The Inertia for Good Editor
Staff

The Inertia

Imagine a world with a pissed off Rob Machado. And in that bizarro opposite world, pissed off Rob is mad because he’s found a board he can’t surf instantly. Both of these circumstances are a reality so unimaginable they must have been written up in some surfing alternate universe comic book. We know this because making anything look rad while gliding on top of water is Rob Machado’s super power.

Or maybe this is all just because riding an alaia is a unique skill (or art) all its own. Creating them is just as unique and just as challenging. We live in a world that stamps out foam blank after foam blank like the things are American Apparel t-shirts. And apparently that’s what inspired shaper Tom Wegener to take shaping (and surfing) back to its roots with finless boards. He’s pretty much pioneered the popularity of alaias in the past ten years. It didn’t take Rob Machado and other talented surfers too long to get the boards figured out, everybody started flying around on them, and we all became just as curious. The rest is history.

It’s an interesting look at where the surf community is headed. On one hand we have the mass production of boards and equipment to keep up with the growing demand. On the other we have a slow and steady dedication to “the core.” There’s no irony to an alaia (although there’s plenty of hipster surfers that pick them up for that reason alone), just a person sliding (literally) on top of water. And if we had to tell aliens what surfing is in one sentence or less, assuming those aliens spoke one of our languages, that’s exactly how we’d describe the act: Sliding on top of water. Anyway, my point is that surfing, as a community, has become a large enough space that we can enjoy the act from any side. Picking up a stamped out board straight off the rack has its place while ordering something custom made with somebody’s bare hands holds its own. Many of us don’t subscribe to one side while cursing the other. Sure, you’re tempted to say you’ll only stay on the side of the soulful custom shaped board and never give in to the commercialized cookie cutters but that war doesn’t really exist in the ways we imagined a decade ago. Nobody forces us to pick sides because the two are figuring out how to exist in a world with the other. The fact that somebody like Wegener took a step in one direction to bring us to our roots is proof that we’re all growing. Heck, he made a board even Rob Machodo couldn’t surf at first. That has to attest to something special.

 
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