61.0°,
Mostly Cloudy The surfing starts in Long Beach
Filmmaker chronicles Long Island’s best waves
As a young man growing up in Massapequa Park, John Beattie often surfed in Long Beach and Gilgo Beach. But when he moved to Selden with his family in 1980, Beattie, who’s now 62, recalled, he had less time to ride the waves here, opting for the surf in Smith Point out of convenience.
“Once I got married in 1976, I surfed Long Beach exclusively because I lived in East Meadow,” said Beattie, a surgical physician assistant at Brookhaven Memorial Hospital Medical Center. “But when I was raising kids [in Selden], there wasn’t much time for me to go somewhere else. I didn’t really go back to the places I surfed when I was younger because it took too much time to go to Long Beach and Gilgo.”
That all changed when Beattie woke up early one morning in March 2007 and discovered that his right arm and leg were numb. “I knew I was having a stroke,” he recounted, “and I had my son drive me to the hospital, and my arm and leg became totally paralyzed.”
After a year and a half of therapy, Beattie yearned to get back in the water. Though he could not surf, he began filming local surfers and posting his videos on YouTube. The reaction to his footage from surfers was so great that they encouraged him to make a movie.
“I thought about what the theme would be and how I would do that,” he said. “I went back to streets that I used to surf when I was a kid. The first street I went with was Laurelton, and it’s still a popular place.”
Beattie began interviewing and filming surfers in Long Beach in 2010, and over the next three years he made his way east to Montauk, capturing some of the best surfing spots on Long Island. The result is “A Hundred Miles to the End,” which premieres at the Long Beach Public Library on Saturday to kick off SMASH Fest, a month-long festival series of surfing film and art events in the New York area.
In the 45-minute movie, Beattie revisits the places where he used to surf over nearly 48 years in the sport on Long Island. It features footage and interviews with some of New York’s best surfers, including Will Skudin, T.J. Gumiela and Balaram Stack, among others.
