Spotlight on Betsy Harris

Betsy and her partner, David Montgomery, operate a surf school out of Fernandina Beach, Florida. While running a surf school is no new news, Amelia Island currently only has two camps offering lessons. Betsy has created a unique niche for herself, and I wanted to find out how she’s managed to sculpt her life around surfing, so I asked.

What is important to you?

Aside from the usual family and friends? Appreciating this incredible life as the gift it is.

Promoting a more diverse image of surfing, especially the beauty in women’s surfing and logging. As in the rest of life, there is a lot of media influence in surf culture, and though there are more women and more mid-lengths and longboards in the line up, the majority of surf media is still focused on high performance shortboarding. Shortboarding is really cool, and there are loads of waves where it is the best or only option, but I think surfing only grows richer as we lose the stereotypes, both of board length and body type, and start embracing a broader image of what surfing is. Surfing is wave riding and it can be done by men and women, young and old, short or tall, big or small and on everything from your belly to an outrigger canoe. It’s all good fun, it all has it’s place and it all should be celebrated!

Treading lightly on this earth and protecting our natural resources. We are so blessed in Florida with our abundance of beaches, fresh water springs, rivers, lakes and forest, but almost every inch of this state is under threat of development or pollution or both. We’ve got a real treasure here and it deserves to be treated as such.

And of course, reopening Huguenot Memorial Park. Please, keep calling your City Councilmen!

What’s something no one would guess about you?

At home, I talk on behalf of my dog, Frankie, with his Southern drawl, so the rest of the family can know what is on his mind.

What do you feel is special about what you offer at Surf Asylum?

We’re in it to share our love of surfing. David and I, the owners, are the two main instructors, so we’re heavily invested in our customers experience. We offer one on one instruction for every student (our camps are capped at 10 surfers each week). This allows us to get to know our students, understand their strengths and weaknesses and make adjustments to the instruction accordingly. We coach on the assumption that each person is going to continue surfing after their lesson or camp, so we do our best to equip them with the right information, everything from how to read the ocean, choosing the right equipment to etiquette in the line up.

We’re proud to use boards from local shapers and have a variety of shapes and sizes to suit each persons unique ability.

Surf Asylum also promotes the idea that it is okay to take surfing as seriously as other sports. Surfing is fun, it can even be spiritual, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t train, eat right and set goals for yourself. Our spring and fall surf leagues are run much like any other sports camp.

We’re committed to community involvement, wether it’s helping out at our local ESA contest, coaching Special Olympics Surfing, or just organizing a fun free surf for some of our alumni. We couldn’t do what we are doing without the support of our community and it is our honor and privilege to be a part of a really great one.

What propelled you to start Surf Asylum?

I wanted to go to Puerto Rico for a month and was afraid to ask my then boss for the time off. Instead, I started planning for Surf Asylum, quit the job, went to PR, came back, offered up Surf Asylum to the community and thankfully, here we are. It’s been the most rewarding experience of my life.

What’s your most memorable experience thus far, running a surf camp?

Gosh, there are SO many! Every time someone gets a good wave, I get just as excited as the student! There’s more than one picture out there of a camper riding a wave to the beach with me, hands in the air, cheering in the background. Is there anything better than sharing your passion with others? I remember the excitement and awe of my first wave, seeing someone else experience it and knowing that I helped facilitate it is such a thrill.

I think the most memorable thing was winding down on the last day of the very first week of camp we ever did. We put an exhaustive amount of energy into the planning and execution, but at the end of the day, it still seemed like a pretty big roll of the dice to go out on our own. I had no idea if we would make it past the first summer. I remember all those smiling faces at the end of that fun, wave filled week and knowing then that we were exactly where we were supposed to be, doing what we were supposed to be doing. That’s a really great feeling.