NSB SURF AND SKATE SCENE IN 2026: SAME BUT DIFFERENT
New Smyrna has plenty to get excited about going into 2027: a surf and skate festival bringing both scenes together, local surfers making national teams, and board builders working a few miles from the waves their boards are made for. You can see it in the contests, the shops backing riders and the people turning up to skate.
The Mike Martin Pro/Am expanded into a Surf and Skate Festival in 2026, with the NSB Skate Open bringing professional skateboarder and New Smyrna native Blake Carpenter into the event. A skate contest alongside one of the town’s established surf events makes sense here, where the two scenes share so many people.
Skating has never been as closely associated with New Smyrna nationally as surfing, but locally the two have always existed beside each other. The same kids who grew up going to the beach often ended up at the skatepark, and the same shops, clothes, music and people moved between both worlds. Adding a skate contest to one of the town’s better-known surf events felt less like introducing something new and more like recognizing something that was already here.
The city skatepark’s street-course expansion, announced in December 2024, added a roll-in, stair rail, ledge, slappy curb, flat bar, manual pad and quarter pipe. It gives the park another set of lines alongside the bowl, and a reason to bring a board even when the ocean is flat.
The park brings together people who have been skating New Smyrna for decades and kids who are just starting. The expanded street section gives both another reason to show up.
Surfing has an even deeper network underneath it because so many of the institutions around it have been here for years.
The Smyrna Surfari Club has been organizing contests since 1980 and says it has hosted more than 100. The Spooktacular returns to the Flagler Avenue Boardwalk on October 31, 2026, giving the next group of local surfers another chance to paddle out with a heat jersey on.
The club says it has awarded more than $250,000 in scholarships since 1980. Its scholarship page announces $20,000 for 2026, supporting local surfing high school seniors planning to attend college or trade school.
That kind of organization helps explain why New Smyrna continues to produce good surfers. A kid growing up here has access to waves, contests, older surfers, local shops and an established community that has been doing this for decades. None of those things guarantee somebody becomes a professional surfer, but they create an unusually good environment for somebody who wants to see how far they can take it.Red Dog supports local team riders, including Auburn Hilley and Sawyer Glynn, who are competing beyond the local contest circuit. That team is one concrete example of a shop backing the surfers growing up around it.
The less visible part of the local surf industry is a few miles south in Edgewater, where there is still an unusual concentration of people making boards.
Greg Geiselman’s Orion Surfboards lists its workshop in Edgewater and traces the brand back to 1985. Its range includes performance shortboards, longboards and designs for smaller waves, giving local surfers options built around the conditions they actually ride.
He is far from the only one.Sean McCabe offers custom orders and says he has shaped more than 12,800 boards. Randy Richenberg Surfboards is listed in the Park Avenue area, while Christie Carr describes hand-shaping Urchin boards there and working with Halifax Glassing to finish them. These are examples of the local network, rather than a complete directory of everyone making boards.
Jay Smith’s Clever Surfboards says its boards are manufactured at Halifax Glassing, and Cronin lists its factory in Edgewater. The network extends into New Smyrna too: Pure Wakesurf says it works with Erie Peeples on designs and manufactures its boards at its New Smyrna Beach facility.
They are different operations with different histories and different ways of working. Some make high-performance shortboards, others build longboards, fishes or wakesurf boards. Some use computer-assisted shaping as part of the process, while others still do much of the work by hand. Halifax Glassing provides part of the production infrastructure that allows several smaller builders to operate without each having to maintain an entire factory themselves.
What makes that interesting is not simply that surfboards are manufactured in Volusia County. It is how close the entire chain still is. Someone can surf New Smyrna in the morning, talk to a local shaper about the waves they ride, and have a board designed and built only a few miles from the beach.
That relationship is easy to overlook because most of the work happens in ordinary industrial buildings in Edgewater rather than somewhere tourists are likely to see it. Surfboards have become a global business, and there is nothing unusual now about ordering one online from a company on the other side of the country or having one manufactured overseas. New Smyrna still has another option because the knowledge, equipment and people required to make them remain concentrated here.
The contests, shops and board builders give the scene places to meet and people to learn from. National-team selections and professional results are worth celebrating, but so is having a local place to buy a board, get it repaired or enter a first contest.
There is no reason to pretend any of this looks exactly like New Smyrna did in 1985 or 2005. A culture that actually survives for decades is going to change along with the people participating in it.
What matters going into 2027 is that people are still participating.
Kids are still learning to skate at the city park while people twice or three times their age are skating beside them. The Surfari Club is still putting contests together almost fifty years after it started. Young surfers from New Smyrna are still making national teams and entering professional events. Local businesses continue backing riders, and people in Edgewater are still shaping and glassing boards for waves breaking a few miles away.
New Smyrna may look different around all of that, but the surf and skate culture was never just a collection of old shops or stories about how the town used to be. It has survived because another group keeps coming along and making it their own.
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