About Tim Sherer, CEO and “Stoke Broker”

Tim teaching Jimmy Buffet

“It’s a hard thing to find a good teacher,” Jimmy Buffett said in an interview on Margaritaville.com, “particularly in surfing, because everybody’s too busy surfing. It’s a pretty self-indulgent sport. And you don’t find a lot of people who have the qualities out there to give. Tim devoted the time to go out there and not go after every wave. Doing this at 53 or 54, and hopefully surfing for the rest of my life, I have a completely different take on how I want to surf. Tim was great to connect with because he has that gift of being a teacher. When you find someone like that, you stick next to them like a remora on a shark.”

Following Mark Twain’s advice to “Make your vacation your vocation”, Tim Sherer founded Goofy Foot Surf and Stand Up Paddle School on Maui in April 1994. Tim had spent the previous several years earning a late business degree and taking a few years off to crew on sailboats from the Caribbean to Greece, when a serious ski accident nearly ended his life, and changed his entire perspective. “The existential moment didn’t happen until the day after the accident,” Tim says. “I was driving my VW bus out of my neighborhood and waiting for the light to turn green, and I just realized, I just had a major accident that should have killed me. I could go ahead and get a nine-to-five job, and eventually retire, and then what? Go surfing around the world? My number could come up at any moment. I’d heard that all my life but to really realize it experientially – that changed me. I just felt like, the world is my oyster, I should be diving for pearls.”

Tim dropped everything, and relying on his sailing ability for work and with little more than a change of clothes and a surfboard, set off for New Zealand, India, Thailand, and Burma. He spent a winter on the North Shore of Oahu, and eventually migrated to Maui where he discovered his love for teaching the sport of surfing. Goofy Foot Surf School was founded shortly thereafter, where Tim has personally taught thousands of students, and where Goofy Foot instructors continue spreading stoke to this day.