How to surf in every state

The fact that most of the United States is not touching ocean didn’t stop surfers Jonno Durrant and Stefan Hunt from “surfing” in all 50 of them.

Their quest, however, did take more than a little ingenuity.

Over the last six months, they surfed a potato field, a mountain of sugar beets, rivers, malls and Times Square. They did find a few good waves along the way, including locally, off Newport and Huntington Beach.

The two Australian natives are not professional surfers. Durrant, 25, said he doesn’t even consider himself extremely skilled in the sport.

Nonetheless, they filmed their adventures for a movie they hope to release by the beginning of next year with help from the surf clothing company Hurley.

Acquiring sponsorship took time. Durrant and Hunt saved their own money to try to make it happen. Eventually they caught the eye of Hurley Australia representatives after Hunt won a “walk off” doing a silly dance dressed in Hurley’s women’s clothes at an industry event.

Durrant told the Hurley representatives about the film he wanted to make, to bring the stoke of surfing to every state, regardless of topography. Then Hurley Australia contacted its Costa Mesa headquarters to tell them about Durrant and Hunt and their crazy idea.

“We just felt that the concept was so great, so unique, we wanted to help,” said Kevin Meehan, Hurley men’s vice president of marketing. “We looked at it as two kids who had a dream, and they actually realized their dream and hopefully that motivates people to get off their bums and get out there and realize their dreams.”

While reading Jack Kerouac’s classic American novel “On the Road,” Durrant decided he wanted to see every state, and sent e-mail to many of his friends in Australia pitching the idea. Hunt was the only one to reply with a firm “yes.”

“A friend suggested we try to surf in every state,” Durrant said in a phone interview from the last stop of their trip, Hawaii. “We said, ‘You can’t surf in every state,’ and she’s the one that said we should just improvise — go in the snow or get towed by a boat or a tractor.”

And that’s exactly what they did with the help of an old ice cream truck, lovingly called Killabee, that belongs to Hurley.

The truck was decked out with the Hurley insignia and the guys hit the road. It wasn’t without bumps.

“The ice cream truck was the best thing and the worst thing about our trip. It was so cool driving and having that thing…. It was a really awesome experience. It attracted so much attention on the road,” Durrant said. “But we just broke down all the time, and we only got eight miles to the gallon.”

It took some help from the people they met along the way to figure things out. “Probably the strangest was Kansas, where we wanted to surf “The Wizard of Oz” somehow, since that was all we really knew of Kansas,” Durrant said.

After talking to some locals in a small town, they found out that there was a production of “The Wizard of Oz” going on, complete with wire tricks. After watching the show, Durrant and Hunt approached the producer and director and asked if they could surf in the air with their help.

“We came back the next day and they gave us costumes to wear — Stefan was the scarecrow and unfortunately I had to wear the Dorothy costume — and they attached us to the wires,” Durrant said. “We taped our surfboards to our feet, and they lifted us up in the air, with the yellow brick road as our backdrop. It was definitely the highlight. We were just laughing and giving each other high fives all dressed up.”

They did catch some actual waves, and sometimes in unlikely places. They found epic offshore conditions on the Alabama Gulf coast, Durrant said. But their favorite state was Alaska, where they also got to dip their toes in the ocean. They tended to stay only a couple days in most places, but they surfed for almost a week in Alaska, on the heels of summer.

The coldest surf they encountered was on Lake Michigan. Wearing 5-millimeter wetsuits, hoods, booties and gloves, they paddled out in water that was in the low 30s, with the air temperature right around a freezing 32 degrees.

Sometimes the swell just wasn’t working with their schedule, as was the case in New York City. With flat conditions, they decided to strap their surfboards to skateboards, and that’s how they “surfed” through Times Square.