More glassed-on fins than you’d dare shake a rock at. Photo: Jeff Divine
Not so long ago that I wasn’t riding the same board I am today, I was surfing with my good friend Jeff C. off the shores of California’s Point Conception, at a break only accessible by boat. We’d enjoyed a fantastic day of waves, shared with only a handful of similarly inspired prop-masters, the surfboat community being pretty tight in those waters. In the warm, golden rays of this particular autumn afternoon, the rest of the fleet having pulled up anchor for the downhill run home home, Jeff and I stood on the aft deck of his custom Anderson, regarding the empty lineup and glorious, untrammeled coastal backdrop. And an old photo came to mind, seen hung on a surf shop backroom wall, faded black-and-white behind smudged glass and a dusty frame. Shot back in the early 1960s, it showed legendary Santa Barbara surfers Rennie Yater and George Greenough at the very same anchorage we floated at this day, working out of an open skiff, hauling up what I could only guess to be lobster traps. A classic period “D” fin visible in the background; they had boards with them.
“Have you ever seen that photo?” I asked Jeff. “Just think of what that was like back then. The only guys here, anchored off the very same lineup, with these very same waves. How amazing that must’ve been.”
“Yeah, kinda like us, right now,” said Jeff. “Except with bad boards and no wetsuits.”
It hit me like a slap of cold saltwater in the face: unlike my friend Jeff, who’s always taken a more prosaic approach to his passion, I found I’d unexpectedly come down with a touch of surfing’s nostalgia virus. That seemingly pervasive belief, among surfers of all ages and levels of experience, that the sport was somehow better, more soulful, more pure, and, as such, more meaningful in some perceived past era than the one we’re living in today.
It’s an easy virus to catch, the Oxford Dictionary defining nostalgia as, “…a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a past time or place, often associated with feelings of happiness, comfort and a sense of belonging.”
Sounds nice, even emotionally healthy. Only that it isn’t, at least not when you’ve contracted a virulent strain, when then it morphs from simple fond memories into a toxic belief system. A belief rooted in dissatisfaction, and a pernicious lack of fulfillment that can taint the surfing experience worse than any onshore wind. I know plenty of older surfers who apparently haven’t really enjoyed their surfing lives since 1974; I recently listened to a 14-year-old lamenting the current state of the sport, harkening back to surfing’s “Golden Age”—in her case meaning pre-COVID, before, as she saw it, surf forecasting and soft-tops ruined everything.
Is there a remedy for surfing’s nostalgia virus? Probably not — as I described above, even the most progressive of us get a touch of it now and then. There are, however, preemptive steps one can take to help render the virus less harmful. The most efficacious being a clear-eyed view of how great surfing is today, when compared to (pick your year in the distant past). Inoculation begins by asking yourself this question: How many of today’s surfing innovations would you be willing to live without if you could go back to “back in the day.”
MODERN WETSUITS
Safely wrapped in your warm, flexible Yamamoto rubber cocoon, it’s almost hard to remember what surfing was like in the previous generation of neoprene strait-jackets. Yeah, all the big companies did their best, with their blind-stitched and taped seams, multi-densities and back zipper flaps. But, c’mon, remember when painful wetsuit rashes, welting up at virtually every point of flexed contact, were just part of the deal? And those aggravating snagged back zips? Don’t go surfing alone. Or go back even further to the old zig-zag stitched seams. Like paddling out wearing a flow-through tea bag. You can keep your warm memories — chilly water surfing’s way more comfortable today.
SURF FORECASTING
Yeah, I know, there was no readily-available, easily-decipherable surf forecasting back in the day, a much-lauded era wistfully perceived by many to have been populated solely by “real” surfers, those who didn’t need their waves served up on a tray like a Happy Meal. But guess what? The surf pretty much everywhere was still crowded. In fact, as I’ve previously written, unless you’re 72 years-old or older, you’ve never lived in an uncrowded surfing world. By this calculation, yearning for the days before accurate surf forecasting means being perfectly happy just showing up in the parking lot with everybody else, desperate to get out in the lineup before they do and establish some misguided sense of moral superiority. Some fun. (I actually believe that surf forecasting is making the waves less crowded than before, a theory I’ll present in an upcoming column.)
INTERCHANGABLE FINS
Those little hex keys can be a hassle, not to mention sticker shock related to the purchase of a set of JJF thrusters. But those modern drawbacks pale in comparison to those in the pre-FCS/Future days of glassed-on fins. Remember the distinctive hum of an improperly placed fin? Nothing you could do about it. Or the intense shallow rock and reef bottom anxiety, knowing that a snapped fin meant weeks out of the water? Or the pointless task of packing for an international trip, knowing that no amount of cardboard bracing or Styrofoam padding could stop a deliberately cruel baggage handler from ruining the first three days of your trip to Puerto Rico, or Bali, or Baja — if you could even find someone to glass your fins back on. Never met a single surfer back then that, at one time or another, didn’t hate his fins.
C.A.D. SHAPED SURFBOARDS
There was a time, an era viewed through more rose-tinted glasses than perhaps any other, where you walked into a surf shop, cash in hand, and pretty much took whatever you could get. No consistency in design — every board was slightly different, thicker or thinner, lighter or heavier, an accurate representation of the shaper’s vision, or one subtly altered by an inattentive sander. No real basis of comparison, either, but just the hackneyed pantomime of “sighting the rocker” and “feeling the rail,” tucking it under your arm and going, “Yeah, yeah,” as if you had even the slightest idea what you were describing. And the custom option? Great, if you didn’t mind waiting a few months, and then getting a red spray-job when you ordered a blue one. I love the smell of a surf shop as much as the next surfer, but when it comes to getting a new board, today’s computer-aided design and advanced composite sandwich construction has put an end to all that pointless uncertainty.
Wrist leash anyone?
USER-FRIENDLY LEASHES
In this case, if you can’t remember listening to 1970s top-selling rock album on FM radio, then you can’t remember what surfing was like without leashes. Less surfers out at cliff-front spots, sure, and a much more rigid, merit-based lineup hierarchy, which at first glance could appear worth pining for. But be honest — what makes you think you’d be any higher on the food chain back then, than you are now? What the soulful, pre-leash days meant for most surfers was getting less set waves and a lot more dings. Early-to-late 70s leash days, you say? Still pretty cool? Hardly. Those old zing-strings either snapped like under-cooked linguine or ripped through the tail-rail with maddening regularity. That is, when the flimsy Velcro ankle straps didn’t gleefully part, and always at the worst possible moment. Face it, having grown up with modern urethane and rail-savers, you’re probably not as good a swimmer as you might’ve been. But I’d bet you’re a better surfer.
SURF TRAVEL
There’s no aspect of past surfing epochs looked back on more romantically than ‘60s and ‘70s surf travel. And it was romantic, and it was adventurous, and it looked great in the surf magazines, when distilled down to a few evocative photos and requisite Tolkien-esque “All who wander are not lost” platitudes. But all that freedom to roam didn’t come for free. Decent education, gainful employment, meaningful relationships — with the exception of a one-week trip to Waikiki in the summer, or maybe a quick run up to the Outer Banks, traveling for surf meant putting up with a lot of insecurity, so far as other areas of healthy lifestyle was concerned. Not to mention malaria, gastroenteritis, harrowing bus rides and long, frustrating flat spells spent languishing in a flea-ridden hammock, trying hard not to question if this, indeed, was the righteous path. Think about this the next time you book a week with a promising forecast at the Punta Conejo Resort in Salina Cruz, or check into the Uluwatu Villas anytime between May and November.
A trip that brings me all the way back to my buddy’s boat, after a great day of surfing along a stretch of wild California coast, and the revelation his observation brought to life. Thinking back on that old photo of Yater and Greenough, it hit me that there was no better time to have been a surfer, simply because the thread that bound the experience captured in that photo, to the day we’d just enjoyed, was unbroken; that surfing, the riding the wave part, the sharing it with friends part, wherever you happen to find yourself, is just as much fun today as it was “back in the day.” In many ways, even more so. So, consider this state of awareness to be like a vaccine — take it and you’ll never have to worry about the nostalgia virus again.
