Opinion: “Sit down Schroff. I like Firewire!”

I like them like Conner Coffin likes lesbian haircuts!

I hereby declare my undying love and support for Firewire surfboards.

For me Firewire is not only desirable, it’s necessary.

To my knowledge, there are three brick-and-mortar surf shops in Scotland, the nearest being two hundred kilometres away. And when I say “surf shops”, it’s in the loosest sense of the term, in that they don’t actually stock surfboards. In due diligence I’ve just checked the websites of two of them (the third doesn’t have a website) and neither of them appear to have a single surfboard in stock.

Snowboards? Fine. Skate stuff? No bother.

Surfboards – nae chance.

There is, I believe, one surfboard shaper in the Edinburgh vicinity. He’s recently got a website, and I’ve seen a couple of his boards on the Boardporn Instagram page. They look nice, mostly like art deco pieces. Not, perhaps, my cup of tea.

So, friends, it is with this in mind that I ask you to consider my options?

Do I travel to another country to finger some boards and do the “arm test” (which might as well be milking a unicorn for all the sense it would make) or do I browse any of the excellent media and marketing spin from Firewire and select a board based on that?

The internet is my local shaper. I would love to stroll round a sunny corner for a chinwag with a salty old dog about foils and resin tints and other associated surfboard fuckery. But it’s not happening, not in my world.

EPS and epoxy? It floats a little better. Ideal for the extra weight of year round, sodden neoprene. Plus, I grew up windsurfing so I like the choppy chatter. It’s familiar and comforting, like an ex-girlfriend. You know how it works.

Built offshore? Who cares. Everything’s offshore when you live in Scotland. I don’t turn my nose up at bananas because they’re not locally or ethically sourced. It’s about efficiency. I’m not going to live on mutton and whisky.

Firewire give me data. Lots of data. Pretty, spinning 3D graphics of boards, apps, social media activity, clips, podcasts… They give me Rob Machado and Kelly Slater. Old guys who surf and look like young guys. And who has the money to spunk on Firewires? Other old guys who want to surf and look like young guys. I’m bombarded with reasons to buy one, or three or four.

At no point during surfing is the board wedged under your arm.Maybe you’re a veteran of shaping bays and surf shops and have been fortunate enough to caress many boards. Maybe you go through boards like Wade Carmichael through chicken nuggets. Maybe you genuinely can get a feel for how well a board will work. Lucky you. But some of us don’t have the luxury.

And you know what else?

You can damn and kook me to hell, but I bloody love volume! It’s the single most useful marker of a suitable board when purchasing online. I get the limitations, I get that volume never tells the whole story, but it gives me a ballpark in a world of pixelated, 2D potential new surfboards I might need to hide.

The qualifier in all of this is that so far I have only ever owned and surfed one Firewire model, and it’s technically a Slater Designs Omni, in a beefy 6’2” (42.8L) to match my height and float my thick neoprene and 92 kg carcass. I’m basically Zeke Lau, but pastier and pudgier.

And back to the “arm test”. What the fuck even is the arm test? It makes no sense.

At no point during surfing is the board wedged under your arm. Sure, sure, maybe you’re a veteran of shaping bays and surf shops and have been fortunate enough to caress many boards. Maybe you go through boards like Wade Carmichael through chicken nuggets. Maybe you genuinely can get a feel for how well a board will work. Lucky you. But some of us don’t have the luxury.

The arm test isn’t even pseudoscience.

You do the arm test, I do rotations of the 3D model on the Firewire website.

So sit down, Peter Schroff, with your racist memes and ironically immigrant surname. I like Firewire. I like them like Connor Coffin likes lesbian haircuts.

All that said, my next board is a Pyzel Ghost.

There’s a hole in the back garden ready for it.