Hey Folks,
I found this video today. Anyway it serves as an allert to some distracted ones. Enjoy it…
“Surfboard Slams onto a Valkswaon on I-95”
I’m amazed you don’t see more of that, actually…
And did you check out the popout? Crushed that windshield, and didn’t even look like it took a ding! I wonder if it’ll be cursed now… I hear once those NSPs taste blood you have to burn them to subdue the popout demon.
Oh yeah- my favorite was last summer; some joker had the nose strapped…or tied, or taped, or something…to the front rack, and the tail tied to the hood, or bonnet as our more anglophilic friends would put it. Kinda like
Idiot was tooling along the highway, happily clueless, his view to the right ( such as people pulling out onto the said highway) pretty much nonexistent… do I need to say it was a big, new Silly Useless Vehicle the aforementioned moron was in? Like a Darwin Award waiting to happen…
scary…
doc…
HAHAHAHA…that’s too funny. I don’t post ever really…but I had to say that’s funny.
Well, Doc, I’d like to think I’ve never done any surfboard transportation tricks quite that stupid, but we all have our moments. Eons ago my 1967 Weberperformer met an ignoble end when, after a very long day in the water, I put it up on my Barrecrafter’s rack, stopped to do something in my car, then proceeded to drive away without strapping it down. Good ol’ suction cups, they held up to about 60 mph on the OC Causeway. I had a great view of defensive driving maneuvers in my rear-view as the board skittered and somersaulted from lane to lane. Fortunately. no people were injured, nor shoobies, either. While the glass job was pretty well shattered on the rails, remarkably the board itself was not even close to destroyed. Probably could have been repaired, had I more patience, and wasn’t itching to jump on a short board anyway. I stripped it, fully intending to re-shape the blank into something smaller (this was 1969-70) but had to give it up. I had only hand tools, and whatever foam Dewey was using that year was hard as a rock…
-Samiam
Hi folks,
I couldn’t imagine the video I’ve posted will bring so many funny stories. I have one, too. Once, a friend who used to be a shaper had sponsored a local champ. While he was transporting three or five brand new boards to the beach, they flew from the car roof and he just noticed when he arrived in the beach to the prize ceremony. He got crazy and jumped into the car and drove back looking for the lost boards. This is a guy we can call a lucky one. The boards were thrown to the road side and landed on a soft high grass without a single damage, and fortunatelly, they weren’t stolen by some smarty one.
(chuckling) - Sam, don’t think of yourself as pulling anything especially bad. There was this lawyerette…
See, she had bought a brandy dandy new board and put it on top of her car with this quasi- rack arrangement; a couple pads, some straps and buckles and some D-rings.
And a couple strips of Velcro. The velcro was there for no particular reason beyond keeping the pads from falling off while you were out surfing. You were supposed to run the straps around the rack bar and through the d-rings before cinching 'em down over the board… it said so in the directions even,
but Lawyerette was hot to get to the beach with her new stick. Besides which, I kinda think she had read just about all she wanted for the day. In any event, she didn’t run the straps around the rail and through the d-rings, just over the board , trusting the velcro to hold the whole shebang on.
it didn’t. In five lanes of rush hour traffic, in Boston.
Compounding the problem, she took the ( surprisingly , not that badly damaged ) board, chucked it in the back of her car ( yes, a Silly Useless Vehicle, new) and took it to the beach. Flat, it was, but she paddled around on it and managed to get about 2 cups of sand in the crunched part.
And then she brought it to me to fix. I was torn between ‘damn, that was dumb’ and ‘ohhhhkaaay, this isn’t the ugliest lawyerette I ever saw…’ so I told her I was all booked up and she might try Charlie down the street.
The circus never ends, y’know?
doc…
…and now Charlie down the street has discovered , since fixing her dings , that lawyerettes make the best lovers ever…
[as long as she wasn’t "Judge Judy "]
Quote:
(chuckling) - Sam, don’t think of yourself as pulling anything especially bad. There was this lawyerette…
See, she had bought a brandy dandy new board and put it on top of her car with this quasi- rack arrangement; a couple pads, some straps and buckles and some D-rings.
doc…
I’ve had close calls with improvised racks as well. On a business trip to NoCal in 2000 (near Jackson), I decided to stay the week-end and surf. A friend of mine had told me that it was hard to rent boards on the spur of the moment, so I searched on-line and made arrangements from Jersey. The only rental shop I found anywhere near San Fran - Sacremento was in Mill Valley (you might well wonder why a shop there, I did). The only rentals they carried were Bic logs. I asked the clerk where I could use it. “Can’t use a longboard anywhere around here”, he said. After consulting with some customers, he directed me to Bolinas. I had brought a pair of soft racks, but they were old and the straps disintegrated when I tried to use them. So I attached the board to the roof of my rental Gran Marquis (upgraded from a Taurus; Hertz has such impeccable timing:) with two luggage straps and a folded fullsuit and proceeded up curvy PCH through Marin Co. to the turn-off above Stinson Beach. Never quite lost the board, but it did a lot of slip-sliding…
-Samiam
Quote:
I had brought a pair of soft racks, but they were old and the straps disintegrated when I tried to use them. So I attached the board to the roof of my rental Gran Marquis (upgraded from a Taurus; Hertz has such impeccable timing:) with two luggage straps and a folded fullsuit and proceeded up curvy PCH through Marin Co. to the turn-off above Stinson Beach. Never quite lost the board, but it did a lot of slip-sliding…
Ohh yeah, I know just how that goes. From both sides, being the guy who has to figure out how to lash the board on top somehow and the guy in the shop who watches his board leave held onto a car with the customer’s ancient rotted out bungees and good intentions. And then there are third world taxis…
We rent out boards, and with them we give straps or soft racks or whatever will work - might even have a set of the dreaded suction-cup Barrecrafters out back someplace, with those cotton straps and easy-rust hardware that had the sudden tendancy to die at the worst possible time. And we were buying soft racks from this nice German lady who was living in the California desert where ( most of the time ) she made bulletproof vests - really, it’s true, I couldn’t make up something like this.
But she went out of business, or got super busy making the vests for the CIA, DEA, Shore Patrol or something, and I stumbled across http://www.strapworks.com/ - the webbing and especially the hardware you can get from them are much better than the kinda cheezy stuff that come with commercial soft racks and cheap too. The webbing cuts clean with a hot knife or rope cutter, a good sewing machine with heavy Dacron thread will do the strap stitching nicely.
You can find those silly pool noodles in beach junk stores, some of them have a hole right up the middle, and they make very nice pads, or just use pipe insulation. I cut 'em to about a foot long, push the strap through with a stick and there I am, good to go. And any rack or tie-down system you ever saw is suddenly easy to make.
doc…
I lost a 2 boards once, a short board and a brand new Infinity triple stringer, with nose and tail blocks after its first surf; a beautiful board. It happened on the 5 freeway just past Laguna Canyon after a slow down in traffic coming home from a long all day surf session at Churches. It was my friends board but my car and racks that broke. I heard and saw the board flying through the air in my rear view mirror and shouted “oh shit two boards just flew off”. Seconds later I witnessed the longboard hit the front drivers side corner of a semi ( tractor trailer) and explode into a million balls of foam, I couldn’t believe it. We pulled over and there was foam everywhere, my buddy was in tears, all that was recognizable was 12 inches of the nose and he picked it up and saved it; I think he still has it and this happened 14 years ago. Anyway no one was hurt and the smei driver didn’t even stop, not funny at the time but the next day at work as we told our co-workers (we are Fire Fighters) (and yes we know what could of happened) we laughed our asses off. I called Steve Bahne at Infinity and told him the tragic story and he gave my buddy a couple hundred off on a new board, called it a extreme misfortune discount.
… I stumbled across http://www.strapworks.com/ - the webbing and especially the hardware you can get from them are much better than the kinda cheezy stuff that come with commercial soft racks and cheap too. The webbing cuts clean with a hot knife or rope cutter, a good sewing machine with heavy Dacron thread will do the strap stitching nicely…
Interesting stuff. I’ve been using straps from Northwest River Systems for years now; pretty bulletproof themselves:
-Samiam
I was going to comment that the supposed video of the board flying through a window,is not actually very good,
and is nothing more than a news broadcast of the incident after it happened.
But there is a serious moral issue to the story.
Some months ago I put some soft racks on my vehicle so that a friend could go surfing with me.
Only his board was on top, and he strapped it in, it went flying about 30 minutes into the trip off to the side of the road.
The reason: well he didnt strap it in securely.
Who would be legallly liable: Me!
This is the be careful thread!
Nice stuff. Y’know, I used to tie a lot of boards on with rope of one kind or another when I didn’t have any racks or if the car wasn’t set up so I could do something else. But once I started using good straps with good hardware, well… I got spoiled.
The moral of the story is, of course, that good straps are cheap, not at all hard to get and there’s really no excuses after the first ‘learning experience’…or at least the third.
Especially if, like me, one’s boards will fit in the trunk…
doc…
Tell the truth Doc… She was YOUR lawyerette, wasdn’t she?!?
LMAO!
Well, no, Doug…that one was even stranger, and indeed like the late Professor J. B. S. Haldane’s description of the universe, was not only stranger than I imagined but stranger than I could imagine.
doc…Sic transit gloria lawyerette
Eeeewww! shudder
well it wasn’t a surfboard but I was with a friend when his dad decided he was going to take home a nice big sheet of corrugated tin roofing back from north jersey down to his house on the shore. It’s a 1.5 our drive. the edges were nice and sharp like a can after it has been opened, it cut it’s way through the straps and flew of the roof going 75 down the highway. those people were scared shitless.
Well I little bit of yarn to spin into this topic, one good and one very VERY bad.
First the bad. A buddy of mine was just beginning a grand auto journey from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Leaving his starting point in Truckee, CA, barrelling down out of the Sierras on I-80, wedged in 75 mph traffic, semis and all. Glancing out the side view mirrors he watches in horror as he watches his stack of boards go flinging off the top if his camper. Not just any boards though – among the boards in the stack were two prized Dick Brewer guns, a 9’0" triple-stringer, full gloss and a 7’8" semi-gun. Well suffice it to say those boards were DEMOLISHED!! Run over multiple times in their respective travel bags by 18 wheelers.
Now the good. Not too long ago, when I lived in Venice in LA, and would get out of the water at Malibu, I would often put my board on the roof racks of my van while I toweled off. When I departed I would simply pull the board down and put it in the van with the rest of my babies. The drive home, some 15 miles, while often trafficky, can sometime be quite fast, with speeds over 50mph with bends and curves. Well, after one such ride home, I hop out of my van and with a little spring in my step, go to unload my van. I open up the back door – and boom – no board. Oh Shit! My bliss instantly converted to rage, I slam the door and then, BOOM, again. There, sitting EXACTLY where I’d left it, is my 9’6" Yater Spoon – it’s just sitting there seeming to smile back at me wanting another go. No straps, no nothing holding it in place except gravity and wax, my board makes the entire ride home from Malibu to Venice. Rage is instantly converted to equal parts relief that no one was hurt, embarassment that I could be so STUPID, and gratitude that my board would live to ride another day.
Quote:
well it wasn’t a surfboard but I was with a friend when his dad decided he was going to take home a nice big sheet of corrugated tin roofing back from north jersey down to his house on the shore. It’s a 1.5 our drive. the edges were nice and sharp like a can after it has been opened, it cut it’s way through the straps and flew of the roof going 75 down the highway. those people were scared shitless.
Ya really shouldna gone there, ya reminded me of an incident I had apparently blocked:
I’m 17, my last summer before going off to college, and I have a 1955 Pontiac Chieftain my Dad picked up from a friend for $50. The car is 12 years old, but has only 15,000 miles. One issue is that the primary hood latch hasn’t been well lubed, and it tends not to close all the way. If you have never seen a '55 Poncho, the hood is at least the size of a 4x4 sheet of plywood, nearly as flat, and damned thick. So one morning on my way to my Sears summer job, the primary latch lets go, and the hood pops up about 6" and rests on the secondary. With the inexhaustible optimism of a 17 year old, I assume that it will get me to work. Did I forget to mention that it’s a windy day? About 1 mile from my destination, I hear a very loud noise, and the hood goes flying up. By instinct, I swerve to the left. The coordination is precisely what is needed for the hood to continue up and back, parting from the hinges in one unimpeded motion. I straighten the car quickly and look in the rear view. The hood is flat-spinning like some huge and berserk frisbee at an altitude of about 4 feet. The car immediately behind me is an Austin Healy 3000 Mark with the top down. The driver ducks just before the hood passes directly and narrowly over his cockpit. I can’t say for certain that ducking saved him from decapitation, but he immediately skidded his car to a halt on the shoulder, no doubt to see if he could find any tissue paper in the glove compartment. I just continued to work and shook like a leaf all day - I didn’t even go back for the hood…
-Samiam