. A custom-made Bunger board will set you back $700 to $800. Although son Tommy and Bob Hawkins do most of the manufacturing now, Charlie, Sr., still shapes the occasional board. He’s also thinking about getting back in the water at his winter home in another well-known surf spot -- Rincon, Puerto Rico.
Debbie Hodges is executive director of the Eastern Surfing Association, based in Virginia Beach, Virginia. This year marks the ESA’s 40th anniversary, and with nearly 11,000 members, more than 2,700 of whom are 50 or older, it is the largest amateur surfing organization in the world.
There are about 635 over-50 surfers registered competitively with the ESA, about a third of them women. “We’re like McDonald’s: we serve from 7 to 70,” says Ms. Hodges. “What makes it special is you’ve got the parents and kids involved. My husband and I are right at that golden age. Our kids are 27 and 29 and they surf. When they have kids, they’ll surf. So it’s a three-generation experience with the ESA. Everybody gets involved.”
To get involved yourself, pick up a board at Bunger’s, the Rockaway Beach Surf Shop, or the Atlantic Beach Surf Shop; take a trip out to Gilgo or the jetty at Rockaway Beach 84th Street (New York City’s only officially designated surfing spot); sign up for a lesson with T.C. in Montauk. Catch a wave and, as the Beach Boys told us way back in ’63, you’ll be “sittin’ on top of the world.”
David Gibbons, 50, took up surfing at the age of 40; other than skiing, it is his favorite hobby and he plans to keep paddling for the rest of his life.
