I entered my first surfing contest that year and placed second in the novice division. From that time forward I was hooked on riding waves and entered every event I could. It wasn't like it is today though with competitions every few weeks. There were only two contests back then in the sixties, The Labor Day Festival and the Easter event. These were great showcases of the times around our area because it was a chance to see hot surfers from around the state like Flea Shaw, the Roland brothers, Larry Minard and Bruce Clelland. Sure we had our own stars to look up to in Cocoa Beach like Claude Codgen, Bruce Valluzzi and Gary Propper but surfing with all those other guys expanded my perspective.Things were happening fast. I was doing pretty well and because of Dick Catri I got a chance to go to Peru and compete against their best and I became the first East Coast surfer to win a contest overseas.
I got sponsored by Dewey Weber, which turned out to be the pivotal point in my surfing career. Dewey was flying me back and forth to California, testing surfboard design shapes, and entering more contests. I don't know how but I was the point leader on both the East and West Coasts at the same time and was beating my idols like Dru Harrison and Mike Purpus.
Being from Florida usually meant competing in surf contests in small waves and you had to be aggressive. Growing up riding lots of crappy small waves does have its advantages though, and I learned a trick or two that no one from California was doing on a regular basis. I used this program to my advantage to win the Laguna Masters, which was the first West Coast contest won by an East Coaster. That maneuver was the nose turn; something I'd seen Tony Van Den Heuvel do in Peru. I'd take off going left and run to the nose but instead of trying to hold the left slide I'd stall my board and break the tail free. Then I'd use the loss of speed to turn my board right without leaving the hang-five position and would end up going right. I pulled off three of them, two in the finals.
The late Sixties; At that time in surfing history, boards began getting shorter thanks to fantastically innovative Aussies like Nat Young, Bob McTavish, Wayne Lynch, and Midget Farrelly. The entire world of surfing was experiencing a metamorphosis at that moment. It was a movement into a more radical, slash and tear type of expression. . I knew that short board surfing was for me. That was my direction. But the repercussion of the new school surfers at the time really had a negative effect on the surfing population in general because for the next twenty years it wasn't acceptable to ride the longboards. If you rode one you were branded a kook. Most of them disappeared into attics or were cut down to make shortboards. Thousands of surfers quit the sport. It just wasn't fun for them anymore. Today all that is different and longboard surfers have returned with delight, entire families enjoying the wave riding experience.
Something else happened around that time that had a huge influence on the sport. There was debate about who was actually the best surfer. Was it the guy who won the contests, or was it the soulful free surfer? The battle cry was propagated by the media and since I'd already satisfied any craving I had to prove myself in competition, I followed the latter philosophy and quit surfing contests all together. It sounds pretty cut and dry now when I say it like that, but there was much more to it then.
In the early seventies, I'd been surfing the Sunset Cliffs with Larry Gephardt, Steve Lis, Snow White and the crew and they got me hooked on Stevie's radical fish designs. Today anything that has a swallowtail can be called a fish, but back then a fish was a fish. It was basically a wide swallow twin fin kneeboard that was ridden standing up. The average lengths were less than 5'6"; mine was 5'2". The Fish performed like no other board I'd ever ridden and there was simply no way to compare fish surfing to any other regular board at that time. It strongly reinforced my decision to quit contest surfing.
Since I was getting paid to surf by Dewey Weber I decided to take my weekly check and continue traveling around the world. My partner in these nefarious adventures was Bruce Valluzzi, my brother in surfing. He was a great Floridian surfer and international traveler. Over a period of years we explored and discovered un-surfed classic spots in France, Spain, Portugal, and Morocco; doing the same things that others like Kevin Naughton and Craig Peterson were doing. It's just that we didn't have the camera or even care about recording it for the rest of the world. It was precious enough for us just being there and doing it alone. All we took away were memories. That's how we felt back then but it was utterly idiotic in retrospect. I wish now that we had documented what we saw. In that era of the early 70's we also traveled to Australia, South Africa, and South America.
that I met Alice. She became my traveling partner and wife. And we set out on the road for years on end. Eventually we went through South Africa in 1992, for four months, and fell totally in love with the place and had to finally settle in there.
From the mid seventies until the late eighties I built Tabeling Surfboards. And in the 80's the business marked an end to my super long world surfing trips due to the responsibilities of my family and work. I missed those days but still continued traveling finding that the "stays" were much shorter.
I'd lost two friends who died in the prime of their lives, Bruce Valuzzi,and Dave Smith. It reminded me of my own fragile vulnerability and decided that I would follow my dreams to the fullest because my day could come as easily as it did to my best buddies. It was absolutely the sole reason that I decided to move my whole family to South Africa while I could still do it. That's how it happened and why I was so blessed to move half way around the world to live in my dream surf spot. I started surfing contests again there and became the South African shortboard champ in 1992 and the short and longboard champs in 1992.
I built a three story home smack dab in the middle of Surfers Point near a section of Supertubes named Impossibles. I called our home the "Impossibles Dream". Because of its location I was inundated with friends who came to town and rented the vacation flat I'd built over the garage. It was especially advantageous to the pros that came to surf the Billabong contest each year because we were close enough to hear the horns separating the heats.
I learned to fly airplanes in America and held a twin-engine retractable gear rating, to fly to nearby Carribean Islands it wasn't until I learned to fly motor less Para gliders in Africa that I truly fell in love with flying. The fact that one has to use Mother Nature's power to do ride the warm thermals up to the clouds reminded me of how surfers use ocean waves. Thermaling is like tube riding. Unfortunately I had a wicked accident, which rearranged my body, but as bad as that might sound it was worth it. We are only given a few short years to play on this earth and like the saying goes "If you aren't living on the edge you're taking up too much space". After recovering from the accident I went on to become an instructor and won the year long cross-country title for the Eastern Province
The ever restless Mike Tabeling moved back to Florida for a few years and now resides in Southern California where he is national sales manager for a surfboard company.
