A Free Surf Camp in Queens Teaches Kids to Stand Tall on the Ocean

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When summer arrives, 13-year-old Richard Yu most looks forward to his weekend mornings.

He rises to arrive around 9 a.m. at a canary yellow tent set up on the sand just beyond the boardwalk at Beach 67th Street. It beckons the Rockaway resident to the beach, where for the last four years he’s attended free surf camp with a local nonprofit called the Laru Beya Collective.

“Every day out here, it’s fun, it’s chill, it’s relaxing,” Yu said on a recent Saturday, as he applied sunscreen to his face. “Everyone just kind of vibes along and just surfs.”

Laru Beya means “on the beach” in the language of the Garifuna, Afro-Indigenous people from the Caribbean and Central America. Aydon Gabourel, a longtime Rockaway resident, established the organization with his cousin in 2018 to provide free surf camps for the kids of Rockaway — starting with his own daughter, then 10, and her friends. They’d wanted to learn to surf, but the camps in the area were prohibitively expensive.

“We’re providing access to youth who wouldn’t ordinarily have the opportunity because of the money,” Gabourel said. “We provide everything the surf camps do, and more.”

Over two six-week sessions on summer weekends, more than 100 kids as young as 8 years old  learn how to surf. They wear yellow shirts to distinguish them from the “mentors,” volunteers in royal blue shirts. The kids can stay in the program until they go to college, and about 95% of them do, Gabourel said. Everything, including the wetsuits, boards, snacks and instruction, is free.

Laru Beya lives on throughout the year, offering homework help, camping and rock climbing trips, snowboarding opportunities and visits to the indoor wave pool at the American Dream mall in New Jersey. But the summer is the highlight, when Laru Beya’s mission manifests and the kids take ownership of what’s in their backyard.

“‘You were born here,’” Gabourel said he tells the students. “‘You go out there and you take your waves.’”

Swell of Confidence

A few years ago, Gabourel heard about Yu, then a much smaller boy who was helping his parents at the local dry cleaner they own. Gabourel visited the store, introduced himself and got Yu involved with Laru Beya.

“I had really nothing to do that summer, honestly,” Yu said. But since then, his summers have been dedicated to leveling up his surf game and “trying to get more confident in those bigger waves.”

The weekend session began with intermediate and advanced students like Yu, who, after a warm-up and some time collecting pieces of trash on the sand, entered the sea carrying blue and sun-faded yellow foam boards.

In the water, the kids whooped and grinned, even when they fell off their boards, limbs flailing. Some caught waves but didn’t stand up, and instead rode from their knees or stomach. Volunteers on the beach kept an eye out and cheered them on; instructors in the water gave pointers.

“They let you catch your own waves and think for yourselves,” said Arianna Williams, 11, a Rockaway resident, of the group’s teachers. She remembered how she used to be scared of the big waves — and the possibility of sharks — when she first started four years ago.

“All the medium waves that don’t look big now looked big before, but now it’s all chill and cool,” she said.

Wave Etiquette

Before they hit the water, the kids received a lesson on land.

Wearing sunglasses and a bucket hat, Coach Dave Caperna sat cross legged before the kids and used a whiteboard to go over wave anatomy and the kinds of breaks they might encounter — reef breaks, point breaks and beach breaks.

Caperna, who works in real estate and has been volunteering with Laru Beya for four summers, balanced the technical aspects of surfing with messages promoting conscientiousness and overall positivity.

“The best surfer in the water is the one creating the most fun for everybody,” he said. “Keep the vibes happy and treat this place like it’s a community.”

He also reviewed surfing etiquette, emphasizing how the kids should be respectful as well as assertive in the water: communicating with fellow surfers, avoiding taking a wave out of turn and paddling out of the way of others.

He acknowledged that the kids might make mistakes, and when they do, they should respond with eye contact, a smile and an apology. But if someone else makes a mistake, the kids should shoot them a dirty look, Caperna said, half-jokingly — then quickly ask if they’re OK.

“We’re never, ever not having fun in the water,” said 12-year-old Jayden Day. “I feel like a bird when I’m riding a wave, bro. I just feel relaxed … If I’m angry, the water soothes me down. The rush and adrenaline just make it more fun.”

A Growing Family

Day and his twin brother Justin traveled down to Rockaway from Washington Heights with their mom, Margaret Day, a psychotherapist. Wearing a wetsuit, she joined the boys in the water to document the session for Laru Beya’s social media pages.

“It’s a little bit of a trek, but it is so worth it,” she said. “I see the grace, the athleticism, that’s carried over into other things, the confidence, which is absolutely beautiful, and it’s a healthy thing that we get to do as a family for free.”

She said it was important for her that her twins be introduced to surfing, or any other new pursuit “through a lens of someone that looks like them.”

“Until really recently … they didn’t even know that surfing was considered a white sport because most everybody that they know that does it is brown,” she said.

The biggest draw for many isn’t the surfing itself: it’s being part of what several people described as the extended family that Laru Beya fosters, with kids growing up together, parents getting involved and younger siblings tagging along.

“It goes outside of surfing. Anything they may be dealing with, any help they need, we help each other out,” said Gabourel, who even drops off his college-bound students at the airport or drives along with them to their campuses.

And Gabourel isn’t shy about expanding the family. For instance, the team brought Zuri Sabir into the fold as a volunteer last summer after seeing her attempt to learn to surf herself and “getting totally pummeled,” she said. Now Sabir, 36, gets her own lessons between helping out, and she applies the tips the kids get to her own practice.

“I’m picking up the stuff that they’re doing,” she said. “Even seeing their confidence improve is heartening. You can’t complain. They’re my superheroes. They’re a big part of my New York City life.”

Mentor Pipeline

After the first lesson for the older kids came the lesson for beginners. They were more serious, with stern expressions on their faces in the water, even when they successfully rode a wave.

Many of the kids were smaller than the surfboards and needed a hand carrying them. The beginners required more hands-on instruction, with volunteers pushing them into waves and helping them turn their boards around to send them back in afterwards.

And for that, more volunteers materialized, in the form of the intermediate and advanced students from the earlier lesson, who had swapped their yellow shirts for blue. They returned to the water, this time as “mentors in training,” to shadow the instructors while the beginners took their lesson.

“It’s a pipeline. We’re going to get them CPR- [and] lifeguard-certified, everything,” Gabourel said, adding that several Laru Beya kids have gone on to take the lifeguard test.

Water safety is a chief concern at Laru Beya, as Rockaway Beach is widely considered to be the most dangerous in the five boroughs thanks to its rip tides and strong currents. Gabourel knows that kids of color are more at risk of drowning, due in large part to segregation and racially discriminatory policies that have led to disparities in access to water. Rates of drowning for Black children ages 10 to 14 are 3.6 times higher than for their white counterparts, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention .

Gabourel sends kids that want to surf but lack strong swimming skills to get lessons at York College with the group Black People Will Swim .

“We tell the kids, ‘There’s a lot of joy in the ocean and being in the ocean, but you have to respect the ocean and you have to be safe in the water,’” said Gabourel, who, in his 50s, has been taking swim lessons himself.

But while spending time in the ocean can be a matter of life and death, the Laru Beya kids understand it as a source of exhilaration. The kids love to take a “party wave,” surfing together on a single, shared wave.

When Yu emerged from the ocean after riding a party wave with his friends, he cried out, “That was the peak, bro!”

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