Are you an ironic hauler of your craft?
I can’t remember the exact moment, but I do remember roughly the year when a certain substrata of surfers started carrying their surfboards like children, tail down, nose up and gripped in the upper third.
It was 2005 and a small company called Insight had created, with its fashion-y trunks and tees and a team of surfers who were B-ish grade but photogenic, the first hipster surfers. Short trunks, sleeveless tee-wearing boys carrying surfboards with dramatic irony.
Oh, yes, we know how you’re supposed to carry a surfboard, wax out, nose down, gripped ever so slightly behind the wide point, but… we don’t care! We’re so confident in ourselves, and so contemptuous of the mainstream surfer, that we’ll do anything to separate ourselves from the jocks.
Previously, any sort of divergence from the standard manner of carrying a surfboard would’ve had you immediately, and accurately, pegged as a kook.
The insouciance caught on very quickly among what we call the freesurfers, Dane Reynolds, Craig Anderson, Creed McTaggart, Dion Agius and so on.
And for a very long time it was only the very best, and most confident, of cool surfers who carried their boards like this and so if you saw a board carried in this awkward, child-like manner, and particularly if they wore a sleeveless black tee and short trunks, you would think, oh he good.
But, then, quite recently, the last few years and so forth, even the novice has begun to carry their board like the child thereby nullifying the ability to rate a surfer by the way he lugs his surfboard.
So.
Carrying a board like a child.
Faux?
Or real?
