On a Rising Swell: Surf Stories from Florida's Space Coast

by Dan Reiter

Overview

A high-speed glide through Florida surf culture and a deep dive into the lore of a classic surfing destination.

Not far from where the Apollo 11 rocket launched to the moon, surfers make their way to the shore in the night. Clutching their surfboards, they chase a familiar dream: more speed, more altitude, and going beyond the limits of what has been done before. For that, they want to be the first ones to catch the early morning waves.

In this book, Dan Reiter chronicles stories of the sport on Florida’s Space Coast, a region that has produced some of the world’s finest surf champions, Pipe masters, and surfboard builders. On this stretch of sand between Cape Canaveral and Sebastian Inlet, Florida’s surf history reaches back to the native Ais people of the Atlantic Coast and continues to the elites of today, including Kelly Slater, Caroline Marks, and CJ Hobgood. Reiter offers insights into the evolution of surfboard shaping and design, the distinctive culture of the East Coast surfboard industry, and the traits and traditions that make Florida surfing unique.

United by the background of Florida sun, soaring blue skies, and shifting sandbars, each one of this book’s eclectic chapters tells its own story of passion and pursuit. Weaving together history, personal experiences, and interviews with the greats, Reiter redefines surf literature and invites readers to share in the thrill of a rising swell.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813080970
Publisher:	University Press of Florida
Publication date:	04/29/2025
Pages:	174
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Dan Reiter lives in Cocoa Beach, Florida, on a dissolving barrier island. His surf writing has been featured in The Surfer’s Journal, Surfer Magazine, and Eastern Surf Magazine, and his short stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Tin House, and the Kenyon Review.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“On a Rising Swell whittles the entire balsa wood world of surfing down to its porous Florida core—a world in which criminals, artisans, and athletes come and go like hurricanes, beach breaks, and surfboards.”—Jason Katz, founding editor, Islandia Journal 

 

“Goes far beyond simple research and delves not only into the fascinating history of the Space Coast's surfing culture but into the very zeitgeist of the sport itself. This is the kind of book that could only be written by a member of this remarkable subculture, as well as a writer of great wit, intelligence, and a keen understanding of context. Essential reading to anyone who calls themselves a surfer or a sportsman.”—Matt George, author of In Deep: The Collected Surf Writings

“Every so often a writer bubbles from the substrata fully formed, handily entering what fellow surf scribes call the ‘meat eater’s club.’ This new Dan Reiter offering serves as an Exhibit A.”—Scott Hulet, editor, The Surfer’s Journal 

Editorial Reviews

03/17/2025

“We surf to remind ourselves that the only thing constant in this world is change,” Reiter writes in this love letter to the sport and lifestyle, a compact and inviting volume that blends history, memoir, and humor to capture perfectly sticky-hot summers off Florida’s Space Coast and the salty, restless waves that beat against it. His ability to conjure the coast can make it feel like we’re in the water with him, sitting on our boards as the rockets shoot off from Cape Canaveral. In brief essays, interviews, and rhapsodies, Reiter captures dashing across Route A1A to the water, sharing stories of surf champions, a taxonomy of spring breakers, and marvels like the waves at Ditch Plains: “long, long lefts … forming out by the rocks, curling around the point, and bowling through all the way into the beach.” Reiter illuminates surfing’s ancient origins and modern history, especially along this strip of the Atlantic that has inspired both board innovations and world-class surfers.

Ideal for the surfer fanatic or even the surf-curious, the book is filled with stories about the evolution of surfing culture over the last seventy years, persuasively demonstrating the beauty and terror that make the ocean so alluring. Alongside his own personal memories of “secret mini-shoals” and braving hurricane evacuations, he offers compelling portraits of surf legends from the 1950s to now, detailing how this stretch of Florida shaped them into the surfers they were.

Reiter peppers warm humor throughout, bringing a light touch to his celebration of a sport and culture that lives for “that instant when the sea rises up from behind, when nothing else matters but the drop.” The prose is intimate and charged with life, occasionally leaving it to non-experts to infer word meanings through context clues, while Reiter’s conversations with and profiles of Florida surfers capture not just thrilling rides but ways of life and drifts of mind.

Takeaway: Rousing celebration of surfing Florida’s Space Coast over decades.

Comparable Titles: Hunter Camp’s The Glide, Kai Lenny’s Big Wave Surfer.

Production grades Cover: A Design and typography: A Illustrations: A Editing: A Marketing copy: A

BookLife Reviews

Intimate and charged with life . . . Reiter’s conversations with and profiles of Florida surfers capture not just thrilling rides but ways of life and drifts of mind. . . . [A] rousing celebration of surfing Florida’s Space Coast over decades.”—Publishers Weekly, Editor’s Pick



“A surfing classic fit to sit beside John Long’s The Big Drop (1999) and William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days (2015).”—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

From the Publisher

★ 2025-03-06
An anecdotal history of surfing along Florida’s Atlantic coast.

Reiter opens his nonfiction debut with a sensual, almost elemental summary of the basic allure of surfing: “The coconut smell of surf wax, a wetsuit drip-drying in the sun, coffee vapor mingling with salt mist, the gleam and crackle of an outside set on a windless morning.” The author’s decades of enthusiastic surfing have left their mark on him: “Twenty years of brine, of salt marinade, of inhaling the sea’s musk, have permanently transformed me.” Reiter’s book, a collection of essays and vignettes on various aspects of this transformation and the activity that caused it, takes readers from the deep history of surfing to his own personal history with the sport to the deep connection between surfing and the Cocoa Beach area of Florida’s Brevard County. The loose structure of his narrative allows for frequent digressions about the eccentric people who populate the surfing world and the natural landscape of Cocoa Beach, with glances at remarkable weather events like Hurricane Frances (“a mere Category 2 at impact, but it was massive, and punishingly slow”). He intersperses comical asides about zany surfers or inept day-trippers (“easily the most abundant of all nonlocal species”) with broader social observations about Cocoa Beach, which bills itself as “a tropical, quaintly parochial town” that has nevertheless been home to some of the greatest surfers in the sport’s history. The author writes with warm, knowing affection for his cast of characters, including Kelly Slater, “the man who revolutionized a millennia-old sport” who’s dubbed by Reiter “the greatest surfer of all time.” The author does a thrilling job narrating the action of surfing big waves, but the main strength of the book is Reiter’s heartfelt appreciation of the natural world of the sport, the “brief Orphic hours” when Cocoa Beach surfers commune with the sea. He’s written a surfing classic fit to sit beside John Long’sThe Big Drop (1999) and William Finnegan’sBarbarian Days (2015).

A wonderfully colorful and inviting paean to Cocoa Beach surfing.

Kirkus Reviews