“Time is the coin of your life,” writes Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Sandburg. “It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.” As Director of Beach Operations at Charleston’s Isla (pronounced Eee-sluh) Surf School, New England native Shane Granigan knows all too well how he’d like to spend his.
“I ditched the suit and tie,” he tells us, “and went back to board shorts.” Affable, bearded and grinning beneath the brim of his Isla-emblazoned ball cap, he’s happy to be back where he belongs. In 2015, he was, alongside Isla founder Peter Melhado, the school’s first employee. After a two-year stint in Corporate America, he returned. “I was waking up in the morning and staring at my computer all day long, closing my computer and [going] right back to bed,” he says. Despite enjoying his job in Boston, “There was always that yearning,” he tells us, “for being back on the beach every day.”
Granigan doesn’t remember learning to surf, though there are pictures to prove he did. Growing up on the coast of Massachusetts, his first teacher was his father, who took the family on many surfing-centric summer vacations. “It’s been something,” he says, “that’s been part of my life from the very beginning.” During high school, he began giving lessons himself before becoming involved with Isla his freshman year of college.
“It started with just [Melhado] and I shuttling kids out in a beat-up, old Suburban,” Granigan says. Less than ten years after having given their first lessons, the growing school recently opened their second location in Isle of Palms and boasts more five-star Google reviews than any surf instruction brand in the area. How do they do it? By “creating a safe and fun environment…to experience something that is really out-of-the-box for a lot of people,” Granigan tells us. Isla’s instructors want to bring new surfers into the sport “the correct way,” which means personalized lessons that meet students at their respective levels—whether they’re four-years-old or seventy. “We’re retraining our bodies to throw ourselves on this moving board,” he says. “It’s tricky.”
The barrier to entry, however, is much lower for novices in Charleston than it may be further north. South Carolinian waves are more consistent, Granigan tell us. The coastline offers more places in the water in which to put your feet down. Also, having seen “both the good and the bad” of different surf schools, Isla has refined an approach to teaching that keeps students comfortable. “I had to learn a lot of things the hard way,” he says. “We want people being invested in us and us being invested in them.”
In addition to their students, Isla Surf School is also invested in their community at large and in making the sport’s positive affects available to everyone. Partnering with Warrior Surf Foundation, a group that works with veterans suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Granigan can attest to surfing’s many mental health benefits. “I’ve seen insane growth in individuals who come through [their program],” he says. So, where does he think surfing’s impact originates? The ocean? The sunshine? The comradery? The list is too long, he tells us. But he can say, “There aren’t many times I leave a surf session more upset than [I was before] I got in the water.”
The biggest testament to surfing’s power may simply be found in Granigan’s return to Charleston. Since risking the security a corporate job can provide and returning to Isla, he’s reevaluated his relationship to work as well as to surfing. “I went through a time where surfing had to be perfect for me,” he says. “Every session had to be taken to the next level.” These days, his highest priority is having fun. “Getting involved with the surf school again revitalized my stoke and love of surfing,” he says, “because I’m watching people who haven’t experienced it before…and they’re like, ‘That was so fun,’ and it’s prompted me to get back into the water. Even if it doesn’t look perfect, go surf. Have fun. You’re gonna leave happier.”