SURF: 2-3ft, little bit of jumble but fun, peeling, and beautiful sunshine.
Gear: 9’0 Stewart Hydro Hull
My 9’4 has been in and out of the repairshop lately. Poor board has been getting dinged at crowded breaks and, since it’s practically a new board, I have it repaired professionally.
With the week or so turnaround time this leaves me high and dry if the swell is too small for my other boards. After seeing the forecasts for small clean swell, I hit craigslist looking for a backup board. Wouldn’t you know, there’s another board similar to mine for sale. I checked out for a long lunch, looked to board over and bought it.
I was looking for an 8’6, but I couldn’t really pass this one up. Sure the finbox had been ripped out and repaired, sure it had a lot of not so nicely repaired dings, but it was in decent shape and cheap. Cheap enough that I can learn to do repairs on it. Cheap enough that I can lend it to friends when I take them out surfing.
I spent saturday sanding down all the lumpy repairs and blobby resin. I touched up the fin box repairs and waxed it up.
Sunday I got it in the water. At 2 7/8th thick it’s a half inch thinner and about a half inch narrower than my 9’4. The tail is pulled in and very narrow. It’s lighter and feels like there’s not as much concave to the bottom. All of which leads to a slightly different ride. It turns fast and seems to be able to get into the wave at a slightly steeper point. I need to test it out more to really see how it’s different.
I managed to get two really great waves out of it. Both nice long rights. I could chase sections pretty well, but didn’t get any of the clean stable shuffling my 9’4 is so good at. Aaron and I stayed out for about 4 hours. He got one awesome long left and a few good rights.
The weather was so amazing people were hanging out all over the place, even the parking lot. A few kids were sitting around with a pickup overflowing with boards and a lazy boy. I’m sure somewhere just out of sight of passing officers was an ice cold bucket of beer.
California is whatever you make of it.
Yay for new boards (including new used boards)! Another benefit of a board like this is it gives you good ding repair practice so you can work towards having new board repair skills. (I don’t have the courage to repair a newer board yet, but I’m working on it.)
Anyway, may you have many sweet rides on this back-up board.