After a surf this morning I decided to clean all the wax off my longboard, a 9'6" Odyssey single fin. I picked it up about 4 years ago from a friend who won it from the local longboard club's Christmas raffle. He already had too many boards (his wife's position, not his) so he sold it to me for $400. I was stoked. At the time I was riding a 9' Stewart LSP that I bought when I lived in Hawaii. The Stewart was/is a great board when it gets a little bigger and juicier, but we have a lot of small days here, so I was in the market for a more traditional log, and I found it. Bright yellow, thick, soft railed, glassed on single fin, little rocker, three stringer, no leash plug; it was just what I was looking for. I had been committed to light weight boards and down rails until I rode a friends Joel Tudor in waist-high glass on the South End and realized the advantages of a heavier board in our small waves. Anyway, I got that board and it's been my frequent companion since. When it gets big I still pull out the Stewart, and I love my Allisons and my Takayama egg, but the yellow log has been my standby slider for all that time. There were long periods that I just committed to it because I wanted to really figure it out and get better at walking it and noseriding (still working on that one). I think it's been almost two years since last time I stripped it down, so a grey ball of wax about the size of an apple came off. Then I used a Pickle Wax Remover to strip the rest of the wax and the film that you can't scrape off. As I did this, I uncovered all the little pressure bumps and dings that I've collected over the years, and I started remembering how I got them and all the places we've gone and people we've surfed with and waves we've ridden. It's funny how a board takes on a personality, how it feels familiar to you like a favorite sweatshirt. I've ridden the hell out of that board, and it shows. The worst ones are from the time it went into the rocks at Fort Fisher, but there are lots of others too. And the scars aren't just on it, they're on me too. There's an obvious mark on my cheek where it hit me after a solid noseride on the South End two summers ago when I probably should have gotten stitches but chose not to. I can clearly remember walking up there and hearing an old timer hoot me and just hanging out for a second until it dumped me. When I surfaced it popped me on my left cheekbone (luckily, and not in the mouth or nose). I paddled back out to the line up and then I noticed the blood dripping into the water. Anyway, I thought about these things as I was cleaning my board, and it seemed significant because it's indicative of the relationship that is built between a surfer and a surfboard, and how much joy we get out of using them to play in the ocean.
Clean your old board up and think about the waves you've ridden together.
