The Perfect Wave

Noreasters, hail, hurricanes? Bring it! Summer surfing is for sissies, according to the diehards who’ve been hanging ten since the sixties.

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Welcome to Rhode Island Now go home reads the bumper sticker on Peter Pan’s mudbrown ’94 Dodge Caravan. It reflects the territorialism of locals who’ve been surfing Narragansett since the sixties: “This is our backyard. We Christopher Columbus-ed these breaks, we named them, we fought for access rights. Some of you Massholes wouldn’t even know about these spots if it weren’t for us. Now you’re crowding us, cutting us off and disregarding the pecking order. Besides, you belong in the soup — you’re too much of a kook to surf the peak. You’re just taking up space!”

So welcome to Rhode Island. Now go home.

Waves are the only constant in surfing. Everything else is ebb and flow: As board design evolves, so do the moves. And as Madison Avenue milks the ocean, the numbers and type of people attracted to surfing have sullied the water and pushed some locals to snarl “Surf where you live!” A board on an SUV rack says, “I might be an accountant by day, and yeah, I’m driving this on-road but you should see me in the water!” The paradox of successful branding? Like a hush-hideaway destination, once the word is leaked and the masses belly up to the bar, the patina is revealed. It’s not nirvana if you have to wait in line.

So you hunt for the perfect wave. You can have a series of twelve-foot barrels and a reef break, but it’s not sublime if you’re battling thirty other people to ride them.

Peter “Pan” Panagiotis, Mario Frade and Patrick McNulty have found the perfect wave — in their own backyard. They just have to wade through snow and paddle thirty-five-degree water to reach it. “The colder and nastier it is, the better because no one’s out,” says Pan, fifty-seven. “When there’s a blizzard, it’s great because there’s no one out. Narragansett is where I like to go on vacation.”

Pan, who grew up in Cranston and now lives in Pawtucket, is a five-foot, five-inch dervish. His family owns Gansett Juice surf shop in Narragansett, he teaches surfing, designs boards and surfs competitively for Hobie and Bic. He’s won numerous competitions and is commemorated in the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame as one of sixteen pioneers of East Coast surfing.

Winter was always endless summer for Pan, McNulty and Frade. Noreasters bring hurricane swells, so the waves can reach fifteen feet, compared to summer’s one- to two- footers. And as the surf builds, the crowds shrink. Back in the early sixties when the men started, the attitude was different. “People were having fun,” Pan says. “They were just happy to stand up and catch a wave. Today, everyone wants the best wave they can get, so it becomes more competitive.” 

There was an etiquette that is sometimes neglected today. It was tacitly understood that locals (who lived in the area) and natives (who were born in Narragansett) had a space in the lineup. If you paddle out and reach the furthest part of the peak (given you have the skills to surf there), you’re supposed to own that wave. “If someone drops in on you,” Pan says, “you have the right to run them over and knock them off their board.”

With tentacles of technology such as Internet forums, webcams and cell phones, people know where the waves are breaking and the coordinates of previously undisclosed spots. Frade used to get the surf report by looking out the top floor window of his house on Continental Street in Narragansett. He was one of the rare (some claim the only) New England surfers to attain “4A” status, the highest rating by the Eastern Surfing Association (ESA). In 1980, a motorcycle accident left him partially paralyzed on the right side of his body. His leg was rebuilt with steel rods, but his right arm was amputated above the elbow. He was determined to walk and to ride again. “Surfing is worse than any drug around; once it gets in your blood you can’t get it out,” he told a newspaper reporter two years after his accident. Today he rides a boogie board and is an ESA competition director.

“Narragansett Pier has been prostituted to people from New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut,” the fifty-one-year-old growls. “It’s been prostituted to their money. The wannabes have the cash to buy the equipment and the $20,000 vehicle to get to the beach, but then they get in the water and they’re completely clueless.”

Patrick McNulty, fifty-five, moved to Narragansett at the age of twelve and was soon winning championships for the Surfboards Hawaii Team of New England. Sergeant McNulty is a supervisor in the Organized Crime and Narcotics unit of the Providence police department. With a Navy Seal physique and blond buzzcut, if McNulty had pulled you over for speeding when he was on patrol, you wouldn’t have fed him a ‘But, officer’ mouthful of excuses.

“Us old-school guys are into the etiquette,” he says. “Most of the breaks in this area were surfed for the first time by us and named by us. People should know the history of the breaks. And you shouldn’t underestimate the guy next to you. Just because I’m on a longboard doesn’t mean I don’t have a right to be here. You wouldn’t even be at this break if it weren’t for us.”

Surfing migrated to California from Hawaii in 1907, brought stateside by teenagers whose military fathers had been stationed in the Pacific. By 1962, the sport had flown East. Frade, Pan and McNulty were hooked as soon as they walked on water. “It’s like the first time you have sex,” says Frade. “It’s something you know you like and want to do again.

You just want to make sure you’re safe and careful about it.”