Small Minded: Wiping The Slate Clean

A few years ago I wrote about a perceived ‘eddy’ of lower and lower volume surfing paddleboards spinning away to the side of the sport’s mainstream. A veritable closed shop of elite riders chasing shortboard surfing-esque performance atop pieces of equipment that increasingly resembled just that: a surfing shortboard.

Well the thing is, as I was writing said piece I was indulging in the very thing that I was taking a pot shot at, attempting to ride micro paddleboards in a futile quest to replicate the sparkle and snap of regular surfing. There was, I shall admit, a strong whiffof hypocrisy and more than a hint of vanity. My ever pragmatic and sledgehammer blunt wife would no doubt have labelled it all as symptomatic of the standard issue ‘mid-life crisis’, but whilst I may be in a confessional mood I’m not prepared to admit that much! But plainly things weren’t going too well.

As we all know things have a habit of biting you in the arse, reaping what you sow and so forth. In my case the crush was finished. That first flush of new love, dry and withered. Honeymoon over. When I weighed it all up was it worth it? A select few might be edging towards performance parity with surfing but I was chasing something and not finding it. Frustration gave way to apathy, and I retreated back to surfing, convinced that stand up surfing was a poor facsimile, an ersatz imposter, a contrivance. Imagine! No more sessions where you spend more time trying to punch through waves barely head high than actually riding them. No more wipeouts that dragged you, like a fishing lure, underwater for tens of metres. No more burning thighs from just trying to stay on the damn thing and no more looks of condescension and smart remarks from surfers. And how easy to get a boardbag containing three surfboards, three whole, entire surfboards, on to a plane? Airports became a joy again, that après check-in pint a celebration of anticipation rather than an expression of relief at actually getting an enormous bag onto the plane.