Coastal surf club reunites on IOP

ISLE OF PALMS -- Back in 1963, Mike Spencer made his first surfboard near the pier on Isle of Palms and, by his own admission, it wasn't very good.

"I couldn't afford to buy them, so I started making them," recalls Spencer, who had moved from Wrightsville Beach, N.C., to the Isle of Palms at about the time surfing first started to surface in the Charleston area.

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Carolina Coast Surf Club

Carolina Coast Surf Club, among the first to surf in Charleston in the mid-1960s, gathered for their annual Labor Day reunion, including all-day surfing Saturday and Sunday in front of the VFW on Ocean Boulevard on Isle of Palms.

After a stint in the Navy during the Vietnam War, Spencer walked into the famed Oak Street Surf Shop in Laguna Beach, Calif., and got a job shaping boards. He's been doing it ever since.

"Everything got better from there (Oak Street). I went to France and made boards. I wound up in Hawaii and traveled the world surfing," said Spencer, smiling. "I really had a lucky life and it all started on this beach and with these people."

The people he was referring to are the original members of the Carolina Coast Surf Club, which was celebrating its annual Labor Day weekend reunion on Saturday by, you guessed it, surfing. Spencer was the club's honored member this weekend for, as club co-founder Hal Coste said, "livin' the dream."

Coste and many of the most active members were among the first wave of surfers in the Charleston area. The group reconstituted in 2001 when one of the members saw a cable TV segment on a house that Coste renovated. She contacted him from California about getting the group back together.

As a result, Coste, "The Price sisters" -- Lucy, Sally and Nancy -- and Tom Proctor, who was living in Texas at the time, worked to find veteran surfers and to get the word out.

For some members, they had stopped surfing when they started families and jobs and have returned to surfing as their families have grown up and their careers wind down. Some, such as Nick Sottile, returned to surfing as a result of the club.

The membership grew and has leveled off with about 80 active, paying members, and an extended mailing list. Besides the reunion, the club does surfing-related volunteer work, raises money for scholarships and members have gone on surfing trips to Costa Rica and Cocoa Beach, Fla., which are not club-sponsored.

Proctor said that the club is not intended for old-timers but that they battle the stigma.

"In the water, it doesn't matter if you're 60 or 50 or 20," said Proctor, who lives primarily here now. "However, I do think it's safe to say we're a club that primarily rides longboards."

Among the members plying the waves on Saturday with veteran East Cooper surfers were 18-year-old Amiee Jette of Kingwood, Tex., and Michael Knotts, 55, of Summerville. The latter found out about the club through a web link for the Isle of Palms surf cam.

"When I joined up, my one concern was that they (the core members) all knew each other growing up and that it would be cliquish," Knotts said. "But they are the most welcoming, friendly group I've met."