Wait…sarcasm!
After a year-and-a-half battling injuries and being relegated to the kook’s corner of my local spot due to an inability to out paddle anyone, my body has finally caught up to my muscle memory and I actually had a fun session.
I can still surf! Who knew?
It’s about time. I was getting dangerously close to giving up and spending the rest of my life telling lies about how I “used to rip before my injury.” Gasping for air, struggling to punch through the lineup on a head high day, is a miserably humiliating experience, enough so that I don’t understand how I learned to surf in the first place.
But the passion is rekindled. I love to surf. I love surf culture. The following most of all:
Recyclable surfboards: The best of lies are always built on truth. Is EPS recyclable? Absolutely. Does anyone actually collect broken boards and recycle them? Of course not. But that hasn’t stopped multiple companies, like snowboard giant Lib Tech, from hopping on the pseudo-science bandwagon and touting their contribution towards pumping out poisonous products as a forward thinking, enviro-friendly, board of the future.
Wave pools: I’m coming up on four decades of hearing about these things and I know that the Snowdonia place is actually being built, but if they follow through on their promise of “2 meter” waves I will, literally, eat my hat.
It’s not that I don’t believe it’s possible, it’s that I don’t believe it’s economically feasible. Generating waves eats a metric fuckton of power and there is no way that enough land locked boners are going to drop the thousands of dollars required to build enough skill to ride waves that size. (US$4912 per year, ignoring cost of equipment and assuming two, two-hour, sessions per week, with a “membership” and time purchased in bulk.)
Instead we’ll see tiny little mush packed to the rafters with beginners, with the pool cranked up to full potential once or twice a year. Maybe. But probably not.
Only a surfer knows the feeling: It’s true! When you’re out alone on a kind-of-fun day at the local beach break, miles of equally good waves breaking on either side of you, and you see a handful of kooks suit up and paddle right to you: only a surfer knows that feeling! Or when a guy makes eye contact then takes of in front of you and blows the drop. It’s unreal!
Sustainable tourism: I’ve met these pricks more times than I’d like in the course of various jaunts around the globe. They’re always wide-eyed entrepreneur types, spending months at a time in a beautiful third world locale, hell bent on teaching all the heathen brownies just how they should be managing their resources.
The beauty of sustainable tourism is that it is truly attainable. All you need to do is borrow a couple hundred K from dear ol’ mom and dad, open up an “eco-hostel” on undervalued land and you can keep the local population scrubbing toilets and washing cum soaked sheets for the rest of their lives! Sustainable!
