It’s the aesthetics. Photo: Luisa Denu
I learned to surf from my dad. Let me rephrase that. A better explanation is my dad took me surfing and let me use his quiver. Which is/was pretty cool of him to do.
We still surf together when I go home. He usually picks out some sort of ultra thin, sub-seven-foot-board which is a little bit ridiculous the majority of the time, considering conditions in Maine are rarely head high, with the average day being knee-high-ankle-slappers. All of this is actually fine by me. The sub-par conditions, I mean.
It’s a sigh of relief to knee-paddle a log I know I can surf easily, and for hours, without getting tired. I know I’m going to impress my dad with my wave count and he’ll ask me how the surf was in Indonesia (which in his mind consisted of me pulling into hollow tubes, perfectly, and with ease, and also, importantly, on a shortboard).
It used to bother me a lot that he cared so much about board length. This is a man who likes metrics, numbers, and measurable outcomes, and who takes monthly and yearly tests to ensure he meets those measurable outcomes. This is also a man who wins big, uphill bike races (yes, these apparent torture-fests very much exist) and cares more about his personal best time than the medal at the finish line. I guess it bothered me because I felt that the metric he was using to measure if someone was or was not a good surfer was so utterly wrong.
It also bothered me because A, much of the time he could catch more waves if he picked an appropriate (long) board for the occasion, and B, at the time I felt that he didn’t understand the nuance of surfing “old-school” style and keeping your hands low and walking to the nose and exhibiting control on a board that is actually harder, in some ways, to control than a high-performance thruster.
For years this irked me. He would call and ask, “What board are you surfing these days,” and I would sorely disappoint him every time. His face fell when in Pavones my answer was “a 9’4″ Wingnut model noserider” and in California my answer was “a 10’6″ glider.” Things improved slightly when in Sumbawa my answer was “a 7’2″ Jim Banks twin pin.”
But a twin pin isn’t a shortboard, and I wasn’t conforming to any sort of high-performance standards of surfing, that was for sure. I assumed my dad hadn’t watched Torren Martyn’s edits or Joel Tudor exiting a Pipe barrel on an eight-foot downrail egg, and so he hadn’t yet been turned on to “real style.” So to him, I was just a kook, all these years later, with my too-big boards and my strange gripping for “the retro movement” and “being mysto” and everything else besides doing a hack or a pig-dog.
And for years, I thought he was the one who refused to down the hard-to-swallow pill. For years I thought, “you haven’t really surfed in California (although he had), you don’t know style, you don’t understand the nuance of surf history and the art of logging.” For years it bothered me that a man who was measurably smarter than me at physics did not appreciate nose riding to the extent that I felt he ought to.
Then, one day, (probably around the time my prefrontal cortex developed) I realized that maybe he was right, just like he was right about feeling better when you don’t eat Twinkies for breakfast, and just like he was right about not cramming all of your studying into the night before the test, and just like he was right about mixing cardio and weightlifting and a myriad of things dads are usually right about in the long run.
This admission was a long time coming, but I was so drunk on the Kool-Aid of Malibu First Point and Sano’s Four Doors and LogRap and every single other way longboarders shove their longboarding in everyone else’s faces, not because they love it, but because they are good at it and they can assert this weird sort of pretentious dominance over everyone else by hanging 10 or even just trimming on a board that cost the amount of an old, used car.
Yes, I realized that shortboarding is indeed harder, and that’s why so many people longboard.
Here is a (short) list of things I noticed that led me to this conclusion:
- My friends who primarily shortboarded went out every day, regardless of wave size, they would just longboard when the waves got small.
- Said friends could easily noseride even though they did not ride these boards the majority of the time.
- My longboarding friends would skip all of the days where the waves were over shoulder high and come up with a different excuse every single time as to why they randomly weren’t surfing that day (when the waves were actually good).
- Longboarders were the people shouting the loudest about how hard their subset of surfing is, and why it is so traditional and artistic, while shortboarders stayed quiet and simply surfed.
- Watching people learn to surf and become excellent at longboarding in a year or less while most (if not all) people were not able to master shortboarding in under a year.
- Shortboarding requires more physical strength, practice, and if you stop surfing, you lose it a lot faster.
I don’t dislike longboarding itself. There is nothing more beautiful to me than mid-50s and ’60s logging, especially at critical spots on Oahu or Australia or even Northern California. Plus, many of the best modern-day surfers ever (my opinion) are excellent longboarders.
The reason I can praise these surfers and sleep soundly at night is because they don’t only longboard. They treat longboarding like a tool to enjoy more days outside instead of a tool to assert hipster-ego-dominance over everyone else who wants to push themselves physically or mentally in bigger waves or harder conditions.
I’m not quite sure what to do with these thoughts. I enjoy longboarding, and anyone who posits that ego doesn’t make activities more enjoyable would be lying. It’s fun to assume people on the beach are watching you surf. It’s fun to film edits. It’s fun to emulate Miki Dora and Phyllis O’Donnell and the Greats Who Came Before. It’s fun to call people kooks because they surf tri-fin-longboards and wear leashes on one-foot days and do all sorts of other things that are Far Beneath You (a no-leash wearing, single-fin, traditional-style longboarder).
I know that surfing is surfing, and surfing is for fun and it’s not that serious. On the other hand, if you take nothing seriously at all, what are you getting out of life? We’re all going to die, and you might as well pick something to care about.
Plus, longboarding absolutely has its place in surfing. An interview with Randy Rarick one fall cemented longboarding’s usefulness in my mind. Randy explained his perspective as we discussed a recent longboard film release, and of all people, I would trust him on the subject. Rarick told me that hotdogging is a wonderful pastime for Southern California surfers because after all, their waves are small the vast majority of the time. But for those interested in taking their surfing to the next level, it’s worth challenging oneself with bigger waves, like the ones found on the North Shore or in Indonesia or wherever else in the world. This made me reflect on my own relationship with surfing. I have invested a lot of time and energy into surfing over the years, and I felt I owed it to myself to challenge myself to try different boards and different ways, even as appealing as it was to stick to the same gentle waves on the same nine-foot-plus boards where I knew I already had things dialed.
For most of us, those of us who surf for fun and those of us who may not have the time or money to go to faraway places with heavy, hollow waves, longboarding is a perfect way to get outside, catch a few waves, and go home happy. But there is also something to say for creating meaning for oneself, and that doesn’t usually come without learning and growth. I’m pretty sure my dad would agree with that.
