IT'S THE GADGETS

By corky carroll

One of the often asked questions I get these days is how is surfing different today then it was when I was a kid. My normal response is the obvious, you don't have to fight off the Indians now and the woodies are automobiles instead of covered wagons.

There is a prevailing sentiment among older surf gentlemen that the waves were better back "in the day," but I don't go along with that one. As far as I can tell the waves are the same, unless there has been some sort of man made change to a spot like a jetty or boat harbor or something. There are years that have lots of big swells and years that don't. But on the whole I think it is pretty much the same.

What has changed most is the equipment and all the gadgets and gizmos that go along with it. When I was little we had balsa wood boards. They had glassed on fins and weighed around fifty pounds. We used standard market bought paraffin wax as a slip retardant, the same stuff our mom's used to put in jam and jelly jars.

If you got a ding in your board you had to let it dry out for at least two to three weeks before you fixed it, and then you had to fix it right or it would get waterlogged and sink. Ya didn't want it to sink, that would be a bad thing.

Today you have your five pound foam board. Most surfers have a whole quiver of them. They have all these wonderful removable and interchangeable fins. Big ones and little ones and ones with rubber edges for protections, and even ones with tunnels in them to help you nose ride. There are dudes that have a whole duffel bag of fins to cover all the different conditions. And nobody uses paraffin wax anymore, it is the new super surf waxes. They got waxes for all kinds of different water temperatures and ones with different textures, from ultra-sticky to just plain sticky. And they even have different scents to choose from. I like the banana and coconut kind myself. But then you have dudes like Benny the Wavehog who actually try to make their wax smelly so guys won't sit by them in the water, I think he actually adds some sort of animal caca smell or stink bug juice or somethin' to make his really reek. Guys just start gaggin' and paddle away from him, that way he gets to hog even more waves than he already does.

And then there are the leashes. We never had those at all. If we fell off and lost our boards, nine times out of ten they would get creamed on rocks or hit the pier or whatever was in the way. My board used to have what I called rock radar. There could be just one little tiny rock on the whole beach and somehow my board would always find it and hit it. It was uncanny. And, besides the rocks and piers and stuff the loose boards used to constantly nail other people. A bunch of fifty pound logs flying around could get dangerous. That is why we all learned to paddle around the break to get outside and now right in the path of the guys riding the waves. Today the dudes just get right in the way and don't care, everyone is wearing a leash.

There are dudes out there who don't even know how to swim these days, they never have to. I saw a guy out there one day who had his leash break and he was in a total panic. I asked him if he was OK and he cried out, "I lost my board, what do I do now?" Duh....swim in and get it, you geek.

And the wetsuits. There were no surf wetsuits for us. We would stay out until we were frozen stiff and then rush in and stand in a boiling hot shower until we thawed out. And then go back out and do it again. We lost tons of guys to pneumonia every winter, it kept the crowds down. Some guys started going to dive shops and getting dive suits to surf in. But they were really thick and hard to get on and off. They would rip easily and come unglued all the time. I used to just staple mine back together. It took me many horrible cuts to learn to put the staples in from the inside out. Today they have all these super stretch ultra light paper thin extra warm, super cool surf wetsuits in all sorts of different designs for all kinds of weather and water temperatures. Geeze, you can wear these things to school. They are fashionable. And they have those cool Lycra "rash guard" shirts to wear under them so you don't get wetsuit rash under your arms and stuff. We need those, 'cause we always had heinous gory rashes. It was bad. If you didn't have a bleeding painful rash you either weren't surfing or you didn't use a wetsuit.

And there was no surfwear either. A pair of you dads big ol' baggy trunks. That is where they got the term "baggies." Some dudes would wear cut off clamdiggers and that sort of was the model for the early custom made surfing trunks. And now, look, there is a multi-zillion dollar surfwear industry. I designed the first pair of surf trunks for Walter Katin at Canvas by Katin in Surfside over forty years ago. And now I am finally trying to get myself into the surfwear business. Crazy. But I am not sure that all the current surfwear is all that much better than dad's old baggies. Those long over the knee surf trunks are NOT comfortable to surf in if you ask me. But I do like all the cool shirts and stuff. And they even have surfwear for babes.

Now that is one of the major improvements. Babes actually surf these days. We didn't have many of them in the water. But now there are tons of girl surfers, it is a good thing. We all love those great lookin' floss string bikini bottoms too. The chicks when I was a kid used to wear monster wool bathing suits and dumb lookin' bathing caps. Oogggly (that is past ugly). But today they are as close to getting naked as you can get. It is refreshing to witness.

And then there are all the zillions of accessories that they have these days. The surf sun glasses, surf watches that not only tell time but give you constant updates on the stock market; the surfing hats, booties, paddling gloves, lip coat, board bags, carrying straps, car racks, bike racks (our horses would have loved those), Walkmen, hula dolls, key chains, videos, wax combs and all sorts of other junk that can be found at any surf shop, 7-11, or in Bob "the Greek" Bolan's back pack. It's wonderful.

That is the big difference in surfing, the "stuff."