Without this generally understood code, and with a completely unregulated free market in the water, the bully boys would likely attempt a take over. Drop-ins and punch-outs would increase and the most physically, or mentally dominant would take over and rule as tyrants in the lineup – with waxed windscreens, slashed tires and broken bones. Hopefully never dealing with life and death, but it could happen – so that the free market of the lineup was regulated by the local Police arresting and convicting felons. Assuming you are at the time in a country where the police are just and able to enforce good law.
Sometimes lineups are “policed” by good guys in the water, sometimes by not so good guys.
A different surfers’ code is sometimes used to regulate the free market of a small crowd at a small take off spot. This is the “take it in turns” policy. After you finish a ride, join the end of the queue and wait for your next turn. Technically this clashes with the “First up nearest the peak” piece of code and I’m not aware of anything ever being agreed in the economy of the household of surfers over which of these two rules applies when. I think the take it in turns policy has to be agreed at the time, or at the spot – and so as it’s not mandatory it’s more an example of a free market adjusting itself to suit the particular conditions of scarce resource (set waves) and alternate uses (several surfers wanting the set waves), and alternate outcomes (fights or shared waves and pleasure)
So what’s the point of this article? Well, I was recently struck by reading that economics is not necessarily about money, but about the administration of any limited resource with alternate uses (or riders) and that there are many options as to how a market economy can be run. In the surfing world we don’t fight each other to the death to control our resources (tho’ Apocalypse Now pictured a helicopter bombing / strafing raid to take over a Point break). The line, “Only Moroccans on the peak tonight” was a new one to me, and something I wouldn’t like to spread. It made me see that we run our lineups generally on a lightly regulated free market economic code: Be polite, respect the locals, pull off when someone else has “right of way”…And that this can’t always be taken for granted, And there are other very different ways that economies can be run – communist, fascist, dictatorship, tyrants. Maybe we should more highly value what we do have, in general, in the culture of the surfing world.
