First paddle out.

Yeah....so??
Well if you need to know--I rode my moms placenta out onto the gurney, came out of them fallopian tubes hanging all ten....they were all there.

 

Bethany Beach Delaware mid-late 1970s not sure of the year...maybe '77. So maybe 40 years ago...damn. My dad bought me a beat up used twinnie.

 

Good treade idea. My first paddle out was indisputably the kookiest "session" of my life. Spring of my sophomore year of high school, I was 16. I had somehow acquired/borrowed/idk? a beat-to-**** single fin that had to be from the '80s if not before and was probably right around 6 feet long. I.e. way too small for my 6'3" well-over-200 fat ass, or for anyone learning. Not that I knew this or would've listened/cared if you told me. The friend who gave me the board had a couple boards, and had paddled out a few times previously the summer before, maybe stood up a couple times, but was by no means a competent surfer. He had managed to acquire a few boards though.

Anyway, it was the first 70-degree day of the spring here in NJ. So probably sometime in March. I put the board under my arm and biked the 1.8 miles from my parents' house to the beach. The waves were ****. Don't recall the exact details, but I'm thinking probably knee high at best, high tide breaking 5 yards from the beach, and I really don't remember if super clean or semi choppy or what. It didn't matter. It was not goode, really not even rideable. Not that I knew this or would've listened/cared if you told me. I paddled out in just boardshorts. In March. In NJ. First warm day of the spring, must be surfing weather, right? LOL. Somehow through a combination of being fat and being young and stupid and impervious to cold I stayed out for a solid 15 minutes and did not get hypothermia. But it was colde. Very colde. There were no waves, so I obviously didn't catch ****. There was no one else out. I don't remember if I even figured out how to paddle the board or just stood there holding it in knee deep water trying to sort of dive into waves. After about 15 minutes I gave up and biked back home. Told my mom I went surfing. She called me an idiot, grabbed the newspaper, and looked up that day's ocean water temperature. 33 degrees. Must've been a cold winter that year. Maybe I'm exaggerating... is it ever that low by the time we get into March? Idk. That's the number I've always remembered when retelling the story. I did not try surfborting again for several more months. It was a year and a half later before I even started trying to surf regularly. And I was a kook for a very long time. Arguably still am, but I mean it was bad for a long time. Probably a number of sessions before I stood up on a wave. Months before I could do it with any consistency. Paradoxically that's probably why I got so hooked. I am stubborn as **** and when I suck at something I am the type to get angrier and angrier and effectively beat my head against the wall until I can do it. At least I set the bar low when I started out so it's only gotten more and more fun from there.

 

Hobe Sound, FL. around 1984. I lived in Largo on the west coast and uncle took me over for the weekend. It was a nice 4 to 5 barreling, glassy day. Actually didn't do too bad, I guess because I was an avid skateboarder. Along with the beat downs, I was actually able to get to my feet and ride for a ways (straight towards the beach) HA HA I was hooked!!! When I got home, I immediately went to Mandalay Surf Shop on Clearwater Beach and picked up a 6' Hot Line surf board. The stoke had set in!! I never actually got on a long board for about 7 or 8 years later and I hated it. HA HA

 

Too young to remember my first paddle out... for a long time it was just borrowing boards from dudes on the beach when they came out of the water to take a break. I do remember my first board, and my first wave on that board... an old single fin Challenger Eastern (Tinker's Label)... road the foam straight in... all they way in to the beach. My mom actually snapped a picture, which she still has.

But I started borrowing boards as a little kid... back in the day it was acceptable to ask... and be asked... to borrow a board if a guy wasn't using it at the moment. That doesn't really happen anymore... but it was completely expected at the time that if you weren't out surfing, and had your board on the beach, you would let anybody who asked borrow your board for a few waves. Maybe that was just a hippy leftover thing in Cape May at the time, but that's how I remember it all the way through the 70's. It might have helped to have a hot sister, too... Lol!

Before that, it was a lot of rash burn from those old canvas mats, with the hard rubber corners. I'd get in the water with one of those things and never come out... this was at about age 5 or 6, until about age 10 or so.

 

My older sister's boyfriend took me out on a windsurfing board in a hurricane swell. I remember hanging on to a lobster pot buoy. Not much has changed.

 

15 in San Diego. Broke the leash and my cousin was so po'd that his board was floating away. Do people still keep placentas?

 

Research institutions still may keep placentas for stem cell research, I believe.

 

20 years old I moved from the mountains back to the coast after trying (and failing) to go pro snowboarding. I was completely over snowboarding from working in the industry and needed a fresh start. I lucked out and happened to rent a room in a house with 2 surfers and a ton of boards. They hooked me up with an old wetsuit, gloves, boots, hood, the whole nine yards. It was January and about as cold as it gets in SENC.

One of the guys lent me a 6'2 bright red single fin. Before I touched the water I dinged the nose and tail.... I was used to lugging around a ragged out 150cm twin tip snowboard and the extra length of the surfboard was foreign as hell to me.

It was about chest high and choppy as hell that first session. I paddled for 2 hours and never made it to the outside. The only wave I caught was on my belly when I was too exhausted to go any longer. It wasn't until we got back to the car that my friends noticed I had absolutely zero wax on the board.... they had a good laugh. We are still great friends to this day.

 

I had a 7 foot green Nomad single fin with duct tape. I talked my buddy into riding with me up to Hutchinson Island, I was old enough to drive, he started surfing a few months earlier. This was 1977 maybe. He warned me not to learn at our local beach, or I would be ridiculed (I was still ridiculed). It was waist to chest high, weak glassy east swell, I must have fell a zillion times, but a couple hours later I could catch a wave and ride it down the line. It was June,and I was told to learn how to turn by the end of August so I could surf the fall waves, and be able to surf our local breaks.

I remember paddling out at Pumphouse and almost running some old guy (23 maybe) over because I couldn't turn. He gave me a nice lecture, said he was the president of the Possum Creek Surf Club, and to take my act up the beach until I learned how to "track" my boart. I looked at him confused, he said "learn how to turn!" In retrospect he was really cool, he could have cussed me out, or threatened me or worse. A few weeks later I got a used twin fin and it turned fine.

 

Funny story lol

 

I'd be interested in hearing about Barry's first sesh too

 

I paddled out at Wrightsboro 7 years ago in April with my two sons. They gave me no advise at all... Told me to paddle and stand up. I took a board to the forehead on the paddle to get outside because I wasn't holding on tight. Finally got outside and paddled over to them and they paddled away because I was bleeding and they said I looked like a dying sea turtle and was attracting sharks.
Caught some whitewater and crawled to my knees and stood up right before my fins hit sand.

I decided then and there I would learn how to surf just to piss those two off!!!

I pretty much taught myself, with the help of a couple of youngsters from CB and UNCW that would paddle out and give me pointers while I flailed around.

Now I like to surf with my sons!

 

Okay....it was during the Jurassic Period, right at the end of it. I tied up my brontosaurus at the water feed, untied my board of its back, and hit the water. Then I saw a school of Carcharias Megalodon. As one came up to snap me in half, a large asteroid hit the ocean, wiped them out and all of the dinosaurs at the same time. But the wave produced was the best drop-in I ever had...200ft A-frame, made Jaws seem like toilet swirl. I slashed, ripped, burned and took that wave apart, minimizing the impact on land based mammals, (rodentia), and therefore, you are here today. I saved the world and prepared it to evolve to the world today. Believe me, the Democrats have nothing on me, with their whining about saving the world from "global warming" today. It was 120*F in the jungles back then and there were no Arctic or Antarctic.

*POOF*.....wow....I just had a strange dream, man....

 

Why Barry is my favorite. ^^^

 

o barry

 

Classic!!

o barry