Mikey DeTemple

Mikey DeTem­ple is an East Coast surfer/filmmaker who recently pro­duced and directed the  film “Picaresque.” A styl­ish long­boarder, Mikey has won numer­ous pro con­tests and has graced the cov­ers of Long­board Mag­a­zine and ESM. We spoke with Mikey to learn more.

So where and when did the Mikey DeTem­ple story begin?
Born (Aug. 30, 1983) and raised in Baby­lon, New York, which is in cen­tral Long Island, until I was 14. I was a part-time surfer for the most part; I surfed in the sum­mers when it was warm. Back then, in the mid-‘90s they didn’t make win­ter suits for peo­ple my size, so I didn’t really get to surf in the win­ter. We spent the sum­mers out in Montauk.

When did surf­ing come into the pic­ture?
I didn’t start surf­ing until I was 12. My dad was one of the bet­ter surfers on Long Island in the ’70s, along with a hand­ful of other guys. He surfed his entire life, and I was always around it, but I was never really all that into it. But one day it kind of clicked; it was actu­ally my mom that got me into it. I think my dad always wanted me to surf really badly, like forc­ing it a lit­tle bit made me deter from it a bit. So I would always hang out at the beach with my mom, we used to go to the beach every day in the sum­mer, regard­less of what the weather was like. Even­tu­ally I just got sick of play­ing in the sand, so I started boo­gie boarding.

What was your first board?
It was like a 5’6” Nomad, made here in Florida. It had these G&S one-star fins in it. It’s a pretty rad board; I’ve still got it actu­ally. It was my dads. I guess he bought it on a trip down to Florida at some point in the late ’70s. It has like blue water droplets over it, like the old splash con­tain­ers, it’s pretty amazing.

I know you’ve had some health issues in the past, tell me a lit­tle bit about it.
I was like 11 years old when it hap­pened. I used to play ice-hockey and I broke one of my ribs while play­ing, I had to go to the hos­pi­tal, and I guess it’s like hos­pi­tal pro­ce­dure to do an EKG on any­one who has a chest prob­lem, and they found it on the EKG, and it was like the bro­ken rib didn’t even mat­ter any­more. They were trip­ping out. They found some­thing called third-degree heart block, which is like an elec­tri­cal prob­lem with the nat­ural elec­tri­cal sys­tem of the heart, where the ven­tri­cles aren’t able to com­mu­ni­cate with each other. So they wanted to do an emer­gency surgery that night and they ended up trans­fer­ring me to a dif­fer­ent hos­pi­tal a cou­ple hours later, to one with a much bet­ter pedi­atric unit, a cou­ple hours away (Stony Brook Uni­ver­sity Med­ical Cen­ter). I was there for like five days.

How did that change your life?
They put me on heart mon­i­tors and the first month was kind of weird, doing all these tests and try­ing to fig­ure out what they were going to do. They were try­ing to fig­ure out whether to put a pace­maker in me. They came to the con­clu­sion that it was asymp­to­matic, which basi­cally means that I had what they found, but I didn’t show any symp­toms of hav­ing it. So my doc­tor back then basi­cally said, I don’t want to fix some­thing that’s not bro­ken, so we’re just going to do check ups every six months and see how you’re doing. He kind of guessed that once I got into my late teens or early twen­ties that I would start hav­ing some prob­lems, that then they were going to have to put a pace­maker in. My first car­di­ol­o­gist com­pletely nailed it, that’s exactly what hap­pened. I was 19 when I started pass­ing out and wasn’t asymp­to­matic any­more and was show­ing full signs of hav­ing third-degree heart block. That’s when they went and put the pace­maker in.

And did that improve your qual­ity of life?
Oh, gosh, it was night and day. I didn’t under­stand how I lived like that for so long. Right after I recov­ered from the surgery I had so much more energy, I was so much more alive, it was just com­pletely, like I said, night and day. It was like get­ting a new engine or something.

Talk a bit about the East Coast surf­ing scene. What sets it apart?
It’s so dif­fer­ent, every lit­tle town, city, every state, I mean, the East Coast has 14 states that are touch­ing the Atlantic, and each one is so dif­fer­ent: Florida, which is like a hotbed for pro­fes­sional short­board­ing; you go to Geor­gia which is a really weird 12 miles of coast, kind of red­necky; South Car­olina, North Car­olina. North Car­olina has com­pletely dif­fer­ent types of waves, where it’s just dredg­ing, bar­rel­ing. You really get every­thing. You go up to New York City and there are stock­bro­kers surfing.

When did you start tak­ing surf­ing seri­ously, mak­ing it more than recre­ational?
I moved to Florida when I was 14, my par­ents were just kind of over the cold of New York and the econ­omy was pretty lousy there in the late ’90s. Things were just so dirt cheap in Florida, so they moved down here and bought a three-bedroom condo on the beach in Indi­alan­tic, near a pretty decent sand­bar. I used to have to drive 40 min­utes to get to the beach from my house in New York, so just being able to walk out back to surf was just the best thing ever. I would surf every sin­gle day. I would surf before school, after school, dur­ing school – with­out telling my par­ents [laughs]. I was surf­ing so much. I was surf­ing okay when I was liv­ing in New York, but with surf­ing every sin­gle day, when­ever I wanted to, with­out any hes­i­ta­tion, it really started hap­pen­ing where I was pro­gress­ing so much faster than in New York.

What is it about surf­ing that makes it such a fix­ture in your life?
I was just really brought up on the beach. And New York is just so dif­fer­ent. In Florida and Cal­i­for­nia, every­one really takes going to the beach for granted. In New York, you really kind of har­ness the beach and the weather, and how you really only get those three months out of the year to embrace the weather and the sand and the ocean and stuff. Oth­er­wise, it’s just so bru­tally cold. I was always around the beach, my dad was a com­mer­cial fish­er­man, so, I’ve always been drawn to the ocean. It pretty much came natural.

When did you decide to pur­sue the con­test scene and make a career of sorts out of surf­ing?
I used to do all the ESA (East­ern Surf­ing Asso­ci­a­tion) con­tests in Florida, and there were some really good kids, and I started win­ning a cou­ple of those con­tests. I started trav­el­ing a lit­tle bit more. When I was 15 I made the final of a pro con­test, the Easter Surf­ing Fes­ti­val at Cocoa Beach and Joel Tudor was in the final, and Dodger Kremel and, I think, Cody Simp­kins, or some­one like that, and I got sec­ond or third, some­thing like that and I made $1,200 and I thought, I might be able to make a lit­tle bit of money doing this. Kind of got really moti­vated to try.

How and why did the movie-making thing come about?
I was doing con­tests for so long, I would travel places with three of the same boards, three 9’0”s with three fins, one ounce glass, and I’d go to all these cool places and I’d do the con­test and leave. Some of the spon­sors I had at the time used to tell me, “When you’re done with the con­test you go home, you don’t stay and hang out. We don’t pay for you to hang out, we pay for you to do well in con­tests.” I thought the whole con­test and long­board­ing thing kind of started to get really lame. And I started to get really burnt out on where it was going, and the things that were being done. So I just thought, going to all these cool places that I’ve been, why not just go and surf all these places instead, and just do photo trips. I think it was on a photo trip to the Mal­dives like three years ago, and all we had was a pho­tog­ra­pher on the boat, and there were like five of us and the waves were insane, and I thought “Man, this would prob­a­bly be one of the sick­est video sec­tions ever if some­one was actu­ally shoot­ing! Why do I go on all these trips and no one ever shoots video or film?” I just started think­ing I wanted to make some­thing cool. It’s just going on trips and shoot­ing sec­tions of a movie in dif­fer­ent loca­tions and stuff.

Picaresque was your first movie, which came out in 2008. What’d you learn from that expe­ri­ence?
Oh, man it was amaz­ing. I didn’t know any­thing going into it. I basi­cally have Dustin Miller to thank for even get­ting it done, because I was so clue­less on half of the things I needed to do. I didn’t under­stand music licens­ing, or time lines or dead­lines. I just knew I had a vision, and I knew what I wanted it to look like, but I didn’t know the back­end stuff that goes into pro­duc­ing or direct­ing a movie. Like I said, I knew what I wanted it to look like and I knew who I wanted to be in it, and I knew where I wanted to go, but that was really it. Actu­ally doing it and hav­ing investors and hav­ing dead­lines, I learned so much. I prob­a­bly learned more work­ing on that movie than had I gone to film school for four years.

So, is there another project on the way?
Yeah, I’ve been work­ing on another film the last seven months; we’ve shot a cou­ple loca­tions. We were up in Maine back in Novem­ber, build­ing boards with the guys from Grain, the LaVec­chia broth­ers, and hang­ing out up there. And I did another trip to the Bahamas recently. Kind of a far out-there island that’s really dif­fi­cult to get to.

Have you been get­ting waves?
We got Maine pretty dang good for a log, and the Bahamas were really fun – it was a very, very inter­est­ing trip. We ran out of food, we ran out of water and our boards got stuck on the island for 45 days. But we came back with what we needed.

Details? Are there a cou­ple cus­toms guys with a new quiver or what?
No, the only way to get to this island is by pri­vate char­ter flight. And they changed the flight on us the morn­ing of the flight. They sent a dif­fer­ent plane, and the plane they sent wouldn’t fit our boards and they were kind of taken hostage by the guy who owned the marina. To make a long story short, I had to fly over to Nas­sau a few weeks ago and had to pick them up off a gov­ern­ment mail boat and then bring them back through cus­toms and ship them out of Florida back to Kas­sia Meador and Scotty Stop­nik and I took my boards back home. It was great, makes good stories.

Do you have a name for the movie yet, or is that on the hush-hush?
I would love to make up some sort of bull­shit story on how I want to keep quiet on what it is, but really I just can’t think of a name. I’ve been forc­ing it so hard, I’ve been flip­ping through the dic­tio­nary. Picaresque just fell into lap; it was the eas­i­est thing ever. That’s prob­a­bly why I’m hav­ing such a hard time, because it was such a good name and it came so easy. Where as this one, I can’t think of anything.

When are you try­ing to have it done by?
I would like to have it out in stores before Christ­mas, but you say that, and it will prob­a­bly be out the next sum­mer. Just how it goes. Whether you’re wait­ing on music to clear or any of the mil­lion other things that can go wrong when you’re mak­ing a film. We’re off to a good start though.

Through the movies and surf­ing, you’ve done quite a lot of trav­el­ing, what des­ti­na­tions stand out and why?
I always say this, but I love the north­east in fall more than any other place in the world. It’s got so much going for it: there’s so much swell in the water, it’s so uncrowded because Labor Day has passed and peo­ple go back to work and sum­mer houses are done. You get a lot of qual­ity surf by your­self and the weather is amaz­ing. You still get those days where it’s 70 degrees and the wind blows off­shore, I rave so much about the northeast.

Can you still find secret spots up there?
I surf New York by myself all the time, espe­cially that time of year. You’re still in 3/2s, and you’re not wear­ing booties and it’s not cold yet. It’s the best. There are other places that obvi­ously have bet­ter surf that time of year. France is one of them, which is one of the most gor­geous places in the world.

So are you done with the con­test thing alto­gether?
I still do a cou­ple con­tests on the East Coast, mostly because I can ride a log in them and I don’t have to ride three-fin long­boards and do kick flips and stuff. I could never stick those [laughs].

So what role does surf­ing play?
Right now I just love to travel and ride a bunch of dif­fer­ent things, and go on dif­fer­ent trips to new places, and make lit­tle films about it and stuff like that. More what peo­ple were doing before the con­test scene came into play. Just cool trips to unique places. Even not unique places, but mak­ing nor­mal places unique somehow.

Is that where you see the long­board­ing thing going?
Yeah, I think so. Just the whole way long­board­ing is going, I wouldn’t even pigeon-hole it as long­board­ing, I would call it more just surf­ing, because I def­i­nitely don’t have more than one or two long­boards in my bag when I travel. Usu­ally I have more short­boards and oddly shaped things, whether they are Stubby’s or some sort of single-fin or a rounder-style short­board or some­thing like that. Always going on trips bring­ing all sorts of dif­fer­ent things. I think that’s where it’s going.

That takes me to my next ques­tion: what’s cur­rently in your quiver?
Chris Chris­ten­son is mak­ing the major­ity of my boards. I’ve got a 9’9” pin­tail log, which is unreal in glassy type waves. I’ve been really addicted to this 6’2”, I guess it’s like a Hull out­line, with­out a Hull bot­tom, and with a far for­ward sin­gle fin. He calls it a Stubby. It works insane when the surf is kind of lined up and it’s super fun when it bar­rels. I’ve got one of Jon Wegener’s peanut ala­ias, a 5’8”, which always comes with me every­where. And then I’ve got a 5’4” round­tail quad that I always bring with me. That’s kind of my go-to set-up. You can ride any­thing on those four boards. There’s no way you can ever not have fun on one of those boards in what­ever con­di­tions are thrown at you.

What excites you about surf­ing right now? What’s going right in surf­ing?
A lot of peo­ple are rid­ing every­thing. There are so many peo­ple that shred on so many dif­fer­ent things, like Har­ri­son Roach surfs amaz­ing on any­thing, Chris Del Moro surfs absolutely any­thing that’s handed to him and surfs bet­ter than most peo­ple that spe­cial­ize in just one thing, whether it’s a long­board or a short­board. I think that kind of stuff is cool, that’s what excites me. Not see­ing peo­ple ride one board in every type of wave. I don’t know, I would get really bored. I don’t know how I used to do that. I spent a lot of time try­ing to fig­ure that out.

What’s wrong with surf­ing or the indus­try right now?
I just don’t think there’s enough money in it. I don’t think there’s any­thing, per se, wrong, maybe everyone’s shorts are too long [laughs], but I wouldn’t say that any­thing is really wrong with it. Maybe mar­ket­ing money is being spent in some of the wrong places some of the time, but I think a lot of the com­pa­nies have the right idea of what’s going on and a lot of com­pa­nies are back­ing some alter­na­tive style stuff and that whole deal.

Now some gen­eral per­sonal ques­tions: what are you lis­ten­ing to these days?
The lead singer from The Shins just came out with a new project called Bro­ken Bell, that just came out a few days ago and it’s unbe­liev­able. There’s a band from Florida, they are from Palm Beach, and they’re called Surfer Blood. None of them surf and they’re super young, but they play amaz­ing music. They’re like Mod­ern Day Pave­ment, kind of. That’s kind of weird for a band like that to come out of a cul­ture­less south Florida town.

What are you read­ing?
Actu­ally, I just fin­ished read­ing “The Div­ing Bell and the But­ter­fly,” a cou­ple of weeks ago. It’s writ­ten by the editor-in-chief of French Elle and it’s about when he had a stroke and it left him with a con­di­tion called locked-in syn­drome. He basi­cally wrote an entire book by dic­tat­ing his entire story to a nurse by blink­ing. She would recite the most fre­quently used let­ters and he would blink when she got to the proper let­ter. Amaz­ing. Really, really crazy.

What else is going on in your life that we should know about?
Just mak­ing that film , trav­el­ing a whole bunch, I just signed another two-year con­tract with Hur­ley, which is pretty awe­some. Those guys are very sup­port­ive of every­thing that I do.

Last thing: what’s next?
I’ve go about four more trips to do on the movie, so that’s really going to occupy the rest of my sum­mer. Hope­fully be full-on edit­ing by August. I’ve been learn­ing Final Cut a lot more and I’ve been lay­ing out this whole project myself. SO it’s been very, very time con­sum­ing log­ging and cap­tur­ing. The last one I didn’t really do any of that on my own.

Find out more about Mikey DeTem­ple and the film Picaresque here.