Surf’s up, and paddling along for the ride are a new group of shredders: the business class. While surf culture—the clothing and lingo—has long been mainstream, until recently the actual surfers were not: Mostly they represented the counter culture, a symbol of generational rebellion, from Gidget in the 1950s to the pot-smoking, Volkswagen-van-living ne’er-do-wells of the ’70s and ’80s. Now the sport has joined golf and fly-fishing as a favorite pastime for people who spend most of their day in the office. “So many older people are surfing, it doesn’t have an underground image anymore,” says Bob McKnight, founder and CEO of Quiksilver, which produces a line of clothing called Waterman aimed at older surfers.
In 2009, the average age of American surfers was 30.6 years, up from 2005, when the average age was 25.5, according to the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association. While that reflects the aging of the baby boomers who started the sport when they were young, it also shows there are more beginners: Overall, since 2007, the number of American surfers grew 9 percent, to 2.4 million people. Longtime surf instructor Tony Caramanico, who teaches in Montauk, N.Y., but travels with students wherever there are good waves, from Mexico to St. Barts, has noticed a big uptick over the past five years in clients who are middle-aged executives. He sees it as a yearning for an escape from the stress and pressure of their complicated lives. Girard Middleton, who runs SoBe Surf, a lodge and surf school in Cocoa Beach, Fla., agrees: “One of the basic rules for surviving in the ocean is to relax. You can’t be thinking about anything else. That immediately changes people’s perspective, especially those used to wearing suits, sitting in offices and drinking lots of coffee.” He says 35 percent of his students are over the age of 30.
