Flagler Beach is Heading Back to Surfing’s Roots

Photography by Dustin Miller, words by Mike Adno.

On the Palm Coast of Florida, vast stands of pine spill into oak hammocks that border the dunes along the Atlantic Ocean.

It’s what most Floridians fantasise the place looked like before condominiums swallowed everything up. And here in Flagler Beach, with its curio shops and wooden pier, there’s still the scent of what Florida once was hanging in the air. The surf community here seems to reflect that, in that it’s a far cry from the rest of America’s surf culture.

Flagler is home to a tight-knit group of young kids devoted to a sub-sect of traditional surfing. They build their own boards, make art, play music, and seem to reveal part of Florida’s emphasis on understatement. In a deeply conservative stretch of the state, where most surfers could care less about the sport’s history, these kids who don’t care about anything either are hellbent on retaining some part of what surfing once was.

For decades, surfing has grown more and more commercial, performance preferred to style, machismo over eloquence. And since its magnetic centre jumped from Waikiki to Malibu 60 years ago, the sport edged further away from a cultural practice and toward a recreational one.

When you walk into Ryan and Pat Conklin’s home, set between the Atlantic and the Halifax River, surfboards are strung around the house like a garland. The place is a fucking mess. In one room, they’re shaping surfboards, and in another, they’re glassing them. The place almost hums as you approach, and there’s a rotating cast of utility vans in its driveway.

Among them, Saxon Wilson, the most successful professional surfer in the crew, is just back from South Africa, alongside Skye Blumenfeld and Jake Loftus. Barefoot and itinerant, it might surprise you that the suitcases laying around the house are set to leave for the Basque Country tomorrow. These kids are part and parcel of what surfing once was—and yet they’re also an indication of where it’s headed.

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