Photo of Mimi: Patrick Ruddy
New Smyrna Beach – It is with great pleasure that we announce the addition of Mimi Munro and Scotty Sherin to the short documentary jury of the 2019 Florida Surf Film Festival. Mimi has been a long-time supporter of our events and mission, and we are honored to finally have her experience and energy on the jury.
I met Scotty in a small cocktail bar in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with my brother after hearing of his skills behind the camera from Mike Bromley, award winning director of Perilous Sea. Scotty was supporting his passion behind the bar and finally transitioned to a full-time associate editor role with SBC Surf Magazine in Canada. It’s a real pleasure to have two more East Coasters on the jury!
Mimi Munro: Diminutive blond child-star surfer from Ormond Beach, Florida; third-place finisher in the 1966 World Surfing Championships at age 14. “She was a natural,” fellow Floridian champ Gary Propper said of Munro. “Quiet and meek and tiny, but a total standout, head and shoulders above the rest of the East Coast girls. People came out in droves to see her.”
Munro was born (1952) in Daytona Beach, Florida, the daughter of an architect, raised in Ormond, and began surfing at age 10. At 11 she showed up at Ormond Pier to watch the Florida State Surfing Championships. Organizers announced that they needed another female surfer to round out the women’s division; Munro’s friends coaxed her into entering, she borrowed a board—and won the contest. The victories piled up from then on, and in 1965 and 1966 she won the East Coast Surfing Championships. “I surfed daily,” Munro later recalled. “I surfed in the ice cold with no wetsuit. My sister would sit in the car with the engine running, and I’d stay out till I was numb, come in, thaw out in the car, and get back in the water.”
Munro never got over a childhood fear of big surf, but had near-perfect balance and exceptionally quick feet, and by 1965 she was the best female noserider in the world. In the 1966 world titles, held in San Diego, she finished behind winner Joyce Hoffman and runner-up Joey Hamasaki. Munro was still in middle school. After the event, she stayed in California and competed in the Laguna Masters, in Redondo Beach, and placed runner-up to Hoffman.
Munro quit surfing in 1968 at 16, in part because she’d been teased in school for being a tomboy. She also dropped out of high school. At 18 she joined a commune, at 20 she was married, at 33 she had four children, and at 38 she “began to dream about surfing” and started riding a longboard after not having ridden a wave for 22 years. “In about 20 minutes,” Munro later said, “I was right back into it. I’d been through a lot of changes over the years, and when I returned to surfing it was like getting back to Mimi again.”
In 2001, at age 49, she won the women’s pro division of the Cocoa Beach Easter Surfing Festival. Munro was inducted into the East Coast Surf Legends Hall of Fame in 1996. —Encyclopedia of Surfing
Scotty Sherin: Scotty is a Photographer, Writer, and the Associate Editor of SBC Surf Magazine. He subsidized his early career in surf photography through bartending. It was during this stint of cocktailing that Scotty was offered an internship at Surfing Magazine. Not one to pass up an opportunity, Scotty loaded up his truck and made the transcontinental crossing from Halifax, Nova Scotia to San Clemente, California. Scotty has since returned home to Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, where he continues to focus on both editorial and commercial work for brands like Smith, YETI, Rusty, and Lululemon.