Making Waves
Nantucket surfers Wynter and Kydon Larrabee compete internationally.
Written by Jonathan Soroff
Photography by Tavia O'Keefe
When the Larrabee brothers started surfing competitively on the West Coast, some of their opponents didn’t even know that Massachusetts was on the ocean. None of them are likely to forget it now. Fifth-generation Nantucketers, Kydon, 14, and Wynter, 16, have been collecting first-place titles in national competitions and stealing the thunder from surfers twice their age who come from surfing hotspots like Hawaii and Huntington Beach.
“I think Wynter and I are the first surfers from the Northeast in a really long time to try and take it to the next level,” said Kydon, who won three national titles last year: one in his age division and two in all-ages divisions (meaning that he was up against older, more experienced athletes).In surf-speak, both teens have graduated from being “grommets” to “rippers” in a very short time, putting Nantucket on the surfing map in the process. Although they were born in landlocked Arizona, Kydon and Wynter moved to Nantucket as toddlers and immediately took to the water.
“They did sailing camp, aviation camp, football, soccer, but ultimately the only thing they wanted to be doing once they were absolutely hooked was surfing,” said their mother, Shawna Larrabee.
The first time Kydon got on a surfboard came just before his third birthday. “It just really stuck,” he said. “It’s addictive.” Wynter added that he learned to swim before he could walk. “We’re watermen,” he said. “We do a lot more than conventional longboarding and shortboarding. We foil surf. We’ve done some kitesurfing, paddleboarding and bodysurfing. We also scuba, free-dive and sail—pretty much anything you can do on the water.”
The brothers learned to surf at the Nantucket Island Surf School on Cisco Beach, where Kydon now works. Its founder, Gary “Kona” Kohner, saw the boys’ potential and told their parents, “These kids have really got something.” Kohner should know. A native Nantucketer who started surfing in 1984, he’s traveled the world, chasing waves in the winter and running the surf school in the summer. “When Kydon was small, Gary noticed that his stance on the surfboard was really compressed. He was squatting, which gave him more balance and control over the board,” Wynter said.“ There were other kids my age surfing, but Kydon was definitely one of the youngest. When he was 4, he was surfing with kids twice his age and surfing better than a lot of them.”
Still, Kydon admits, “I struggled with a lot of fear until I was 8 or maybe 10. I was very afraid of big waves for a very long time. But I started to push past it, and now I’ve surfed places like Waimea Bay in Hawaii, which has 20-foot waves. I feel comfortable now, but it took me a long time to get my bearings."
Wynter, on the other hand, was “kind of fearless. I would go out into the bigger surf and get pounded, but I just loved it. I want to surf Nazaré in Portugal and Half Moon Bay in California. I’ve been doing breath training and other stuff to get ready to surf the big waves in Hawaii this winter.”
The season for surfing competition runs from June to August, and for the past several years, the pair has spent a lot of time training in Florida, as well as in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Hawaii and the Dominican Republic. To allow them to pursue their passion, the boys are homeschooled, and their father, Richard Larrabee, points out that surfing is a natural classroom.
"They’re eager learners, and they’ve picked up language skills,” Richard said. “They love math and reading. But from their love of the ocean, they’ve learned a lot about physics, with waves and the tides. Timing, wavelength, fetch, pitch. They watch the weather all the time. Topography. There’s a lot that goes into surfing, education-wise, and sometimes they don’t even realize that they’re learning. But to understand what the ocean’s going to do, they have to know a lot.”
By mid-June, the Larrabee brothers had competed in the USA Longboard Surfing Championships, with Kydon placing 7thand Wynter 10th. The shortboard trials took place at the end of June. More importantly to Richard and Shawna, though, was the fact that Kydon was given an award for best sportsmanship by USA Surfing. Ultimately, both Kydon and Wynter want to become astronauts and go to the International Space Station, so they’re also learning Russian. Kydon joked that his personal goal is to someday surf on Mars. But for the foreseeable future, they both hope to represent the U.S. in the 2032 Olympics, and to continue proving what a lot of people already know: Nantucket is an awesome place to catch a wave.
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