I love the smell of a new board and its curing resin. Toxic but exciting. I love how I get to ride something created after long chats with the shaper: design – redesign. I love how a new board has a spring in it and an ‘aliveness’ that gets you up on the cold morning keen on more water time. They don’t cost the world, but they do cost. After awhile though, sometimes you can get a bit slack and a board can simply become … well … a board. It’s ‘aliveness’ and allure may fade, except for the magic few that we get in a lifetime of surfing. But that board, that one that lost the ‘aliveness’, still has a magic’, it’s just that we lose our affection and enthusiasm for finding it.
Today I saw the Ahimsa Beach grommets carrying a newly obtained board. I took a photo of pure stoke. The board had only two fins, the third snapped out. No nose. Dings galore. Delaminated deck. You could say … the board was dead. You could, but the truth is the board simply needed an injection of enthusiasm and imagination. This was the grommets’ first board of their own. No more begging, borrowing and stealing the older crews. This board was their board, and they talked furiously fast about how special it was and what waves they imagined riding with it. This was a new board, even though it wasn’t. The ‘aliveness’ was there all the time, even though it had been cast on a rubbish dump. For these groms this was already a magic board, and they hadn’t even ridden it yet. I wish I still had that imagination and gratitude, and sheer bloody stoke. Thanks for the reminder and inspiration boys.
Local Groms and the Magic Board, Indonesia, July 2009:
Great stuff! So true…
i found my first glass board on the street while scrounging for furniture with my mum on one of those Council clean-up throw out nights in Randwick. It was a 6’6” Simon Anderson pin tail single fin ‘Energy’. All purple. All dinged up. I wish i had kept it.
Two weeks ago I received a custom Miller V-skate and love it.
The excitment of getting a new board is a great feeling that makes you appreciate all that has brought the experience together. The insipration, surf, the relationship with the shaper/creator, and dreams of surfing perfect waves better than you have ever surfed all culminiate in learning the intricacies of a new surfboard.
Once felt it is always there, but is most often blocked or ignored. Close your eyes and think/feel deeply to relive it.
Although commercialised now it remains ever true “Omly a surfer knows the feeling(s)”.
There is nothing quite like a new board (whatever your perspective of new). Cheers
This is a beauty Clif. It triggered feelings for me.
Firstly how great it is to talk to a shaper about what I want, to throw down a few ideas, get a bit of feedback on what might work and why. Then picking colours, pinlines and stuff or sometimes choosing to go biasa.
And then waiting for it to be ready. And riding it for the first time, hoping its going to be everything I hoped it would be. And then riding it lots and lots of other times and everytime getting a little tingle to see my name on the stringer in pencil.
And to treat it like a piece of work. A piece of work artists and artisans had a hand in. And to know its a different thing to the boards that get popped out of Asian factories. That the whole process is as cool as commissioning a building or maybe a painting.
But secondly you reminded me of the thrill of a grommet’s first board. You captured it well. Like your Groms, my first board came from the dump. It was 6’10″, a cut down sam egan mal with bog and heaps of onion rings. It looked like it had been reshaped with a handsaw. I propped the board at the end of my bed and lay awake for 5 nights staring at it until I got the chance to ride it.
That was my kind of post. Thank you.
This morning I was chatting to fella in the surf who was riding a little chunky wooden board he had made himself. It was a beatiful piece of work. It was like a miniature clipper sailing boat with all the panels meeting so perfectly and capturing sunlight deep into the wood grain. As soon as I commented on it he slipped off it, flipped it over to let me tickle its underbelly and admire the fins he had also hand crafted with layer upon layer of thin veneer. I could see this relationship between board the owner/builder was never going to lose its magic. He was beaming with love.. pure love. aaahh
Thanks it … where’s the steamer, I’m getting wet.