Surfers are bearing witness to how climate change and human interventions are altering coastlines. One community in North Florida watched its revered waves disappear seemingly overnight.
By Michael Ando via the New York Times
ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — As a kid, Zander Morton grew up surfing some of the most storied waves in the American South.
Middles and Blowhole, as locals called the two surf spots inside Anastasia State Park, took the Atlantic’s energy and formed consistent, world-class waves that generations of surfers in St. Johns County in the 1990s grew up riding — a rare thing for Florida. Surfers like Morton talk about those waves with a reverence usually reserved for deities.
But they only do so in the past tense: The waves disappeared at the turn of the 21st century, almost overnight.
They are among the many surf breaks that have now vanished, an illustration of just how quickly terrain can change, if not disappear entirely, because of a complicated set of factors that affect waves: Deepwater canyons, shifting sand and human intervention along the beach in the forms of jetties, piers or engineering projects.
Like almost everything in St. Augustine’s history, the remarkable waves on that stretch of beach, which became popular in the 1960s, were ensconced in origin myths. Most people credit the interplay between storms that molded an ever-changing set of islands, work done by the Army Corps of Engineers, and bathymetry for creating two of the best waves on the East Coast.
“It was a destination,” said Walter Coker, a photojournalist who lived in St. Augustine for more than three decades and began surfing those waves in the 1970s. “There’s only a handful of spots in Florida that have that kind of status.”
In the past few decades, surfers like Morton and Coker have watched as the coastline in North Florida has changed. The fast-acting effects of erosion, powerful storms and rising sea levels have become intimately familiar to them.
That knowledge — unique to local surfers — has become indispensable to those who are forming a record of what was.
