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March 11, 2009
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"You're not going to catch it good unless you live here,"
Sterling Spencer laughs. "All conditions will look perfect, but then it'll suck. And then sometimes, we'll just wake up and the surf will be good."
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"People don't realize how cold it gets here. We have to wear booties and hoods," Spencer said after waiting for nearly two months to collect sufficient photos for this feature. "The water gets down to 54 and the air will be in the 30s. But in the summer, it's one of the hottest places on earth. The water is in the 80s and the air is over 100." Florida's Gulf Coast is probably more noted for wild Spring Break revelers than top-level surfers. But Sterling Spencer comes from a long lineage of talented wave-riders. His dad, Yancy Spencer III won the first professional contest on the East Coast and is widely credited with putting Gulf surfing on the international map. His older brother, Yancy IV has been shredding for years and, at 22, Sterling is the lone Gulf Coaster emerging through the ranks. "I'm home whenever I can be," said Spencer, who travels for eight months of the year. "But, winter is the best time to score surf on the Gulf." Primarily, passing cold fronts (that only leave a tiny window to score after the wind turns offshore) generate Pensacola's surf. There is literally one day of clean surf before the energy subsides and conditions return to lake-like. "It's hard. A lot of the older guys with day jobs give up surfing eventually because they can't drop everything when that one day of offshore winds come."
-- Sterling Spencer
"It's hard. A lot of the older guys with day jobs give up surfing eventually because they can't drop everything when that one day of offshore winds come," Spencer admits. "The East Coast gets way more groundswell than us. We basically rely on windswell, unless it's a hurricane or a storm that formed at the bottom of the Gulf. Right off Pensacola is actually one of the deepest trenches in North America. We don't have a shelf like Texas does. It just comes up on shallow sandbars and gets pretty slammy." You can generally find the up-and-coming local talent like Spencer, Mikey Peyton, Graham Wade and others at the Pensacola Pier. Although, two hours east lies another surfing hotbed -- Panama City Beach. Panama City has bred the likes of aerial wizard/global wonderer Warren Smith and the two cities stand at ends (Think Santa Cruz and Huntington Beach). "There's a big rivalry. They don't like it when we come down there," Spencer reveals. "They get good waves but they don't get as much as we do. They do have jetties and stuff whereas we just have sandbars and a pier." "If it's small east swell, we all head to Pensacola because they get that direction more full on," admits Warren Smith, who relocated to California. "The characters in the lineup are basically the same as Panama City: leathered rednecks loaded with charisma, personality, hospitality and endless amounts of surf froth. And that's what I love about the Gulf." And when the cold winds of winter blow, surfers in Pensacola and other breaks along Florida's panhandle are glued to Surfline trying to find that perfect window to drop everything just to score a few hours of offshore barrels. Surfline forecaster and native Floridian, Jonathan Warren graduated from Florida State University with a degree in meteorology. He actually forecasted for the Panhandle for the FSU surf club/team. Warren raps about the fickle nature of the Gulf: "Cold fronts are one of the main wave producers for the Panhandle. To put it simply: you have increasing onshore winds and building southerly windswell/chop ahead of the front followed by the offshore winds and decreasing (but cleaned-up) windswell. Timing is key -- knowing when and where to be right when the winds switch offshore. This way, you maximize swell size when the surf finally starts to clean up." Check out Jonathan's Forecaster Blog for more on the Panhandle. Also, there's some valuable Panhandle info in Surfline Travel. MORE SURF NEWS SURFLINE HOME PAGE |