Surfing isn’t the first activity most amputees turn to for renewal. But once they try it, they almost never turn back.
by Mary Elizabeth Frandson
As Melanie Ebig rolled her wheelchair into the convenience store for her morning coffee, the clerk behind the register said, “You’re getting around really good in that.” Ebig smiled and said, “When it’s the only way you can get around, you adapt.”
The word adapt caught the attention of another customer who was standing nearby. He started up a conversation with Ebig, which led to a question that took her completely by surprise: “Why don’t you come out and give surfing a try?”
Ebig, who had recently lost her left leg below the knee in a motorcycle accident, hadn’t even learned to stand on a prosthesis yet. She had set a goal with her physical therapist to get back to playing sports with her three daughters, so she had taken up wheelchair basketball and adaptive biking. But those were adaptive versions of sports she loved before she got injured.
“I never thought I’d be a surfer when I had two legs,” Ebig says. “Now it’s one of my favorite things in the entire world.”
Ebig’s surf journey is a proxy for anyone who’s ready to reclaim their life after a setback. With the rise in adaptive surf programs on the Pacific, Atlantic, and Gulf coasts, amputees are experiencing surfing as a joy-filled access point to healing. Inclusive surf communities give people a sense of belonging and remind them that they’re much more than their disabilities.
The guy Ebig met in the convenience store was a volunteer with the Adaptive Surf Project, a nonprofit committed to radically reimagining who has access to water sports. The South Carolina-based organization operates on the belief that disability shouldn’t disqualify you from a chance “to dance with the ocean, in that sweet spot between control and surrender.”
Despite her self-doubts, Ebig accepted an invitation to attend an Adaptive Surf Project event. When she arrived at Cherry Grove Beach, she had no idea what to expect. The event was part of ASP’s Wheel to Surf series, which welcomes people with varying types of disabilities, including limb loss. Volunteers paddle out with first-time surfers to help them get comfortable with being in the ocean. About 70 participants ride the waves during a typical Wheel to Surf event.
While there are many ways surfing can be adapted to meet the needs of the surfer, the most common include prone surfing (lying on your stomach), prone-assisted surfing (an instructor pushes the surfer into a wave), tandem (the surfer and instructor share a board), and waveskiing (an adaptive surfboard that you steer with a kayak paddle). Ebig began by riding tandem with one of the volunteers, and from the moment she first caught the energy of a wave propelling her forward, she was hooked.
“The freedom you feel being on top of the water, it’s just awesome,” Ebig says. “When I’m on the surfboard, I don’t feel like I’m disabled because I’m out there right next to people that aren’t disabled. I can do some of the same things as them. That’s something I love.”
In the months that followed, Ebig became confident enough to surf on her own. Her experience became another way in which losing her leg has taught her lessons about her own strength.
“People will say, ‘I’m so sorry that happened to you,’” she observes. “I’m not. I get to see a whole different side of life that I never would have seen. If you ever get the opportunity to participate in an adaptive surfing event, do it. It’ll change your life. There’s no disability held back from participating. Where there’s a will, there’s a way—and you can always find the will in your heart.”
Healing What’s Broken
Shawnie Whitaker discovered the healing power of surfing long before he lost a limb. Growing up in abject poverty in the 1980s, he found refuge, freedom, and escape in the waves. Surfing gave him a sense of identity and belonging, the one place he felt sure of his footing. But at age 16, he was in a devastating car accident that left him with an estimated 5 percent chance of survival. When he emerged from a coma 28 days later, half his leg was gone—and his doctors told him he’d never surf again.
“That created a darkness in my heart,” Whitaker explains. “I was utterly heartbroken.”
The surf community he belonged to showed up with a tremendous outpouring of love and support. People came together to raise money with the aim of helping Whitaker find a way to get back on the water, a way back to himself. His friend Greg Geiselman, a world-renowned shaper with Orion Surfboards, walked into the hospital with a new board he’d made especially for Whitaker. “You’re not stopping,” Geiselman said. “You’re going to surf again.”
Sure enough, the following summer Whitaker got back into the water with a brand-new prosthetic leg and a fire in his heart. “I paddled out, even though I wasn’t supposed to,” he says. “My body was still healing, but I had to feel the water again.”
He caught his first wave and got up on the board, but his prosthesis slipped off and he slammed into a shallow sandbar. He heard a loud crack!—that was the femur on his amputated side, which had broken in half in the car accident. It was now fractured again, in three places, after his wipeout. “My mom and my doctor were devastated,” he says. “But that wave, that moment, reminded me who I was.”
Thirty years later Whitaker felt a similar sense of renewal when he met another surfer whose life was upended in adolescence: Charlie “Chaka” Webb. Growing up near Oceanside, California, Webb would occasionally open Surfer Magazine and see a feature spread about a guy sitting next to him in class. That’s the type of surf mecca he was raised in. “Surfing was going to be my life until I was 19,” he explains. Then, in 1986, he got into a motorcycle accident and suffered a spinal cord injury, becoming a T7-8 incomplete paraplegic.
“At the time, there really weren’t adaptive surfing programs,” Webb continues, “so I didn’t surf for about 25 years.” In the early 2010s, Steve Boehne from Infinity Surfboards got him up on a waveski, which eventually led Webb to adaptive surfing. He became the first paraplegic to compete in an open-water paddle race, then won the Western Surfing Association Adaptive Surfing Championship in 2015 and 2016.
Those triumphs inspired Webb to create the Stoke for Life Foundation, with the goal of helping more people with disabilities encounter the healing touch of the ocean. He left the security of his corporate job and put everything into building the nonprofit. “It was scary, but it was my destiny to do this,” Webb says. “It took a long time for me to embrace it, but this is what I’m supposed to be doing. I was an ocean baby most of my life, and if you can have a relationship with the water, which is a living thing…if you can give somebody a good experience in that, it ends up enhancing their quality of life and giving them a confidence they can bring outside the water to deal with the obstacles you have to overcome in a wheelchair or as an amputee.”
Whitaker met Webb in 2021 at the US Open Adaptive Surfing Championships, an event Webb had founded a few years prior. “My mom was sick at the time,” Whitaker says, “and my heart was wide open. Charlie and I connected deeply, and a beautiful friendship was born.”
The day of the competition, Whitaker learned that his mother had been moved into hospice. He immediately booked a ticket home and left the competition. As he was driving to the airport, his mom called and told him to turn around and go win the title.
“I remember being in the water, and Charlie hollering through the loudspeaker, ‘Shawnie Whitaker, you need a 4.9 to take the lead. You’ve got 48 seconds!’ I looked back out toward the horizon, and it was flat. Dead flat. I prayed, ‘Lord, please give me just one wave for my mom right now.’ I turned around, and there it was. Before I knew it, I was up and pumping on the perfect wave, riding it on the inside.”
When Whitaker made it back to the beach, he heard Webb’s voice over the loudspeaker: “Shawnie Whitaker: Congrats, man! You’re the 2021 US Open Adaptive Surfing champ!” Whitaker has served as a Stoke for Life ambassador ever since, giving other people with disabilities the chance to fall in love with surfing. “When you’re in the water, I don’t care if it’s an issue with a relationship, or the stress of bills, whatever the burden—it’s gone,” Whitaker says. “The ocean is your sanctuary. Everyone experiences brokenness. It’s about finding those things that help us heal.”
Yes, You Can
For Dana Cummings, surfing brings the sense of being whole. “It means being able to express myself and having that euphoric joy of riding waves,” he says. “There’s just nothing like it.”
Before he lost his left leg in a car accident in 2002, Cummings had only tried surfing once—and by his own admission, he failed at it miserably. So when he told his doctors that one of his rehab goals was to surf, they couldn’t quite wrap their heads around it. “They told me they didn’t think it was possible, and that just pissed me off,” Cummings laughs. “So I set out to prove them wrong, and to prove to myself that I was capable of anything.”
One week out of the hospital, he got together with an amputee surfer he’d met during his recovery. “He took me out, and I rode a couple of waves lying down, and I was stunned. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m actually riding a wave.’ The second day I stood up on my own. It was probably only a couple of seconds, but it felt like the longest wave in the world. And I just thought to myself, ‘Man, if I can do this, anybody can.’”
And so, in 2003, Cummings founded AmpSurf, a nonprofit that now has separate chapters in California, New England, New York, and the Pacific Northwest. Initially targeted exclusively to amputees, the program has grown to encompass people with all kinds of disabilities, including many disabled veterans and first responders. Every year, thousands of people get introduced to the sport at AmpSurf clinics. In addition, the organization is a primary partner in the Para Surf League, which sponsors international competitions on five continents.
“It’s become more than I ever imagined,” Cummings says. “The goal of adaptive surf therapy is to shift the focus from what people think we can’t do. The truth is, 99 percent of people think that surfing is something they could never do. And then you add to that whatever [disability] someone has, and it’s multiplied exponentially.”
The barriers to surfing are very real, but AmpSurf helps participants overcome them with a combination of instruction, encouragement, and adaptive equipment that’s tailored to each surfer’s needs. Amputees who can’t take their prosthetic legs into the ocean can learn to surf on their knees, or straddle a board with a handle in the middle of it and ride a wave while sitting. To Cummings, it doesn’t matter what card you’ve been dealt in life; he believes anybody can learn to surf, and the participants are often what inspires him the most. AmpSurf’s youngest participant was a four-year-old blind boy, and the oldest was an 87-year-old World War II veteran who was both blind and an amputee. “He was able to ride waves for two years before he passed away,” Cummings says.
The physical obstacles can always be solved, he adds, once people get past the mindset that they can’t surf. “We’re not trying to make Kelly Slaters out of them,” Cummings laughs, referring to the LeBron James of competitive surfing. “We’re just trying to give them the ability to adapt and see that they can be successful out there.” And that success, in turn, can give people the confidence to try other things in their lives. “Everybody will focus on our disabilities,” he says. “We get to send the message of what we can do.”
At 54, Cummings feels the wear and tear his body has incurred over two decades of surfing, but he still gets as much of a thrill from it as ever. “Being in the water is so therapeutic in and of itself,” he says. “Even when I get my butt handed to me, it’s okay because I still paddled out, and it beats sitting on the couch.”
For anyone who’s ever felt their life has been taken from them, the ocean offers a way to reclaim it. As more amputees take to the water, they find themselves on that same journey. They’re learning how surfing can return parts of their identities they’ve lost along the way. The ocean is really just holding up a mirror, showing them what’s alive within. From the sea, they’re drawing purpose and energy.
“If I had a superpower, it would be to fly,” says Melanie Ebig. “And the closest thing to flying is surfing.” Adaptive surfers generate waves of influence that extend far beyond their home breaks, teaching us that healing doesn’t have to be heavy. It can be salty, radical, fun, and full of stoke.
