Bad weather brightens day for R.I. surf shops

SURFS UP: Pete Pan, co-owner of Narragansett Surf and Skate, says business doubles when a hurricane is near. / PBN PHOTO/JOE MCGOVERN
SURFS UP: Pete Pan, co-owner of Narragansett Surf and Skate, says business doubles when a hurricane is near. / PBN PHOTO/JOE MCGOVERN

Hurricane season often causes concern for many local businesses, but for Rhode Island’s surfers and surf shops, it can be the most wonderful time of the year.
The season has gotten off to a slower-than-usual start. “We do look forward to this time of year, because it produces some of the largest surf and strongest swells,” said Cheyne Cousens, manager at Island Surf & Sports in Middletown. “Usually by late August, we’ve seen at least something ride-able and with some decent size. Typically in the summer the surf is small, so everybody’s looking forward to whatever we can get.”
And so far this year, in terms of hurricane waves, surfers are getting a whole lot of nothing.
Contrast that with Hurricane Bill, in August 2009, which delivered several days of excellent swells under beautiful, blue skies. For a surf shop, those days are money in the bank.
“It’s wild, it’s crazy” on those days, said Tom Hogan, owner of Warm Winds Surf Shop in Narragansett. “On a day with hurricane waves it’s just people in and out. If it happens during October, people need gloves. Surfboards are getting broken. People forget where they have left things.”
The fall hurricane season provides an important shoulder for the state’s surf shops, whose steadiest season is the summer tourist season.
“The strongest season is the tourist season like everyone else on the coast,” said Bob Fox, owner of Matunuck Surf Shop in South Kingstown. “It’s a six-to-eight-week season, with schools getting out earlier and earlier.”
Fox spoke to the ambivalence surf-industry professionals often feel about hurricane season, in terms of the risks that the storms carry. “Everybody hopes for hurricanes,” he said, “but then we go get something like Sandy and we wish we never saw it. We like the storms that go 300-400 miles southeast of us. Hurricane Bill was a perfect example: beautiful, sunny days, five days of beautiful waves, and no damage to anyone.” For Hogan, at Warm Winds, Bill delivered the single greatest sales day in the store’s history. It helped that the hurricane spun its waves up during August, right in the middle of the high tourist season.
Tricia Pan, who works with her father, Rhode Island surf legend Peter Pan at the family’s store, Narragansett Surf & Skate, has noticed a predilection for lousy weather among members of the surf industry.
“We root for bad weather, as an average, just because anything unusual will also create more waves for us to enjoy personally, but it also creates more business,” Pan said. “The better surf creates damage and boards that we need to replace or repair and other equipment that has failed. Without inclement weather, we just don’t see much surf around here.”
According to weather.com, the latest first Atlantic hurricane in the satellite era was Gustav, which got declared a hurricane on Sept. 11, 2002. According to the National Hurricane Center, the average date of the first hurricane to form is Aug. 10.
Not all surf shop owners agree that hurricane season, whenever it starts, is all that big a deal. Chuck Barend, who owns Living Water Surf Shop in Little Compton is a skeptic. “It’s just part of the year, it can be good and bad,” he said. “Sometimes during hurricane season, there’s no power, so we can’t be open, like when Sandy hit. Some hurricanes are a dud, they don’t produce any surf. Every year is different. To be truthful, hurricane season is mostly just a lot of hype.”
Peter Pan has had a different experience. “If we have a hurricane, we have a lot of business,” he said, speaking by phone from a major surf-industry event in Florida. “We double the business, no problem.” Pan said short-lived swell events get people buying wax, leashes and odds and ends, and longer swell events see people buying new boards, which range in price from $300 to $1,200. Major Rhode Island wave events attract surfers from all over the East Coast and even Canada. Pan hasn’t seen much help from traveling surfers, when it comes to his bottom line, however. “Personally, I don’t think the traveling surfers really buy anything,” he said.
One period during which locals weren’t buying much of anything, though, was the recent recession.
Hogan’s Warm Winds, which started in 1983, grew steadily until that point. “Then in 2008, there was a little bit of a downturn,” Hogan said. “Everybody in the world experienced a downturn. Ours I don’t think was as serious as most. And it has definitely come back in the last few years.”
At least some surf shop owners, regardless of the season, have been struggling to match the prices that would-be surfers can find online, according to Barend of Living Water.
Where online behemoths can deliver a low price, that comes at the cost of service, Barend said. “We teach kids how to put their fins in their board the first time. We teach them how to put their leash on the board. We teach them how to wax the board. We teach them how to buy the right-size wetsuit, things that online sales don’t take into consideration.”
The state’s shops, to varying degrees, have come to accept customers who want to appear to be surfers, or at the very least to be connected to the lifestyle through what they wear.
“Most of our business comes from tourists who are visiting the area, and it is a lot of apparel and sandals and sunglasses,” said Cousens, of Island Surf & Sports. “What they call hard goods, surfboards and skateboards, is not making up the majority of sales.
“You do have the locals and the diehards who still support that end of the business for us,” Cousens said. •

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