Taking my kid for a walk just now, I saw a family unloading curbside, and the boy had one of these I always want to make people an offer for their old boogies, it's a shame that most of them are beat to hell and delaminated.
My neighbor gave me one of those Schroffs a couple years ago. It had been under his beach shack house for at least 10 years and who knows where before that so it doesn't look like those anymore! It's stained ugly brown/yellow I fixed it up a little but it's still barely watertight. It is really a twin fin with a nubby center fin that doesn't qualify as a thruster and about 5'11, at least 3" thick with a rough textured deck that will remove your nipples and the skin from your knees . I suppose it could be fun in the right waves but maybe not. I've been meaning to take it out but I don't want to ruin a perfectly good session with it.
My favorite wetsuit from "back in the day": Anybody else out there remember the name of the "model" here?
From the "Bo Knows" campaign, he's rocking a CI hahaha! On his famous wall run play after catching that ball in center field he basically smacked the lip of the outfield wall. Imagine Bo on a surfboard. There's nothing much he couldn't do.
Lopez WAS style defined....lotta gibberish out there now posing, and poseuring (note the diff, kidz) with their tatts & their rad tudes & their FU bogusino crap that mummsy & da-da paid for in their suburban psychosis. Gerry probably banged the anorexic star-fukker at 1:34, the wealthy daddy's grrrl at 2:04 & anything else in that homage to Mr Pipeline. Good stuff.
Okay, so I'm a glutton for abuse. . . have at it: <<So, this week, 50 years ago at 14, I got my second real paycheck from working as a pool boy/ mini golf attendant and go-fer at the Stockton Motel in Cape May. My brother had gotten me skim boarding two years earlier on a marine plywood round skim board. I had my share of skin strawberries on my knees, hips and elbows to prove that I had learned to avoid the ever present wipeouts in early skimboarding. We weren't launching into shorebreak, but just maximizing distance on the flat sands of Cape May beaches. At any rate, I had saved enough from two $40 checks to have enough to actually buy a surfboard, and it has made all the difference in the interim. My father poo pooed the idea of spending $80 on a surfboard (it was a Dextra Royal Hawaiian pop out board made with matt glass, not fiberglass) because it was just a fad. As much as I loved and respected my Dad, I'd like to think he was wrong from the perspective of the last 50 years. I scavenged a small formica covered piece of countertop and made the most of two wheels from a broken bicycle to fashion a bike trailer out of aluminum tubing and a long axle rod for the wheels. At any rate, it worked and gave me the opportunity to head for Poverty Beach (not a guarded beach back then) for numerous solitary surf sessions. It wasn't much, but I figured I had to start somewhere. The board didn't last, but the memories have. My next investment was a short sleeve wetsuit jacket, complete with a swivel lock beaver tail, and within two years I was custom ordering a full wetsuit for winter from Central Skindivers of Jamica, NY (mail order no less) Remember, this was hardly a surfing suit, stiff as a board (pants and jacket that flushed cold water through the suit every time you went underwater) and I guess you could say I was hooked. By 1966, my family moved to Ocean City, Maryland (the town I was rooting for over Union, NJ; or Hyattsville, MD) and my passion for surfing was set. That spring I started fixing rental surfboards for Spyder's Surf Shop in OC where I met my surfing buddies. We would eventually become the Spyder's "Weber Team" in '67-'70 when school and eventually a career in teaching would enable me to remain near the ocean. Surfing has been one of the highlights of the last 50 years from New Jersey, to OCM, to Hatteras, to Puerto Rico, El Salvador and California twice. Now, 50 years on, it's not quite as easy, but it's always been fun, and that has made all the difference. I doubt I'll make it another 50, but it's been a great ride, and I've got no complaints. Not bad for a "fad" at all in my book!>> http://mdsurferpix.tripod.com/webonmediacontents/50yearsofSurf.jpg
Good stuff Paulie, that sounds like a lotta fun. With all the technology we have today, it probably is never quite the same huh?
Thanks for the reminiscing. Brought back my own memories from early teenage years in early 70s So. Calif and how we used to cobble together gear for skin diving, spear fishing and hunting abalone off Palos Verdes. Wetsuits, if we wore them, usually consisted of of ill fitting beaver tail tops, booties, and gloves. The latter were more for hand protection from rocky reefs, barnacles, mussels, fish fins, etc. Gardening gloves were also used. Much was a hodgepodge collection of assembled parts from dive store or surf shop cast-offs or hand-me-downs from older brothers or friends. Hawaiian slings and spear guns were old ones which we often had to repair. Some slings we made ourselves from the gathered components. Most of us gave surfing a try, but we were more into diving then.
Wow... I worked down the street at the Stockholm Motor Inn. This was about 35 years ago. At that time, if they were the same owners, your boss and my boss were good friends. I remember my boss telling me that our grass wasn't as good as your grass, and it burned him up! Poverty Beach, btw, was the only beach that could handle big hurricane swells, and guys would come from all over to surf that beach. With so many guys in the water, the armed guard at the coast guard hut would get really nervous...
Yep, Wally Ryder was quite a character, his wife and kids were very gracioius as well. Heck, they hired me didn't they?
Old School single fin, mini rhino chaser. 7'3" built as a custom design modeled after a Brewer Mini Gun template in 1974.
Growing up surfing in SoCal in the 70's, I couldn't believe that people actually surfed the East Coast during that period (with the exception of Hatteras and Coastal Florida). Stupid, right? I would actually get psyched finding out that guys named Peter Pan would surf Rhode Island, it was unbelievable. I mean, those areas of the country never got any exposure in Surfer, Surfing or Breakout, right? LOL. I had a buddy that moved to the outskirts of DC when he was 16, and he left me his board. Little did any of us know that you guys are actually holding in OC and Jerz. We were so sheltered and arrogant back then. I met my first Texas surfer on my first sojourn deep into Mainland Mexico. I didn't even have a clue that Texas had any surf at all. Funny thing was, he surfed better than me or any of my buddies....and spoke Spanish to boot. Winter surfers on the EC have it made, as long as rubber technology keeps improving and all the kooks continue to wuss out. Rock on, my cold water brothers.
fixing a 6'4'' nomad now... center fin seems too big that I have... feeling like buying a flex fin for it... anyone have a recommendation?
Depends on what kind of waves you ride it in... but something like an 8" Yater Classic should be a nice match for average surf. Go smaller for big waves... which is what that board was built for.
My first surfboard was a 7' green Nomad single fin with duct tape on the rails. I had to keep it in the bushes at the haunted house where we hung out and surfed because my parents thought I would put my eye out if I surfed. It got stolen a month or so into my first summer of stand up surfing. The next one I bought, I grew a pair and kept in the garage at home. Ron Heavyside and Smitty are still shaping boards down at the Nomad Surf Shop in Ocean Ridge, FL. They are both sights to be seen. Crusty as a couple of barnacles on a whale's a$$. Ron's kids are real shredders - pro class.
