Each generation thinks it`s more advanced than those which have gone before. Yet many people insist surfing was better when they were young…
What`s been lost along the way?
as a 21 year old i wish that i would have been alive and surfing in the early days. There was true exploration in those days, not surf camps and $1,000 dollar flights. The surfing generation that is being brought up now has no soul. They have been brought up on the contest and sponsorship aspect of surfing. the same could be said for skatebaording. Many skateboarders belong to P.R.O which is a union for pro riders. its total crap skateboarding has sold out. Surfing is about exploration and finding things within yourself. I really think that surfing was better in its infancy, i wish i could have been around for it.
See grumpy old men thread…
Who were your mentors? What were their attitudes?
Did any of your friends have a bad attitude? Did you get rocks thrown at you or tires slashed or fistfights at another break? What did you do to get even?
Are you passing on your knowledge? How do you treat those who look up to you? Your today might be a direct mirror copy of what was yesterday’s old news.
When it’s your chance to hold the mirror for some young’n to try to see his or her future somewhere in your core - just remember we are the descendents of sketchy entrepenuers, gold miners, religious zealots, people who were escaping social and or political persecution and criminals - anything done with honest integrity from the heart will help us not lose anything along the way this time. (We can’t/won’t lose!)
Surfing was a BIG adventure in the day, now it seems to be packaged like a politically correct soundbite. Though my at 18 is just as excited as I ever was - god bless him. “Epoxy’s the future dad, get with the program.” Pass it on… Now it won’t get garbled like that old classroom experiment when whispered from ear to ear “get with the program” became “My mom is an alcholic whore?” Pictures speak volumes, indeed!
Dale, my opinion is that ignorance is everywhere, and of course inside the surfing community there’s too, and now a days there’s no excuse, we have the information and if we don’t learn is because we don’t want to, or just because we are so sober to think that maybe someone did something interesting before us.
Know what you want.
Learn from the past. That means for all those which have gone before.
Use what the present offers you.
Enjoy the future.
I was born on 1976 and i live in Galicia and i haven’t found another surfer in the water with a single fin, a quad, a mat or anything different from an standard super thin modern thruster, a three fined standard longboard or a mix of both. I haven’t found anyone who knows something about how was surfing before he surfed… just something about someone’s called “Duke” or “Gerry Lopez”.
I’ve been trying different shapes, different rails, different fins from what the “standard present” offers me, and i’ve been trying to surf and feel the way some surfers did before our era, from Duke to Taj, going through Phil E., Dora, Nat Young, Wayne Lynch, Shaun Thomson, Mark R., Cheyne, Tom Curren, Occy, Slater…
I enjoyed so much all this kind of “experimenting”, and my surfing had improve a lot, i learned to use my rails, i learned the difference between riding the board or riding the fins as we use to do on modern shapes, and the most important thing is that i learned how to ride the board, and flow with it, instead of use it as a skateboard.
The result is that i enjoy surfing more and more everyday.
Dale, this happens everywhere, think about politics… we are living again what happened before and we now where we are going.
History is a big part of us, and we are a little part of history.
On the other hand, i think that people feels as if surfing was better when they were young because on our society, when we’re “young”, we just have to go to school and the rest is surfing (and girls, i know), and we are part of the surfing culture and style of the moment, and we’re really focused on that. But when we grow and we raise a family and have some kids and a job, we don’t belong anymore to the surfing world, we belong to our own world, and we see the surfing world from the outside, and we begin to feel as if our little surfing world is being ruined by the newcomers who doesn’t have any respect… That’s just about cycles.
I think this is a question about human nature and not just about surfing or shaping… but a nice question.
Good waves!
Coque.
PS: wow, i always feel as i used a lot of words to tell litle messages in english, i hope you understand what i wanted to say.
Quote:
What`s been lost along the way?
Ah, a good incendiary topic…time to shake the cobwebs off. What’s been lost? Simplicity, freedom, fun…and this seems more a function of age rather than generations. It’s still a simple thing when it’s new, ja? Same today as 10/20/30/40 years ago. Without the perspective of accumulated experience it’s a simple matter of getting equipment and having time.
The beginner of 2004 cannot comprehend how little money and equipment surfing involved in, say, 1970. Conversely, the beginner of 1970 probably gags when viewing what a current 5-7 year surfer takes to the beach every day. I personally took less to Australia in 1978 than the average California surfer of today takes to San Onofre or C Street for a 2 hour go-out.
With fewer people in the water it was much easier to get satisfactory waves. This is irrelevant to contemporary surfers, as it always has been, but years earlier in now-urbanized places such as Southern California a simple car trip could do for a surfer what one now has to fly for hours to hope for. The time and money commitments are horrendous, simply to get what was “growing on the tree” in earlier decades.
“'Twas always thus”, said Mr. Natural, and that’s true. But how much more can there be? Can there be more “necessary” crap still to be invented for us to take to the beach every day? Is “commitment to surfing” now a matter to be judged by disposable income and waistline sizes?
In my heart I know nothing has been completely lost. What I hate about Now vs. Then, however, is the knee-jerk judgementalism surfing is choked with. It’s a simple function of overpopulation pressures, I’m sure, but it didn’t used to be this bad and certainly other popular pastimes have encompassed massive growth and learned to live with it. Surfing is no longer a young sport, but the juvenile attitudes of the industry advertising via much of the surf media is feeding a totally bogus notion to impressionable people of quite a broad age range.
This is just another thinly disguised nostalgia thread?
OXOMOXO…(Our Mother Ocean)
(excerpt from)The Teachings
of Don Redondo
Part Two
A Surfer’s Way of Knowledge
by Careless Constipeda
as told to Drew Kampion
Meanwhile I was walking out over the ocean as if I was walking down your typical city street. I walked on out to the line-up and a voice said: “Your feet are growing long; they are stretching out in front of you and behind you; they are growing together; your heels are growing a fin; your ivy league trousers are baggies; the rest of you is well-tanned skin; you are a hot, young junior from Waikiki.” And I was!
It was ten foot and glassy and my feet were my board and they were well-shaped with just enough kick in the nose, a step-deck, egg-rails, and a Greenough Stage IV fin, so I ripped ! And in the middle of my ripping there was this short little guy who surfed along with me; he said he was my ally. Call me anytime you want to Surf, he said. His name was Murphy, and after that all he said was “OXOMOXO” which made perfect sense to me at the time. Better than anything I’ve heard since.
In general, for most of us, SPACE. And, as has been pointed out, when you get older, relativity sets in and the daily spin seems faster, and thus TIME seems lost the longer we hang around. Other than that… You can get a great mat today, that you couldn’t get when I was young, and lots of boards to think about too. Taylor
As a wise friend once said to me: perfection is that place in your mind where judgment is suspended. It’s all, always perfect, always has been, always will be, if you can avoid being judgmental and maintain wonder. Surfing is miraculous, at any level.
Surf in joy! The ocean loves you!
You can’t take it with you, so why not stay a little longer 
Quote:
This is just another thinly disguised nostalgia thread?
Say it ain’t so, Daddio…certainly not yet a nostalgia thread but rather a general look at a subject, bearing in mind in Dale’s own header “A common delusion”.
Nostalgia? I love modern wetsuits, hate the frickin’ leash. Changed equipment and regular surf spots to hold out a little longer against the leash, but crowd pressure and my own good judgement eventually tied me up and raped me! Gotta look out for those inside who never knew what it was like to surf free and unencumbered. It’s the only responsible thing to do.
Certainly my surfing was better when I was younger. But unless one is truly delusional, that’s true for everybody past a certain age.
Quote:
See grumpy old men thread…
Hee hee hee…we may choose to view grumpy old men threads on surf related forums, but by far the grumpiest bunch of weiners I run into at the beach are younger people. And why? They don’t get cold in the water and they never lose their boards on the rocks and they never have to swim. Of course, for some of them their boards start delaminating in the shop racks, and they can ding fairly easily if the golf clubs roll over in the back of the SUV…that’s always a bummer. Not for me, of course, but I feel their pain!
Quote:
But when we grow and we raise a family and have some kids and a job, we don’t belong anymore to the surfing world, we belong to our own world, and we see the surfing world from the outside, and we begin to feel as if our little surfing world is being ruined by the newcomers who doesn’t have any respect… That’s just about cycles. - Coque
A great observation, although I dispute some of it. Certainly this is the feeling put off by “the surf culture” (basically the surf money industry/media). At a certain point of maturity one might see more importance to paying the bills off instead of buying three pair of surftrunks on the credit card. I’m told there is a special hell somewhere in Orange County for people who leave the One True Path of surf consumerism.
What is “the surfing world”? Surfers. People who ride waves. What laughably passes for “surf culture” seeks to define valid entry by age, equipment, sponsorship, endorsements…basically by advertising demographics and related gibberish…for personal/corporate ecomomic purposes. F–k them, eh? The real surfing world of 2004/2005 is right this minute outgrowing it’s wetsuit. When do we “not belong”, for real? I put it to you all that if we surf, we belong; this includes the goofball who had to go to surf school for three sessions before he could finally stand up as well as the surf-geezer who has worn out two sets of hips.
Very seriously: Once surfing as a whole can grow up enough to accept that it really isn’t the small outlaw cult group it used to be, things will settle down and get better for everyone. The whole pro surfing thing will still exist, the people who want to cut the cords and be feral lifestylers can still do so, the recreational people will be able to rec-reate without hassle and the snobbery so inherent in every era (but now annoyingly amplified by the huge numbers), and the people who want to integrate Real Life with their surf life can do so without getting kicked by all sides. Even that would be good for surf business.
I think the common delusion is that anything’s been lost. The older you get, the more nostalgic you get and the delusion grows. How quicky they forget about horrible wetsuits, heavy, tracky boat boards, limited travel horizons, the Cold War, Vietnam, etc.
Crowds? You could walk on surfboards from the Slot to Cowells on a nice winter swell in the 60’s. Same today. Sure, you might have to do a little more work to find some isolation these days but imagine what it would take to get to G-land 40 years ago! Yeah Burrhead and Yater had no reason to go to Baja 50 years ago, at least today we have paved roads…
I feel sorry for the under 40 crowd just because they missed out on some of the better things in the past (the spirit of wonder, adventure and “try anything once” of the 60’s) but then the opportunities available (materials, tow-surfing, world-wide travel, etc.) in surfing today are so overwhelming I sober up pretty fast.
The ONLY guys who really lost anything were the Golden Era folks (late 1940’s to late 1950’s) but even they still have the memories.
Monday, Tuesday - Happy days…Ahhh - the good old days? Fret not, maybe we haven’t lost anything. Maybe our combined voices will lift some poor sucker, Phoenix like out of the masses to erase the definition of what it is to be a surfer - look at Rasta, he’s started the movement. (What’s he thinking?)
I pray everynight that some young gun will eject over outside reef at Trestles and I can paddle out and watch “the sunrise from the bottom of the sea” with whoever it be. But alas, my champagne bottle stays corked cause there is no young rebel to question why all the boards, wetsuits and haircuts all look the same. I sat in the locker room after football practice one fine spring afternoon and heard “are you experienced” Jimi Hendrix on one of those crappy little record players and my reality/delusions slowly came undone - the next year I wasn’t a football jock - I were a surfer. Is there a comparable scenario for any of today’s generation? “After surf school it’s straight into junior competitoin I go.” The closest they’ll ever come is - “retro”. Do you like my retro fish? Check out the retro wood fins. Retro is a concept that will keep turning up to drive sagging sales. I’ll take one from the punk potato chip column, and one from the old longboarder column - Oh, could you retro my order, please? The industry blends in like a super-spy chameleon. I bet if flourescent wetsuits came back every company would have their version.
We already heard from one dissatisfied customer Any others? Or are you all - love me love my thruster clones or retro wanabees??? Does anyone have a voice louder than the mass produced equipment he carries? Dare to surf a mat or make your own board. Shape a retro fangtail just for the hell-of-it. After you take that sucker in the gut just once, you’ll realize this is where it’s at anyway…ya whiners.
What’s been lost??? how about what’s been GAINED along the way?
today, I can surf logs or hi-performance longboards; I can surf a bonzer or a twinzer or a thruster or a Lis fish or a quad fish or a cross-country board or a tandem or a mat or a hybrid or a Pipeliner or a 6 fin gun or WHATEVER I WANT. I can wear no leash, no wetsuit, no boardshorts, no booties, no hood, no polypro rashguard, or all/any of the above. I can be a local or fly to Fiji. I can make boards out of balsa, foam, or the latest hi-tech stuff that only got invented this morning. I can ignore the pro circus or I can watch contests on cable. I can be Mr. Soul and ride only retro boards or I can tow surf or I can buy the latest fin designs, interchangeable systems, traction pads and do aerials until my knees shatter.
I’m surfing better now, on better boards, that I can make myself, than 25 years ago. But I can ride 60’s boards if I feel like it, and glide into the sunset. I can surf with my 65 year old surf buddies, or with the local kids. Or with my kids. SO MANY THINGS TO DO.
Best of all is Swaylocks. Nobody would have dreamed of this place, trading surf tips with people all over the world…
Nostalgia, hell. Today is pretty groovy & bitchin’ even if nobody says that anymore. Now, where did I put that Steppenwolf CD…
I can surf, I can wear, I can be, I can make, I can ignore, I can watch, I can ride, I can tow, I can buy, I can make, WHATEVER I WANT… me, me, me!!!
On a world scale such people are part of an incredibly spoiled minority who have (or can get) anything and everything. They want for nothing. But guess what?
All of that comes with a price- and it ain`t paid for in money!
sorry YOU are having such a bad day!
The point was that WE all have a lot more choices now, it was only phrasing to say “I”.
Maybe YOU should go surf. Then YOU might have a better attitude.
Or not…
Quote:
Each generation thinks it`s more advanced than those which have gone before. Yet many people insist surfing was better when they were young…
personally, i’m 21 years old and i grew up listening to stories of my dad coast trippin’ with all his surf buddies back in the 60s and early 70s. on any given day, at any given spot, we’ll go out and he’ll flash back to all the times he surfed that same spot when it was SOOO MUCH BETTER!!! i think it’s because over that much time, you really only remember the good days. no one ever looks back to that day 30 years ago when the Deerfield Beach Pier was knee high and crappy. however, i do feel that the 60s was the golden age of surfing, and i’m really disappointed that i missed it. i guess i try and bring it back with my very classic, traditional style. i have images in my head of surfing malibu and rincon with 10 guys in the water, but when i open my eyes and look around i see 60 guys all ready to get in a fist fight over who had the rights to that last piece of knee high wind chop. given that scenario, surfing really was better back in the good ol’ days.
A recent interview with Mickey Munoz sheds some light on a guy with a positive approach. It was either the best wave he’d ever ridden was the last one he rode, or maybe the next one? Bottom line, he’s still stoked on day to day surfing and trying to make the most of it!
Quote:
What’s been lost??? how about what’s been GAINED along the way?
today, I can surf logs or hi-performance longboards; I can surf a bonzer or a twinzer or a thruster or a Lis fish or a quad fish or a cross-country board or a tandem or a mat or a hybrid or a Pipeliner or a 6 fin gun or WHATEVER I WANT. I can wear no leash, no wetsuit, no boardshorts, no booties, no hood, no polypro rashguard, or all/any of the above. I can be a local or fly to Fiji. I can make boards out of balsa, foam, or the latest hi-tech stuff that only got invented this morning. I can ignore the pro circus or I can watch contests on cable. I can be Mr. Soul and ride only retro boards or I can tow surf or I can buy the latest fin designs, interchangeable systems, traction pads and do aerials until my knees shatter.
I’m surfing better now, on better boards, that I can make myself, than 25 years ago. But I can ride 60’s boards if I feel like it, and glide into the sunset. I can surf with my 65 year old surf buddies, or with the local kids. Or with my kids. SO MANY THINGS TO DO.
Best of all is Swaylocks. Nobody would have dreamed of this place, trading surf tips with people all over the world…
Nostalgia, hell. Today is pretty groovy & bitchin’ even if nobody says that anymore. Now, where did I put that Steppenwolf CD…
Yes, nice attitude. It’s fun to surf with Keith.
i do not remember…the 60s…or 70s…or what i did yesterday…but i live it a s =it all comes…hell i dont remen=member what started this conversation…surfing and what not is allways fun…no matter what year it is…can i name 2 pro surfers ?..no…i surf cause its fun…im the fucking pro…