By Tom Warnke:
Visitors to the Florida Natural History Museum in Gainesville or the Surfing Museum in Delray Beach see drawings made by Spanish explorers in the 1500s showing Florida’s Calusa Indians stand up paddling. This was hundreds of years before the Seminoles arrived in Florida, and paddles were the method of propulsion for dugout canoes, along with poles. Most of today’s paddlers will believe that stand-up paddling is a new activity, but there is a long history of many board sports in Florida, including stand-up paddleboards.
Paddlesports can include all human-powered craft. The earliest news article we can find about the new sport of “surfboarding” in Florida appeared in 1904. Panhandle news items described people building their own boards that long ago. The oldest known photograph of people surfing in Florida was taken at the Breakers Hotel Pier in Palm Beach in 1919. Solid redwood and pine surfboards were made here nearly 100 years ago, and surfers wore wool, full-coverage bathing suits, known as “bathing costumes.” By the 1930s, surfing contests were already being held, and most competitors used lifeguards’ hollow rescue boards. Surfing legend Gaulden Reed used his surfboard to catch tarpon at the Daytona Beach Pier. In the late 1940s surfboards were made of lightweight balsa wood covered with fiberglass cloth and resin, using technology the United States stole from Germany during World War II. This reduced the weight of a board to only 80 pounds, and a few years later the foam and fiberglass surfboard created surfing as we know it today.
Board sports created by surfers include skateboarding, snowboarding, bodyboarding, sailboarding, wakeboarding, and kiteboarding. They are the core sports of the X-Games. Today, SUP enthusiasts make up one of the fastest-growing watersports in the world, and SUP fishing has become a new extreme sports partner to kayak fishing. Of course, both methods of plying the waters are now eco-tourism mainstays.
Using the ocean for recreation in the United States happened around 1900, with surfing as one of the first ocean sports.
Tom Warnke is a Trustee and Historian for the Palm Beach County Surfing History Project and manages the Surfing Museum at 255 NE 6th Avenue in Delray Beach. Email Tom at trwarnke@hotmail.com for information about hours and museum tours. In April the Elliott Museum in Stuart, Fla. will host “Surfing Florida, A Photographic History,” an exhibit produced by Florida Atlantic University and owned by the Project. Additional info is at surfhistoryproject.org.