Coastalsurvey

Nobody could figure out what this chick was doing, alone, at the Rincon Surf and Board. Sometimes guys brought their girlfriends to this Puerto Rican guesthouse, but girls just didn’t show up on their own. She didn’t even have a board.

Randall Matlack found out the next day when he and the new girl drove up Wilderness for the dawn patrol. “It was solid six foot on the face with some bigger sets coming through,” Randy said. And there was nobody else out. “It was just us,”

She hesitated — borrowed longboard, big, new spot — but Randy talked her into it. He wasn’t going to miss a chance to be first out.

“I saw a set rolling through,” Randy recalled. He started paddling out and glanced back over his shoulder at the new girl. “I thought she was just going to paddle over the first wave, but she took that big nine-foot longboard and just dug it in and spun it around. One paddle. And she got up in that parallel stance and she just took off — flying.”

“The rest of the time we were out, it was pretty much wave for wave,” Randy said. “She charged it.”

Aimee and Steve, PR, winter 1996-97

Aimee Spector is a girl in motion. She’s usually on and when she’s not on, she’s sleeping. In her mid-20s, Aimee has already surfed more spots than many men twice her age. She’s ridden the West Coast from Baja to Malibu, mainland Mexico, Costa Rica, Fiji, New Zealand, Hawaii, and England. Puerto Rico was just the latest stop in her surf travels.

“Travelling tests your limits,” Spector said. “I guess that trip to Costa after high school did kind of start it going. It was the independence I was waiting for.”

Aimee grew up on the beach. Her parents moved to Malibu at when she was 13 and she got serious about surfing at 17. She still speaks in a warm California rasp and her dark brown hair is streaked by the sun.

Spector attended USSC — pol sci major — and graduated in three and half years. She worked two jobs all through college and surfed mornings before class. Her jobs were eclectic: dishwasher, nanny, cocktail waitress (“hated it – it’s just not me”), healthworker, writer’s assistant, and fishmonger at the Santa Cruz fishmarket.

In 1996, she applied to Teach America, a kind of domestic Peace Corps program, and got an assignment teaching second grade at PS66, in one of the roughest neighborhoods in the South Bronx.

Spector is fully committed to teaching. While at PS66, she made home visits and took the kids on a lot of weekend trips. She told the kids: “You’ve got to want something. Education is important, but if you lack motivation, you just don’t get anywhere.”

Since then Spector has moved back to California to teach, but she still finds it challenging. “There’s no way that today will be like yesterday,” she said. “I’m really kind of the commander of the ship when I walk into the classroom. And I like that.”

Back in California, Spector is spending a lot more time surfing. “The most comfortable place I can be is out in the water,” she explained. “I like to surf a lot alone, but the best times I’ve had surfing were with my dad.”

Riding a longboard, Spector prefers waves in the waist to head-high range, but when it gets big, she doesn’t hesitate. “I feel a lot of pressure surfing big waves,” she said, “because it’s heavier and you have to think more and be cautious. Everything is heightened and honed.”

She laughed when asked about her retro parallel stance. “I don’t know why I do it – it seems to work.”

Aimee taking off on a small day at Maria's

After teaching for another year, Aimee plans to go to Australia to live and work for a awhile. After that … who knows, maybe start an environmental awareness program for city kids. “A lot of the kids have never seen the ocean,” Spector said. “and that’s kind of sad.”

Whatever she ends up doing, Aimee Spector won’t be sitting still: “I like to keep moving all the time.”