A lot of surfers agonize over equipment. Is this board a half-inch too wide, a liter too voluminous? Marketing copy tells us that if we don’t dial in our dims just right, we’re going to be wasting precious performance. Conversely, we’re told that if we can just find the right board for us, we’ll be able to shred even in the weakest, crummiest waves. When a session doesn’t go as expected, it’s easy to say that we just had the wrong board for that day, but we would have done a lot better if we just knew what to bring.
Then someone like Jack Robinson comes along and whips a turn on a board he just ripped in half and blows all that out of the water. It turns out if you’re good, you’re good. Whether it’s an air mattress, a window, a lunch tray, or roughly 45 percent of a HPSB, you can basically make it work. Just don’t tell that to all the Craigslist sellers trying to unload new boards they only rode once, because I still have offers out.
