Inside Florida’s Micro-Wave Masters: Hot Dogging Knee-High Cape Canaveral Peelers

It takes a peculiar sort of optimism to plan a surf contest in Florida in the middle of summertime. For all the wave action this part of the Atlantic sees in July, you might as well try to chase swell in the Everglades. Yet somehow, for eight summers running, Dennis Griffin has drawn some of the world’s finest longboarders to Cape Canaveral for his vintage log contest––Hot Dogz on a Stix––and every year, clean little miracles have materialized out of the steam and flatness.

 “I call it a good karma event,” Dennis tells SURFER. “We’ve had fun waves every year.”

The air is still crisp in the first pink light, the wind a gentle luff out of the west. Sleepy-eyed locals lay out their longboards and umbrellas and settle into pleasant, fragrant conversation. Bob Dylan croons “John Wesley Harding” under the tents. An idyllic Florida morning, all told… whether the waves are “fun” is a matter for debate. A swell of 1.5 @ 9 seconds is lapping anemically on the beach. The tide is too pulled out, and one of the dawn patrol ripple bandits has already knocked his fin off in the shorebreak and is carrying it like an injured animal up the wrack line.

Saxon Wilson, a three-time Hot Dogz on a Stix winner, is waxing up his ’67 Hansen longboard, a sunflower-and-white 9’3” stylish piece with original art nouveau graphics. (All eligible boards must be built pre-1968.) Saxon recently returned home from a surf trip to Japan with Tosh Tudor and is talking about going to Teahupo’o next week, but when a thigh-high left stands up on the inside sandbar, he goes up on his toes and says, without a drop of irony, “The waves are firing over here!”

To be a Florida surfer is to froth over the most worthless conditions––fizzle, chop, sideslop crap, closeouts, even swamped-out days like this, when it is, for all intents and purposes, flat. It’s precisely this tilting-at-windmills instinct––this ethos of desperation that makes Saxon Wilson perk up when a micro wave goes peeling off in two feet of water––that defines the Florida surfer (and creates more world champions per capita than anywhere else in the world).

“Pickiness kills,” Saxon explains.

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Cocoa Beach’s latest logging prodigy, Gavin Idone, has pulled a ’67 Wind an Sea model out for the contest: 9’8”, a deep-gloss ripe-cherry red with bladed-out rails and a footlong, raky, ruby-colored fin. He is sporting a pair of stars-and-stripes trunks that he picked up at a thrift shop yesterday. “I’m sponsored by Goodwill,” he quips.

Some things you won’t see on this stretch of beach: sponsor banners, corporate logos, soft tops, litter. The crowd is young, 20-somethings mostly, but strangely enough, none of them seem to be on their phones. The whole scene is a throwback to a more innocent, analog age, before our digital overlords started stamping messages deep into our brainpans.

“The youth just need to boycott anything corporate,” Dennis suggests. You won’t see any soft tops at Dennis’ surf shop, either. Core Surf––the Bird’s Surf Shed of the East Coast––is one of the last old-school anti-corporate holdouts, a trove of nostalgia and history, a place when you can read Florida surf lore in the rafters. Tabeling, Propper, Catri, Loehr, Crawford, DCB, O’Hare, Salick, Kechele, Slater, Hobgood, Marks…

The rising crop of Florida longboarders owe much of their riding style to Core Surf’s influence. “Dennis was a huge inspiration to me growing up as a kid,” says Saxon. “Hanging out in his shop, getting me on different boards.”

For competitors not slinging their own sticks today, there are loaners on the beach, all of them north of 30 pounds, thick, with round rails, low rocker, and massive hatchets or D fins set all way back off the tail. “These heavy boards are hard to ride,” Dennis says. “You need to be more tactical with positioning. Put your weight and pressures on the right spots at the right times. When you don’t do things right, they send you swimming. They’re silent teachers.”

The horn blows for the first heat. It’s too shallow, too tiny, closing out. None of that matters. Saxon strolls out and promptly conjures two noserides out of empty space, cutting the highest, smoothest lines imaginable, riding these wrinkles better than you could mind surf them.

Growing up in Florida teaches you precision, speed, nuance of positioning, and a knack for finding the most efficient pockets of energy in the weakest of surf. It’s no wonder, then, what happens when you get Floridians on real waves.

The tide begins to push in, and for an hour or so the sandbar actually looks fun. Gavin wrangles three hang-fives on a single knee-high wave, with a step-off dismount onto dry sand. The other competitors are holding their own––so many underground rippers on the Space Coast––but by the look of things, a Saxon/ Gavin final seems inevitable.

After lunch, an onshore wind comes on quickly, as it tends to in these parts, and transforms the lineup into a ruffled-up mess. Unfazed, the East Coasters ease out noseride after noseride, as if the deteriorating conditions are actually sharpening their focus. Their elegance of line, their composure, is what soccer fans could only call ‘class,’ or ‘quality.’

With a minute left in the final and Saxon holding a razor-thin lead over Gavin, the last wave of the day rolls in, if this bit of side chop can be called a wave. Both surfers paddle for it, but at the last moment Saxon gives Gavin the nod, setting up a fitting finish for the surfer sponsored by Goodwill.

Gavin fades, whips into trim, and locks into a critical hang ten. The noseride is too long to be real… he holds it all the way to the beach, all the way up the sand, all the way past the crowd, over the dune line, and then, drifting upward, he holds it until he and his cherry-red 1967 Wind an Sea board are just a dreamy speck on the hot blue Florida sky.

Related: Inside Kelly Slater’s “Best Win of My Life” at Pipeline

For more on why Floridians surf better than you, pick up a copy of Dan Reiter’s ‘On a Rising Swell, Surf Stories from Florida’s Space Coast.’