Trick Or Treat
Crash The Coast Concludes On All Hallows Eve
by Zach Weisberg

The luminous jackolantern grins at me. He’s thinking what I’m thinking:

“I can’t believe we just pulled this off.”

It’s fitting too – the way SURFER’s Crash The Coast Trip has concluded, because Halloween marks a transition period into the cold with an eerie celebration - and in our case where the surf culture skips along as a mystery.

The surfers in New Hampshire warned us about Maine. They said, “This is kind of the end of the rainbow here. Once you start heading north the surfers become few and far between. It goes from ten miles between exits to twenty miles between exits.”

Ross Kunkel, Cinnamon Rainbows Employee said, “Those guys will come down from North Maine and grab a new board and wetsuit and we won’t see them again for another year.”

We had to get to the bottom of this.

We didn’t make it to that sketchy part of Maine they were talking about, but we did find a committed crew of surfers to show us around the area surrounding Higgins Beach and Portland.

“I think the strangeness is based around the fact that it’s incredibly empty,” says Northeast Firewire Rep, Chris Carey. “A lot of it has to do with the fact that the surf community in New Hampshire is so tight-knit that the further north you go in Maine the stranger the people are because you might run into a surfer up north who’s never surfed with more than three people.”

Sounds like a dream. But what I think might be the weirdest thing about Maine surfers is their authenticity. It’s refreshingly jarring, and exactly what our seafaring tribe desperately needs.

“I like it here in the sense that you don’t get a lot of egos,” says Carey. “You can go out anywhere pretty much and feel comfortable…You might not be able to pick a surfer out of a crowd here, because surfers here don’t really care about the gear – they just want to surf.”

It’s like we had found what we were searching for. Nevermind the lack of industry -  only once we got as far from a conventional surf town as we could imagine, did we really find one. Considering it was a freezing Halloween night, and the candy was spilling from the doorsteps – we had nothing left to do but celebrate.

Thanks to all of our gracious hosts and sponsors, We trekked for 17 days without spending a dime on a hotel room. East Coast surfers up and down the coast dropped everything at a moment’s notice and welcomed us into their homes and told us their stories. Look for the full feature in an upcoming issue of SURFER Magazine, and something tells me we’ll be back here soon!

- Zach Weisberg
Online Editor

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