Surfing Santas draw thousands to Cocoa Beach
COCOA BEACH — There is no official record category for a Surfing Santas event.
If there were, Cocoa Beach probably could have claimed it Thursday at the seventh annual Surfing Santas event, held just off Minutemen Causeway. Organizers distributed 500 wristbands to people who wished to ride out and surf dressed as St. Nick.
But if there was a category for a community getting together on a balmy Christmas Eve morning to show enthusiasm, generosity, fun, Christmas spirit and yes, quirkiness — one couple was carrying around a black chicken named Muppet for goodness sake — Cocoa Beach probably would take home that record as well.
Consider there were an estimated 6,000 people, both
And there was "Balsa Bill" Yerkes, on a stage near a wall of various-sized
"This is so cool," one woman screamed as she took in the atmospherics of the morning.
"I feel like we're extras in a movie," said Todd McGill, who along with his wife, Belinda, were visiting from Ithaca, N.Y.
They decided to see what a Cocoa Beach Christmas looks like. After they saw it, they were unsure how they were going to describe to their friends in upstate New York.
"This is unbelievable," McGill said. "I've never seen anything like it."
Neither had Norm Myers of Coventry, Conn., who was in Florida to watch his son, Tommy, a tight end at the University of Connecticut, play Marshall University in the St. Petersburg Bowl on Saturday.
Myers isn't a surfer and had no plans to join the hundreds of surfing Santas in the somewhat choppy ocean. He did, however, don a full Santa suit and enjoyed hamming it up as people took his photo next to
"I'm here to have fun," Myers said. "This is spectacular. What a way to celebrate Christmas."
Few people Thursday probably were happier than George Trosset, who founded and organized the first Surfing Santas event at his beach house a few miles south of Minutemen Causeway. Each year it grew a little bigger and Trosset started using it to raise money for a local cancer support group called Grind for Life as well as the Cocoa Beach Surf Museum.
It got so popular that Trosset had to move the venue from his house to the beach off Minutemen.
Last year, the Cocoa Beach event raised more than $10,000, mostly through the sale of Surfing Santas T-shirts. No word yet on how much was raised at this year's event, but sales of the T-shirts appeared brisk.
One goal of Trosset's has been to get the famed Guinness Book of World Records to recognize the event. Guinness, however, doesn't have a category for Surfing Santas. Last week, an Australian/New Zealand online gift retailer called RedBalloon found a loophole of sorts.
They organized the world's largest "surfing lesson" at Bondi Beach, a suburb of Sydney, Australia. On Dec. 15, RedBalloon had all the participants — 320 surfing "students" — don Santa attire. Guinness bit and handed them a record.
"The Australians aren't holding it very long, I know that," Trosset said, just before emcee, Hunter
Unofficially, Trosset has spent the last year researching various Surfing Santa events around
Cocoa Beach Mayor Dave Netterstrom added to the festivities, and the quirkiness, by donning a shiny gold suit and Santa Claus hat and posing for dozens of photos. Netterstrom said his first visit to Cocoa Beach was 40 years ago and he remembers how enjoyable it was for him and his siblings to see someone dressed as Santa Claus walking the beach.
Thursday there were hundreds of them — walking,
"Cocoa Beach,
Follow Wayne T. Price and Michelle