Amy WoodsLeaders of Palm Beach County’s newest attraction say it is the largest surfing history museum in the world.
Behind the unassuming glass doors of a strip-mall storefront south of Forest Hill Boulevard, things start to get sick.
A balsa-wood twin fin measuring 10-feet-6-inches long hits visitors first. Designed by legendary shaper Bob Simmons in 1947, the “Spoon” is believed to be the oldest surfboard in Palm Beach County.
A seemingly endless row of sepia-toned photographs snapped in 1930s-era Miami Beach documents the popularity of paddling out decades before surfing took off conventionally. Courtesy of brothers Bill and Dudley Whitman, early pioneers who began on belly boards, the almost-100-year-old gallery chronicles them and their fervent followers.
A sweet silver dune buggy owned by East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame inductee Scott McCranels is raring to go in the back corner of a former retail space that now houses Palm Beach County’s newest attraction.
A quiver of 128 surfboards lines the perimeter, and a mind-blowing maze of weathered pallets weaves through 8,000 square feet, showcasing more than 80 storyboards that celebrate the sport.
“Surfing history is still being made,” said Tom Warnke, executive director of the Surfing Florida Museum, pointing to a framed blow-up of the February 2013 issue of Surfer magazine. “It’s not just about the old stuff.”
The issue featured a South Florida surfer on its cover for the first time. Beneath the epic image of Peter Mendia shooting a Hurricane Sandy-spawned tube hangs the signed Todd Proctor board the daredevil rode to nationwide fame.
At every turn in the Surfing Florida Museum, there is something to make someone exclaim “cowabunga,” such as the largest assemblage of Bill “Holmesy” Holmes surfboards in the country.
“Nobody has more Holmesys than we do,” Warnke said.
Jimmy Buffett donated a board
The originator of a radical hull called the “Sidewinder,” Holmes found waves of success with the innovation, and many a big kahuna barreled the creations to contest-winning victories.
Jimmy Buffett claims a section of the museum that fittingly faces the entertainment stage. Buffett, a seasoned surfer frequently seen waiting in the lineup at Reef Road in Palm Beach, donated a board before he died in 2023 bearing his unmistakable cursive chop.
All of the above – plus a groundswell of memorabilia, film reels and Kodachrome slides – can be experienced during the museum’s operating hours, currently noon to 4 pm Fridays through Sundays.
“We’d love to be open seven days a week, but that takes a lot of volunteers,” Warnke said.
Volunteers staff the museum and its impressive gift shop, which sells everything from hats and T-shirts to jewelry and purses to artwork and books. Proceeds benefit the nonprofit entity that evolved from the Palm Beach County Surfing History Project.
It started with a shipwreck
In 1965, the grounding of a giant freighter near the coast of Singer Island dynamically resulted in the formation of a killer break that attracted surfers from not only the region but also from around the state and across the country. Two of them, Corky Roche and Fred Salmon, religiously surfed “the ship,” as the spot was called.
During the three years the 440-foot Amaryllis hulked offshore, local photographer M.E. Gruber set up shop on the beach to capture the exploding scene. Gruber organized frequent slideshows of his work, usually set to music, and invited his teenage subjects to come watch them. He amassed an archive of local surf culture’s beginnings, 5,000 transparencies in all, prior to his death in 2007.
His family decided to give the collection to Salmon, who had become close friends with Gruber, on the condition that a charitable organization be formed. In 2008, Salmon helped bring 501(c)(3) status to the Palm Beach County Surfing History Project.
The Surfing Florida Museum had its debut exhibit in 2009 at the Community Foundation for Palm Beach and Martin Counties. Hundreds attended. After that, the museum acquired 72 panels of visual and written histories of the sport from Florida Atlantic University.
It has had 45 pop-up exhibits since then. The latest is The Richard and Pat Johnson Palm Beach County History Museum’s “Surfing Florida: A Photographic History,” which runs through October.
“Right now, our museum is the largest surfing history museum in the world,” Warnke said.
Palm Beach once banned surfing
Surfing has come quite a way from the ban slapped into place in 1964 by the Palm Beach Town Council. Citing unruly behavior by youths, officials in Riviera Beach and Palm Beach Shores quickly followed suit, fining surfers caught out on the water and confiscating their boards.
The Surf Fossils, notably led by Joel Daves, a lawyer who later would become a West Palm commissioner and mayor, fought the ban all the way to the Florida Supreme Court and won.
“The Surf Fossils were the most well-organized surfer club in the country,” Warnke said.
Patrons of “Surfing Florida: A Photographic History” can learn about the ill-fated injunction and misplaced stigma by reading the Surf Fossils panel, one of 50 in the showcase.
It has been a rip curl of a ride for the Surfing Florida Museum, which has bobbed from one location to the next until landing at the Shoppes at Palm Coast plaza on the south end of West Palm Beach.
Golf tournament fundraiser in October
Its first real venue was on U.S. 1 in Delray Beach in 2014 followed by a building on Park Avenue in Lake Park in 2016 and a suite in West Palm’s Elizabeth Avenue warehouse district in 2018.
In 2020, the contents were piled and stacked inside a barely navigable storage unit until the new rental agreement came together. On May 2, a six-hour beer- and music-filled grand opening party rang in the museum’s happily ever after.
The museum’s annual golf tournament, its largest fundraiser of the year, returns in October to The Park, the city’s golf course. A reception Oct. 4 kicks off a best-ball scramble on Oct. 5. Click here to register.
“Golf and surfing have a big crossover, including 11-time world champion from Florida Kelly Slater, now 52 and winning heats against pros half his age,” Warnke said.
Check out the Surfing Florida Museum:
Where: 7623 S. Dixie Highway, West Palm Beach
Note: Construction on the building’s exterior is ongoing, so the Surfing Florida Museum sign is temporarily down. Look for the museum in the northwest corner of the plaza behind Pollo Tropical, one block north of the new Trader Joe’s.
When: Noon to 4 pm Fridays through Sundays
Cost: Free with a $5 suggested donation
Information: www.surfingfloridamuseum.org
Amy’s byline has appeared in magazines and newspapers across the country in a career that has spanned from The Key West Citizen, where she was a reporter, to The Orange County Register in California, where she was a staff writer, to her editorships at The Palm Beach Post and The Coastal Star. She became an author in 2023 with the publication of “100 Things to Do in Jupiter Before You Die.” Her latest book is “Secret Palm Beach: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure.”
