Yeah, that’s not what you want to see when you land. Photo: Instagram//Willem Beck
Traveling with surfboards can be the worst. You’ve been tracking a swell, booked your tickets so you arrive the day after the waves do. Your bags are packed, flip flops stowed, surfboards wrapped and fins tucked away with extra leashes and wax. You are excited. Then, horror of horrors: you arrive, collect your board bag from the oversized area, and unzip it just to make sure everything made it okay. Everything did not, and now you’re within spitting distance of the firing waves you came so far for and your magic board is in pieces. It’s all too common an occurrence, and recently Willem Beck opened his bag to see some of the worst carnage we’ve seen.
Beck, a Welsh surfer who was returning from Biarritz, France to Stansted (London) at the time of the crime, was traveling on RyanAir. According to reports, two of the three boards he was traveling with were brand new.
Beck explained to Wavelength magazine what, exactly, happened to turn his surfboards into shrapnel. “It got stuck underneath the wheel and was dragged across the tarmac for a while until they realized what they had done,” he said. “The boards were completely flattened. I also had wetsuits, clothes, fins, dry bags, board socks, you name it. Every single item was either ripped, flattened or covered in tarmac. I’ve submitted a damage report, let’s see what we get back.”
As I mentioned, this is far from the first time a surfer has had their treasured possessions ruined by the rigors of air travel. Billy Kemper famously took Hawaiian Airlines to task, as did Kelly Slater. American Airlines decimated Alex Gray’s surfboards, and Ben Gravy’s too. It won’t be the last time we see it, but hopefully with each destroyed surfboard, airline employees might be a little more careful.
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