What are you looking for?

Is the grass greener on the other side of the hill?

Will the other board turn better?

Will the other board curiously make you a better surfer?

Do you wish you could do what you see the other guy do?

You can’t make the wave but with that other board you know you could.

You know which one of your boards you like the best, but the one you ride most is the cool one.

Sometimes we just think too much. For the most part if you think too much your surfing will suffer. Thinking that you need a different surfboard will not help you surfing. Thinking that you can over come the hardships you have with a particular surfboard will help your surfing.

When is a good time to think about your surfing? Not during but before or after your session….. Like why did I fall on that particular wave and what should I have done or not done in order to make the wave.

Case in point; Last week I took a bad fall and hurt myself. Maybe a slightly over head wave. Late, late take off and didn’t make the drop. Fell back flat on the water and suffered whip lash to my neck. It took about 7 days to get back to normal. I have replayed that fall in my head many times.

Why did I fall? I didn’t get my feet positioned correctly.

Why? Because for the most part I free fell for a split second on take off.

Why? Because I took off so picking late.

Why? I didn’t want the wave to pass me by.

My thinking? If I made It great, if I didn’t at least I tried.

I never thought about the possibility of getting hurt. I should have thought about the possibility of getting hurt by doing something ill planned like taking too late a take off before I got in the water.

So what’s the big deal about late take offs? Nothing, I do it all the time. But, at my age I could take a bad fall and hurt myself…. So I should plan a little better before I go.

D.R.

I've made a few fish in the past several months. Matt Riley on his 5'8

The surfboards I ride post 2 or, the surfboards you ride.

Did anybody that surfed in the sixties ever hear the words ‘the board doesn’t work‘? I don’t remember hearing anyone say that. Actually, I don’t remember ever hearing anyone say that until maybe the eighties.

What I do remember is getting a new board and surfing it until you figured it out. Sometimes you’d get it down in short order. Sometimes it would take a number of trips to the beach. But, you always worked at it until you knew what you could or couldn’t do with the thing, and then lived with it until you got a new board.

Sure, as we all progressed and wanted to do quicker turns and maneuver more on the wave we ditched the old “D” fins and found smaller aspect fins helped with maneuverability but, did the old “D” not work? Maybe its semantics, “D” fins worked fine until we found out that they limited maneuverability…. Then they didn’t work anymore. But before that they worked fine.

I remember once making a board for someone… like a team rider type… when the guy saw the board for the first time said ‘the board won’t work, the tail is too thick’. How thick or thin the tail was supposed to be for the board to “work” he couldn’t say, but what he saw wouldn’t work. Since surfing is 98% mental guess what? There was no way the board was going to work after the guy said ‘the board won’t work’. I later mentioned what the guy said to another board builder friend, his comment?... “ He said it wouldn’t work before he rode it? Well, it sure won’t work now will it”?

I made a board for one of the pro guys I’ve done boards for in the past. I’d made him plenty boards, but one in particular as soon as he saw it he rejected it flat out. He never said it wouldn’t work though. Of course good surfers can ride anything and look good but, this particular board was not what he was wanting, he could tell by looking at it, so that was that.

Personally, of all the boards I’ve had over the years there have been none that I could ever say “didn’t work” First off, a surfboard has no moving parts…. Unless the fins are loose…. So how could they not work? Each board may ride a bit different than another but reality… they all work. That said, I had one board that was seriously moody. When I first started riding it finding my feet was none to easy. Seems more times than not I’d plant my feet down in the wrong spot on take off spaz through the first turn until I could relocate my foot position for the next maneuver. After a few go outs I even decided to put some markers on the deck for my foot positions…. It helped a little. But even with the board the way it was there were go outs that I had the best time surfing it. So… did the board work or not?

Are there boards you can get that are as close to perfect as possible? Are there boards that “work” great starting with the first wave and every wave after? Is there such a thing as love at first sight?

Surfing... and love.... is a very individual thing. The questions asked in this post; you may have to answer them yourself. What do you think?

Geez, I even ended with a question...

D.R.

What happened in the 70’s ?

At the turn on the 60’s decade surfing seemed to be over it’s first commercial stage…. If you consider the sixties surfing thing as commercial. There were a couple clothing companies like Hang Ten and wet suit companies, nothing like today though. But, there was the Hollywood surf thing in the sixties like Beach Blanket…. something and the TV show Gidget in the sixties.

By the turn of the decade the big surfboard labels had lost their appeal in the industry and small local builders became the place to buy surfboards. Starting in the early seventies surfing seemed to be much more a grass roots or underground type of pursuit. The contest thing had no real traction as surfers became more interested in a non establishment going your own way thing.

The art of making surfboards may have gotten it’s start in the 70’s as the whole mass produced make as many surfboards as you can thing of the big labels in the sixties was replaced with the small board builder. Builders had more time to focus on design and crafting something their heart was into. If you find an old 70’s board you will see some of that craftsmanship. Color laminations and swirls or abstracts, as well as some pretty amazing resin pin line work.

Surfing certainly continued to advance. Surfers every where were still pushing performance boundaries but it was pretty much kept at the local level. There was the localism factor too. Certain places were known to have a local contingent of hard core locals only types that would make things unpleasant for unfamiliar faces in their lineup. I knew of one spot I wouldn’t surf in my home town even though I was a local.

Surfing was a quiet thing during the 70’s. But in the last couple years of the decade things began to change. Surfboard design was moving sum what slow with no real significant notice through most of the seventies. Sure there was the twin fin but it didn’t take over that much, there were still more single fins in the water than twins.

But at the end of the decade surfboard design changed radically and to this day has never looked back… well maybe just a little. What happened? The three fin Thruster.

D.R.

For the longest time tri fins were it. Now….how about a quad?

Growth of an industry.

Last weekend I went to an event that was held at the Fender Guitar Museum. For a guitar guy like myself it’s a pretty cool place. As well, every surf music band that was, is or has been played Fender guitars… from the Beach Boys to Dick Dale.

As I was taking in all that was there, reading the various stories and captions on so many of the photos in the exhibit I was struck by the thought that in the beginning Leo Fender really had no idea where his little company was going to take Him. That most likely there where people that belittled the notion that his amplifiers and guitars would amount to much. After all how far and how long could this crazy teenage music go?

At the same time I saw how the surf board industry had similarities. Who knew that making surfboards would ever amount to anything? As guys like Dale Velzy and Hap Jacobs, in their twenties, started surfboard businesses did they ever think that surfboards would grow to what we see now? Can you hear the words…? “Yeah, do you really think your little surfboard business is really going to last? Surfing is just a fad fuelled by this crazy music with electric guitars"…. Fenders no less!

As we stand back and look at the history it’s really amazing to think that Fender having started in such humble beginnings grew to a multi million dollar business. And similarly we can see how what was started in the late fifties on the beaches of California making surfboards has grown to an international industry. Leo Fender sold his company to CBS for a rather large sum of money. Similarly Channel Islands Surfboards was sold to Burton for no small amount I’m sure.

I certainly never thought that making surfboards could or would be sustainable over decades. Something that could put food on the table, something that would help provide the resources to raise a family. Something that would over time be looked at with some respect instead of “ Oh, it’s just a passing fad. “ Or, for that matter, be passed on to new generations.

My wife found the below drawing today. I’m not sure what age my son was when he drew it… maybe 6 or 7. But I am sure he never thought while drawing a picture of his dad surfing, wave curling behind and a flock of seagulls over head… note the M’s in the sky, some 25 years later he’d be pictured below (third from left) with his coworkers at FCD doing what his dad taught him, making surfboards.

D.R.