Fun, sun and Moondoggie: Not your average surf party on Hilton Head Island

Two volunteers led Ericha Doubles and a paddleboard into the surf Thursday afternoon.

They found the perfect spot — behind the breaking waves and in still-shallow water — and they steadied the board for her to get on.

Doubles, 45, is developmentally disabled and lost full mobility in her right arm and leg after a stroke years ago, so it was no small task for her to go from standing upright to lying prone on the board.

But — with the help of the volunteers and an older, suddenly appearing mystery man with a vacation tan and royal blue swim trunks — she did it.

When the time was right, they released Doubles onto a wave that would take her back to shore.

She rode the board beaming and then promptly fell off and into the water.

Sputtering, she regained her footing and stood up in the churn.

When she got back on dry land she wanted to know, “Did you see me fall?”

“I did,” I told her. “Was that scary?”

“No,” she said.

Just then the mystery man reappeared.

“Know what that’s called when you came off the board at the end?,” he asked her. “A wipeout. That’s a fun thing to do, a wipeout. It’s the ultimate.”

Then he left.

“Who was that?,” I asked.

No one knew. But they were certain he wasn’t one of the 160 people who had gathered on the beach and in the water outside the Marriott Surf Watch on Hilton Head Island for the second annual Pockets Full of Sunshine “Fun in the Sun for EVERYONE” surf event for adults and children with special needs and their friends and family.

“Oh my gosh,” I said. “I think that might actually have been Retired Moondoggie.”

Turns out it was not.

It was Bill Berger from Atlanta, a longtime visitor to the island.

He and his family were guests at the Marriott and just having fun in the water when the group of surfers descended onto the beach.

“They were having trouble getting her on the board,” he said. “I was just there. It was instinctual.”

He wanted her to know about a “wipeout” so she wouldn’t be afraid to get back on the board.

When Doubles’ mother, Susan, heard this, she was thrilled by the kindness of a stranger.

“Can you believe that?,” she said. “That is pretty cool.”

Berger’s good deed was exactly the kind of thing Laurin Rivers and Dayna Dehlinger, the founders of Pockets Full of Sunshine, wanted to see Thursday.

“The key word is ‘inclusive,’” said Rivers, a speech pathologist with the Beaufort County school district.

The event, which drew just over a dozen people in 2015, was started so that those with special needs could have the opportunity to do something they ordinarily might not do, and so those without special needs could learn more about a community of people who often fade into the background in adulthood.

“We hoped for this,” Dehlinger said of the day. The response was many times more than they had originally planned for this year.

“It speaks to the need for more events like this,” she said.

Local businesses donated surfboards, boogie boards, paddleboards, food and drinks, and 40 teachers, students and surfers volunteered to get participants registered and in the water.

“Hopefully,” Rivers said, “those who never worked with (special needs people) before can say ‘Hey, we’re comfortable with special needs people now.’”

Rivers and Dehlinger started Pockets Full of Sunshine last year on Hilton Head Island. Their primary mission is to give intellectually and physically disabled adults a job making sellable crafts that are decorative, useful and eco-friendly. Their secondary mission, of course, is to expose the general population to people with special needs.

Dehlinger, a special education teacher at Beaufort Middle School, was inspired to start Pockets Full of Sunshine because of the sun-like punch-outs that are left over from a tag that goes over the splined shaft in new cars. Her brother, who works for the company that produces the tags, had asked her if she could use them with her students.

The re-purposed punch-outs now serve as the motif for the group and are an appropriate symbol for the bright, happy and hopeful attitudes of the crafters.

On a recent Sunday at First Presbyterian Church on Hilton Head, they prepared for their day of surfing by painting beach scenes to give to the event’s sponsors as thank yous. They sang along to the Beach Boys, filled tea bags with a citrus brew and decorated a donated surfboard with painted traces of their footprints.

Paul Green of Bluffton sat down to fill in a tiny footprint on the board.

“No, no,” a volunteer said. “That’s Amy’s. This one’s yours.”

The owner of the footprint, a cute blonde with Down syndrome, stood by and waited for Green, who has autism, to get up.

“Yeah! Gee whiz, Paul!” she said to laughter.

The crafters have decorated flowerpots, they’ve created magnets and they’ve even made keychains, which they gave as thank-you gifts to Meg Wild’s second-grade class at Red Cedar Elementary School in Bluffton. The class had donated $1,000 to Pockets Full of Sunshine this past year, a portion of the profit they made from a Christmas sale they held as part of their economics lesson.

The students met the crafters and had many questions for them. Where would you like to work? What inspires you? What do you like to do?

“It was really cool,” Wild, a volunteer at the surf event, said Thursday while she watched the paddleboarders.

Afterward, the students had even more questions for her. Why did the adults clap? Why did they make that noise?

Wild explained to them that everyone has a different reaction to being excited or nervous.

Oh yeah, the students said. I do this or I do that when I get nervous or excited.

“It really opened them up to the differences and similarities we all have,” she said.

Farther down the beach, 15-year-old Bailey Messmer of Bluffton, who has autism, wasn’t so sure about this surfing thing.

She was nervous and didn’t want to get in the water, but eventually her mother was able to persuade her to give it a try.

A volunteer helped her into the water and onto the board and off Bailey went, speeding toward the shore.

At first she looked horrified.

But when she came to a stop, she smiled

“I made it,” she said.

This story was originally published June 3, 2016 at 5:45 PM with the headline "Fun, sun and Moondoggie: Not your average surf party on Hilton Head Island."