i  n  t  e  r  e  s  t  s      p  a  s  t  .  .  .
             s    u    r    f    i    n    g     
   
                                                                                            
      


my shortboard
This was definitely an early passion... Too early unfortunately for me even to act on properly, meaning I was 12-13 years old, living 160 miles inland in Columbia, with no means to get myself to the beach outside of the yearly family vacation.

Yet I did what I could, which was ride skateboards and homemade snowboards* and read surfing books and magazines. I never even owned a surfboard until I was in my late twenties! By then I weighed over 200 lbs. and learned that the small shorebreak of Myrtle Beach is not very rideable for a 200-pounder on a shortboard.







moving day 
April 1995   
 
 		  
 

  *The homemade "snowboards" were really grass-boards, as
    there's never much snow in the midlands of South Carolina.
    Furthermore this was 1974, and as far as I know, no one had
    even heard of a snowboard then! But the concept of "surfing"
    on land occurred naturally to us, and we fashioned plywood
    into surfboard shapes to "surf" down steep grassy hills.
 
 		  

        Anyway, I intended get more serious and do it right when I moved to
  San Diego... But then several things happened: one, I discovered much to my
  dismay that despite a lifetime of "surfing" I in fact had no transferable skills from
  the Atlantic to the Pacific... In other words, the small shorebreak of Myrtle Beach
  did NOT train me for
  deeper, faster-moving
  water, bigger waves,
  stronger currents/rips,
  etc. (For example, no
  need to paddle out
  on SC's coast; you can
  simply walk out! The
  waves break in waist-
  deep to chest-deep
  water, so you don't
  really paddle much.)


 		 


         Do you realize how many surfboard
          manufacturers there are in the San Diego
          area?!

            Manufacturers list

          (Keep in mind that Encinitas, Oceanside,
          San Marcos, Del Mar, La Jolla, Imperial Beach
          are all San Diego area locales)

 
 

 
   


The other main factor was probably falling into
 beach volleyball which became a much stronger passion,
displacing and eventually far outranking surfing as my
beach activity of choice...

 





 

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