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!
