We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kristy Murphy a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Kristy , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

After I won the Women’s World Longboard Championships, I was so elated with what I had accomplished in the competitive surfing arena, but it was time to move onto something different. Something that still centered around surfing. Surfing is my passion. It is who I am. I surf every day. Sometimes 3 times a day. At the time, I was working for a surf retreat company called Las Olas, in Mexico. I really enjoyed that but I thought it could be done differently. I didn’t like the big groups they were taking out to the lineup. I felt like it could be a better program. Robert “Wingnut” Weaver was doing these private Surf With a Pro surf trips and I learned a lot from him. Together with former professional longboarder and surf photog/videographer Cat Slatinsky, we created a program that is so different from anyone else out there doing surf trips/retreats. Our groups are small…real small…with a max of 4, in order to guarantee that all our guests receive heaps of personal attention in and out of the water at all times. We are your coaches. We are with you in and out of the water at all times. We put our guests first. We do not catch the waves. We make sure that our guests do. No one else is doing this.

Kristy , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Thanks to my family, I was born on the water. In coastal Florida, we pretty much all are. We are fishing family that ran boats to the Bahamas, every summer. We fished, dove, snorkeled, boated, and caught waves. The boogie board was my first slide. I borrowed a longboard from my friend’s Dad and was hooked on that right away. Surfing requires that you put your time in. You don’t learn how to surf in one day, one week, or one year. It takes years. And I mean years. A lifetime. I am still learning everyday but if you think you can learn to surf in one week, you have another thing coming. It’s a lifetime commitment. What is different about Siren Surf Adventures from other surf retreat companies is our surf resume. A lifetime of experience and dedication to the ocean that we believe qualifies us to be surf guides in the areas that we host. We not only have been in these communities for over a decade, we surfed in international professional events for over a decade before we even thought about being guides, and are proud of the legends who have been mentors for us. People like Corky Carroll, Linda Benson, Pinoi Makalena, Rabbit Kekai, Wingnut, Donald Takayama, Tony Channin, and so many more.

How’d you meet your business partner?

I met Coach Cat at a surf competition in 2001, at the Longboard Magazine’s Margaritaville Contest Series in her hometown of Imperial Beach, California. Her and Kassia Meador were working together a lot making surf videos. All the girls were staying at her parent’s house there. Jenny Flanagan and I were new on the scene and we wanted to be apart of the gang so badly. We begged to stay with them and begged to do the Baja trip that they had planned for after the comp. Next comp was the Women’s World Championship in Boca Barranca, Costa Rica. Cat had a room and I wanted to attend that. I was making it to the quarters and semi’s regularly and was confident I could do well. I made it to the semi’s at that first World Championship event! Cat and Kassia had another trip planned to go to Pavones. Pavones was Cat’s spot. She had been going there every year for quite some time at that point and was going to take us all down. I was lucky enough to get on that trip as well. Pavones is where we first realized that we worked well together.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Reputation is everything. Our many many years of experience in the professional contest world, working for/with others in the field we are in, and putting our time in with the legends of surfing has helped build our knowledge that we now pass on to our guests. These past moments have given us a legitimacy that many other surf retreats do not have. Once people come with us and compare it to any other camp, they realize that. We have kept our morals and have made the surf experience more important than making money. Our surfing resume is top notch. We are ocean people, not business people.

Contact Info:

• Website: sirensurfadventures.com
• Instagram: sirensurfadventures
• Facebook: Kristy Murphy’s Siren Surf Adventures
• Linkedin: Siren Surf Adventures
• Youtube: Siren Surf Adventures

Image Credits
All photos taken by Cat Slatinsky