University of Delaware junior Jennifer Abrams is hoping for the ride of her life when she makes a run at the Eastern Surfing Association’s Eastern Surfing Championships, to be held Sept. 18-24 at Cape Hatteras, N.C.

Abrams, a history major from Seaford, Del., who has been surfing since age 12, earned the right to compete for the title by winning the women’s division of the ESA’s Mid-Atlantic Regionals held in mid-May in her home waters at Ocean City, Md.

At the Easterns, Abrams will be competing against the finest surfers on the East Coast, a region that is currently producing some of the most accomplished wave riders in the world.

“You try to do what the judges want you to do,” Abrams says of competitive surfing. “They will be looking for powerful maneuvers and surfers who can paddle well and paddle strong. And, a lot of it comes down to picking good waves. You want to be in the right spot at the right time so you can get the right wave.”

Abrams says she believes her greatest asset is the experience gained from years and years of riding as often as possible, even bolting the UD campus on weekends during the winter months in search of solid, if icy cold, waves.

Abrams says she picked up the sport at age 12 after months of asking her father, Wally, himself a veteran competitive surfer, for lessons. “I had been bugging him to teach me,” she says, and he finally relented, first pushing her onto small waves on a longboard.

For her, it was the start of a love affair with a sport that is rapidly gaining momentum worldwide. “Something about surfing makes the experience so different from everything else,” Abrams says. “It is an extreme sport, and you are using the world itself in the form of the ocean. You can’t control it; you can just use it to the best of your abilities.”

Although surfing provides an exceptionally dramatic sensation for the rider, it also requires a great deal of athletic ability. “Athletically, it is an awesome sport,” Abrams says. “The paddling is like swimming, and you have to have leg strength, arm strength, coordination and balance. It can be frustrating at first, but once you get it, it is so fun.”

Soon after the first assisted ride, Abrams started surfing on her own using a shortboard. After about a month, she was able to stand up and ride nearly every wave that came along, and by the end of her second year in the water, she was ready for competitive surfing.

After several second-place finishes, Abrams, who concedes she is still developing and improving, won regionals for the first time this year.

An early graduate of Seaford High School, Abrams thought about taking a surfing career track but decided she wanted the college experience and so enrolled at UD. Still, she surfs throughout the year, during the summer whenever she is not working at the Dough Roller restaurant on the Boardwalk in Ocean City and weekends when UD is in session.

Asked about her practice sessions, Abrams says, “Practice? It’s not like I go practice. I just go surfing.”

Surfing is not only difficult to learn, with riders jumping on a less-than-stable board that, in turn, is gliding over moving water, but poses certain hazards, even to experienced riders. “The biggest dangers are your own board or other people’s boards,” Abrams says, adding that bumps, bruises and sand scrapes from tumbling into shallow water are other annoyances.

For her, the worst thing is the “ice cream headache” from surfing in frigid water. “Those are worse than getting hit by a board,” she says.

Abrams’ abilities have earned her several sponsorships, including Roxy, K Coast surf shops, Matt Kechele Surfboards and Silver Girl jewelry.

They also have provided her opportunities to surf in California, Hawaii, Coast Rica and Australia. “That’s another great thing about the sport,” she says. “It allows you to travel all over the world. My favorite spot was Australia. It was just amazing, and I want to go back there.”

Abrams says she believes surfing is in the midst of a renaissance. “Everyone is interested in surfing,” she says. “You see kids wearing the surfing clothing brands, listening to the music and wearing shaggy surfing haircuts. You see surfing in movies and in commercials. It is definitely huge and every year it seems to get bigger and bigger.”

—Neil Thomas, AS ’76