The Kid Who Kept Coming Back

In 2010, a grandmother in Destin brought her ten-year-old grandson to surf camp. He was visiting from Texas. He fell in love with it, the way ten-year-olds do with things that happen in the ocean, and when the summer ended he went home.

He came back the next summer. And the one after that.

At some point he started helping carry boards down to the water, the way a kid does when he's outgrown being a camper but hasn't figured out what comes next. Then he got good. Then he got hired. He became one of the best surf instructors Ride On has.

In 2027, Dylan Sims will stand up as his best man.

Sims didn't set out to own a surf school. He started working at Ride On in 2007, on summer breaks from school, the kind of job a kid on the Emerald Coast takes because it beats the alternatives and it's on the beach. He took the business over from the previous owner in 2011 and has run it ever since.

That's a straight line from summer job to owner, which is common enough. What's less common is how many other people's lines run through the same place. Sims describes Ride On as the starting point for a lot of stories like the one above: friendships that have lasted, and more than one marriage.

Fifteen summers is long enough for a surf school to become something else. A place people measure their lives against.

Why here

Sims grew up on this coast and is raising his family on it. When asked what the Emerald Coast means to him, he doesn't reach for anything poetic about it. He says it's home.

But he does make a practical case for it as a place to learn. Clear water and white sand, which sounds like tourism-board language until you think about what it actually means for a beginner. You can see the bottom. You can see the board. Nothing about the water is hiding anything from you, which matters enormously when you are lying on a foam board for the first time trying to work out which way is up.

The surf community here is small, and Sims counts that as a feature rather than a limitation. Everyone knows everyone. Paddle out and you'll recognize half the lineup.

What they actually do

A lesson starts on the sand. Before anyone touches the water, instructors go over the basics of surfing and the safety side of it: what the surf is going to feel like and what to expect once you're out there. Ten to fifteen minutes later, everybody's in the waves.

Most students stand up on their first couple of waves.

That's the part first-timers don't believe until it happens to them.

Ride On runs lessons, camps, and surfing birthday parties all year. All equipment is provided, wetsuits included, which is the detail that makes the "all year" part real. Nobody has to own anything or know anything before they show up.

Ride On operates directly on the beach behind Capt. Dave's on the Gulf in Destin.

Sims's pitch for first-timers is not complicated, and he doesn't dress it up: it's a good experience, it works for any age and any skill level, and he'd be stoked to get you out there.

The thing worth noticing

Every business in a beach town says it's family-friendly. Most of them mean they won't be rude to your kids.

Ride On has sixteen years of proof of a different claim: that a kid can show up once, come back every summer, grow up in the place, and end up running lessons himself. That's not a marketing position. That's just what happened, and the wedding's next year.

If you're standing on the sand behind Capt. Dave's this fall watching somebody's first wave, there's a reasonable chance you're watching the beginning of something longer than a vacation.