Please be on the look out for one hollow wooden surfboard that blew off car on Hwy 152 somewhere near San Luis Reservoir/Pacheco Pass area last night. Owner will be out of reach for a few days but if any of you guys in that area know of one of Paul Jensen’s boards being found, please contact me via PM or on this bulletin board. If found, I can pick up and hold it until Paul returns.
Maybe some of you guys can check the local lost & found ads?
Good karma aplenty for any efforts to return this board to its maker and rightful owner.
Try posting a lost board anouncement under the sale/wanted section on the SLO craigslist, that would reach a lot of surfers who might see it. Especially if a non surfer picked it up and is trying to sell it. I’d also keep an eye out at local play it again sports and other used sporting equipment shops.
Thanks for the tips guys. I’ve posted here, Craigslist and Surfline. No pics Herb but I don’t think there are any out there in the hands of civilians. It would have the typical light/dark alternating wood strips and laminated built up cork rails. Paul doesn’t appear to be very upset but it would still be nice for him to have it back I’m sure. The weird thing is the straps were intact and still hooked… BEWARE OF RUBBER RACK STRAPS! He figures they stretched and the board slipped out.
You’re kidding- he doesn’t appear to be very upset- the man has bodhisattva-esque control. I’d be ranting and in tears losing a board like that. I hope it’s found by someone who knows it’s a special item and takes the needed steps to get it back to your friend as he deserves that for demonstrating such self control. Good luck.
That sure is one windy area…it was mounted w/out fins I assume? Or fins at the back? That always makes me nervous in high winds, although it is more aerodynamic.
I called the CHP offices in Modesto and Gilroy (either side of Pacheco Pass.) They said unless it’s actually blocking traffic, they don’t pick anything up. Caltrans is open tomorrow and on an extreme long shot possibility, I plan to call them. They are more likely to pick up lost (not “Lost”) surfboards and other assorted rubbish.
I forgot to ask Paul about fins and board direction.
I just know I don’t trust rubber straps. I strap boards on with fin(s) up and forward, use nylon straps with cam buckles and check things (including racks themselves) once in awhile to make sure nothing’s coming loose. My girlfriend razzes me - will often grab the racks as we’re getting in the car in mock imitation of my technique.
As long as I remember to use the straps, I’ve never lost a board.
…so we had just finished an evening session at Ponto, heading N. back into Carlsbad. Woz looks up through the skylight in the roof of the van and notices that he can see daylight instead of the board socks. Greg made a U/T heading South on 101 and we all look over just in time to see a guy in a CalTrans truck pass in the northbound lane with our boards sticking out of the back of his truck. The whole stack had blown off the roof racks and landed in a neat pile in the ice plant median. We chased him down all the way back in Carlsbad as he was pulling into the lot.
paul, kp, chambo and others over for bbq last night.paul’s newest board is insane!! he was very casual about possible loss of the 7’4" egg that blew off on way down. why stress it if you can’t do anything about it? what’s done is done and if it makes it’s way back, great! if not, maybe the person who ends up with it will enjoy it…
Don’t want to commit a major thread hijack, but want to pass on something I learned recently. I have the Thule racks that consist of rectangular cross bars that are held in place by the toe-in of angled brackets at the roof mounts. I have known for some time that I can adjust the bars side-to-side by “walking” them through the clamps about 1/16" at a time. I changed my strapping set-up on my trip to Hatteras last month. I normally run the outboard straps around the bracket. One reason for this has been that I usually have my boards on one side of the rack and an 8" PVC tube with fishing poles on the other, and I like to kind of web the entire load together with nylon cam buckle straps and bungies. This time I omitted the rod tube and, in the interests of getting a better downward bite on the board bags, I attached both ends of the straps to the cross bar only. There was no wind to speak of on the way down, and the new arrangement worked great. On the way back, there was a pretty constant gusty wind, mostly from the side. In Norfolk, I noticed that the boards had slid out of fore-to-aft alignment, but assumed that the straps had just walked a bit on the bar. When I went to remove the boards after I got home to NJ, I found that the rear cross bar had walked all the way out of the bracket! I don’t know how I didn’t lose the entire load (luck of the feeble-minded, perhaps). Anyway, I wanted to let folks know that this can happen. I plan to drill holes through the junction of my brackets and cross bars and rig some kind of safety wire set-up before my next long surf trip…
I had a Highway Patrol officer show up at the shop once with a board he found in the center divider. He saw the Moonlight label and figured we might know whos it was. Turned out it was a sailboard we made for Leroy Grannis. Needless to say Ganny was pretty stoked to get it back. Grannys karma was good and I believe Johns will be also.
I got an e-mail a few days ago from Kevin in the Bay Area who had some questions about a board…My lost board from 2006…
Kevin and I just talked on the phone… He came into possession of it after finding it on Craigslist…The guy who had it for sale got it from another guy who traded the board for some music studio time…Kevin paid $400 for it…He said he felt a bit guilty about having it after hearing the story of it’s loss…I reassured him that the board is his, which was a huge relief to him…
Kevin said the only damage after flying off my van sideways at freeway speed was a bit of a crush on one rail…That’s it…The whispy fiberglass flex fin and the glass-on side bites were undamaged… I figure that the full internal carbon fiber layers on the inside of the skins and the CF reinforced stringer and cross ribs had something to do with the insignificant damage, despite the board skins being almost all 3/16" balsa… I figured the board would have shattered upon impact…
I asked Kevin to have the first oppertunity to buy it back, if he ever wants to sell it, and it looks like that in maybe a year we might do an exchange of him building a board here in my shop, for the nearly bombproof 7’4" egg…
With only a few questions remainig unanswered, I am super stoked to have the story come full circle, and now consider this chapter in the boards life written…
After fixing the ding Kevin plans on riding it regularly…As it should be…
I gotta ask…How does a board fly off of ones car, and the driver doesn’t even know it? I know I can tell by when the humming of the straps, and the banging of lose ends stops…then i know something is wrong.
“I gotta ask…How does a board fly off of ones car, and the driver doesn’t even know it? I know I can tell by when the humming of the straps, and the banging of lose ends stops…then i know something is wrong.”
…5am, been driving all night, of course the music was loud…
A very strong side wind gust from the driver side to the shoulder of the road got it…Think about it…A side wind gust…The straps were those black rubber truckers straps which for over a decade had been fail-safe…I know better now…
When I got to the beach in Marina, I looked at the surf, looked at the van, and the straps were there, just fine, but the board was gone…
I was upset for less than a minute, then remembered that with a life of abundance, the loss of a single simlpe object that I can easily replace, really wasn’t much of a loss at all…Got to keep things in perspective…
