Two men died in Florida from Katrina when they tried to ride out the storm in their boats. In Florida, two swimmers died in rough surf Rita kicked up on Panhandle beaches. One was a Kentucky man killed at Miramar Beach, and the other an unidentified man who died at Pensacola Beach.
2003: two swimmers in the Florida Panhandle who drowned in the rough surf; and a 10-year-old boy drowned in a rain-swollen creek in North Carolina during TS Bill, a man drowned in a rip current near Cape Hatteras in Hurricane Fabian, a 71-year-old man who drowned off of the Florida Panhandle in surf generated by Claudette.
Fair enough. It's probably pretty safe to assume that most of the "swimmers" were in fact surfers, because tropical storm conditions aren't exactly conducive to doing laps.
The kid in the creek probably wasn't a surfer, unless pre-teen creek surfing is a new extreme sport I missed, and the 71-year-old ... well, I can't begin to figure what the hell he was thinking.
My impression is wholly subjective, but based on a fair number of observations. A lot of surfers head out to places like Cocoa and New Smyrna when a storm is on the way, because those fat 5' swells aren't easy to come by on the Atlantic coast. There are a lot of kids out there 1-2 days from landfall, but not many 0-1 days out.
Now, the folks who decide to ride out the storm on small craft, they're definitely suffering from more b--ls than brains.