The Choice
The best bit of advice I can offer people on choosing their surf shape is to be honest about the waves they intend to ride most often. Don’t buy a board for the 5% of glassy overhead perfect days, when 95% of your sessions are waist high and onshore. Most of us don’t get a chance to jet round the world on an endless summer and there will be a selection of local spots within our reach that offer us the best chance of catching a wave without having to file for divorce, bankruptcy or the jobseeker’s allowance. For the majority, a permit to ride involves negotiations with spouses, employers and the economics of fuelling your surf wagon. It’s a crime to waste that precious time and money therefore not doing anything but catching waves and having a board that will help you do just that. At the same time we need to keep a sustainable momentum of progression in mind. Make it too easy and our interest and skill set will soon plateau. Volume, length and width all contribute to stability and ‘surfability’ but my experience is that when a board is just out of our reach at first, it soon turns into ‘just right’ after a few weeks of use. Reasonably challenge your body and it will adapt to the new levels of balance and skills required. Learning to ride a bike is easy with stabilisers but how many people do you see keeping them on once they have mastered the art. Don’t limit yourself with your board. A healthy used market makes turning boards over fairly easy and when compared to other sports and pastimes, the residual values and depreciation are actually very good. Societal norms state that spending thousands following football, rugby and cricket teams round the world to matches is perfectly acceptable, buy a new sticker for your board though and you’re a ‘Surf nut’, wasting your wages on a pointless pastime. Forget ‘norms’, keep a healthy perspective on how good an investment for your mind and body your new board is despite what the neighbours might say!
