Looking back to rebuild the future of surfing.

Do you ever find yourself just sitting and watching life? I do and the last time this happened I was checking the surf on a fairly average day at Japs (the local beach) … Nothing really changes quickly here. If it does change it kinda stays that way for a long time. Anyway this day was ok, winds were light and a bit off shore then a bit cross shore and back again. The waves were ‘saw toothing’ as my Californian friend would say, but there was an occasional good one peaking at just the right spot on the bank and peeling left down the line for 30 meters or so before fattening out to nothing in the channel. There was probably half a dozen guys sitting on that bank, which was the only one really working on the beach as far as I could see.

For every good wave, there would have five other waves that no one surfed. There wasn’t really any one thing wrong with those waves, they were just over head high normally, some we a bit fat and slow and some were a bit too fast or peaked too far inside. These waves just rolled on through unridden and it struck me as a waste. I mean why, why did no one try and surf these other waves, its not like there was an endless run of good ones, there wasn’t, the good ones were here and there one, two, even five minutes apart. I figured it was unlikely that they (the kids surfing) didn’t want to catch waves. As a grommet (I always loved that name for young surfers) and sometimes even now, I was so keen to ride waves, I’d imagine waves even when I was living in Kinglake hours from the beach. I’d run down the dirt track behind our house in the National Park and pretend the trees and shrubs that overhung the track were waves and I’d trail my hand along their leaves and branches visualising the perfect barrel I was in…

The only reason I could think of why these waves were being surfed was that they (the surfers) weren’t able to ride those waves that didn’t line up just right. Their boards and in some part their skills weren’t up to the task. Looking at the boards they were all fairly similar, short, narrow, curvy with three fins, just like all the guys on the ‘dream tour’ ride. I’m sure the reason it’s called the dream tour, is because these guys get to surf all the best waves (or at least those that are well known) around the world in the peak of their swell season with just one or two other guys. Most surfers can only dream of that. Which begs the question if their boards are designed for those dream waves (and their considerable skill) why on earth do we kid ourselves by thinking they are the right boards for us to ride at our local break? I mean Japs has its day, but that’s just it, its day, singular. Unless you only surf on the very odd occasion when it’s absolutely pumping and all the elements come together just right, for the most part you’ll be riding less than perfect waves and normally you’ll have to share those less than perfect waves with half a dozen less than considerate other guys. It would stand to reason then, that the boards you ride on all those other days when it’s not quite perfect or indeed a long way from perfect, would be considerably different to those ridden on the ‘dream tour.’ Logical right? Yet our surf stores (or store since the other place closed down), don’t stock alternative boards, they just stock dozens of ‘dream tour’ boards with some slight variations in size and shape, fins and rails, and of course the big seller - different brands and colours! Are we surfers really that shallow? Are we too cool to surf the not the quite perfect days? Are we not creative enough to surf a slow fat waves well, to change our board’s shape, or our technique, our manoeuvres to suit the waves we live with? Watching all the old surf films, people surfed whenever they could, good days, average days, they were out there and having a blast, stoked if there was a good wall and loving the company of other surfers. What’s changed? Now we surfers hate it if another bloke paddles into our wave, we don’t surf if it’s not ‘good’, and a smile is a rare thing to see out there in the water…  

Things do change slowly here, and I think they are changing, surfers are waking up to the dreaded onshore Sou’ Easta’ and wanting to go surf anyway, so they are looking for other boards that might work well on those less than perfect days. Hopefully they might even begin to enjoy surfing with each other again. For me the change couldn’t come quick enough. I build and ride hollow wooden boards, they are nothing like the dream tour boards, they are wide, heavy, shorter, and they go really fast. They don’t turn as tightly as a regular foam thruster and an air is fairly unlikely, but they are heaps of fun in the waves here. There is one thing a Chinese pop out can never be, customised - Customised to your waves, to your size, to your style. If you are looking at getting a new board for summer, think about it. Get something you will have fun on even the surf is small, or a bit onshore, or if (dare I say it) some guy drops in…