By Matt Cortina
At only 9 years old, Seylah Childress of San Juan Capistrano has already surfed and skated around the world.
“I always loved the water, and I started surfing when I was 6,” Seylah said. “I started with my uncle. He took me out on the surfboard at Doheny.”
Doheny is still a favorite spot—as is San Onofre—but Seylah says she’s had great experiences surfing in New Zealand and Australia. As part of a big surfing family, her love of riding the world’s best waves was born into her.
“It’s like what we do,” Seylah says of her family and surfing.
Seylah says she’s made friends out on the waves, and has also potentially found her career calling out there, too—she wants to be a marine biologist.
“Just because I love the ocean and I love the animals in the ocean,” she said, adding that her favorite subject in school is, fittingly, science.
Seylah also starred in her school’s—St. Anne—production of Alice in Wonderland last year, and hopes to continue the theater arts through high school.
And perhaps it’s from her world travels or her surfing family that gives her this righteous perspective at such a young age, but Seylah hopes “to encourage all of the girls to start surfing and skating and try to get up on the board.”
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