The Story of Virginia Beach, Virginia
Virginia Beach is the mid-Atlantic’s surf capital by default — a three-mile resort strip of hotels and concrete boardwalk where a 34-foot bronze King Neptune presides over the sand, and where, most days, the Atlantic is flat calm. The wave that matters breaks at the far south end, against the granite jetty by Rudee Inlet at 1st Street: a shifting-sandbar beach break that throws both lefts and rights and, on its rare good days, walls up and peels. It is small, fickle water that needs a hurricane far offshore or a winter nor’easter to wake up. Yet this unlikely beach has hosted the world’s longest continuously running surf contest since 1963.
The Oceanfront and the Jetty
Virginia Beach’s Oceanfront is a proper resort town, and reaching the water could hardly be easier: Atlantic Avenue runs a wall of hotels and shops a block back from the sand, and a wide promenade — closer to three miles of concrete than a true boardwalk — carries walkers, cyclists and beach cruisers from Rudee Inlet in the south up past 40th Street. Roughly midway, at 31st Street, a 34-foot, 12-ton bronze King Neptune, unveiled in 2005, presides over the strip as the anchor of the city’s autumn Neptune Festival and the de facto symbol of the Oceanfront.
The surf, though, gathers at the far south end. Follow the boardwalk past the amusements and the Virginia Beach Fishing Pier to where it meets Rudee Inlet — the dredged cut that lets sportfishing and charter boats out to the ocean — and you reach the granite jetty at 1st Street. This is the traditional main peak, the lineup everyone means when they say “the jetty,” and the contest site each August for the East Coast Surfing Championships. Parking, a bathhouse and easy sand access make it one of the most convenient marquee waves anywhere; the trade-off is that when it is on, the peak by the rocks gets crowded and competitive.
The Coast to Cape Henry
Trace the shore north from the Oceanfront and within a few miles it swings hard west at Cape Henry — the low dune-and-pine headland at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, where the coast turns its shoulder to the open ocean. This is where English colonists made their first landing in 1607 before sailing on to Jamestown, and two lighthouses still mark the bay entrance. Beyond it the Chesapeake, the largest estuary in the United States, empties into the Atlantic across a mouth so wide it is spanned by the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, with the barrier beaches of the Eastern Shore low on the far horizon.
That geography is also why the surf is so often small. Virginia Beach sits on the broad, gently shelving continental shelf of the Mid-Atlantic Bight, a wide shallow apron that bleeds the energy out of ordinary swell long before it reaches the sand. The beach faces roughly east, so its swell window runs east through southeast, and it takes real ocean energy to beat the filtering shelf — the coast stays small or flat for long stretches and only fires when a distant storm organizes a proper groundswell. The bottom is all shifting sand, so the sandbars, and the peaks that stand up on them, migrate with every swell and tide.
The Jetty and Its Contest
Up close, the 1st Street jetty is an honest mid-Atlantic beach break with a helping hand from the rocks. Sandbars pile against the granite groin on the inlet’s north side, and the wave breaks along them as shifting lefts and rights, usually best around three-to-six feet on an east-to-southeast swell with a west wind blowing offshore. On its better days it can line up as a longer, running right that peels away from the jetty toward the beach, but there is no fixed line here — the peaks move with the sand. Summer tends to be small and forgiving, an all-levels wave on an average day, while the size arrives in two windows: fall hurricane groundswells, roughly August to October, and winter nor’easters. The water swings from the mid-to-upper 70s Fahrenheit in high summer to the low 40s and low 50s in late winter, so wetsuits run from a shorty to a 4/3 or 5/4 with boots and hood. The main hazards are strong rip currents along the jetty, the rocks themselves, and the city’s summer “blackball” rules, which confine surfing to designated zones and hours on the guarded beach.
For all that fickleness, this is the contest heart of East Coast surfing. The East Coast Surfing Championships began in 1963 — grown from a 1962 beach party at Gilgo Beach on New York’s Long Island that moved south — and has run at the Oceanfront every year since, which makes it, by broad agreement, the longest continuously running surf contest in the world. Staged in late August at the 1st Street jetty, it has become a week-long festival drawing well over 100,000 spectators, and it long ago turned this unassuming resort break into a proving ground for mid-Atlantic surfing.