Session 22 - Feb 18 - WC

Monday Feb 18 - 2-4 - 6'8 Kirkshapes (white)

New board! It was pretty awesome, I was ripping on it. I might like it even more than the Taylor? Perhaps. It has a traction pad on it which I actually appreciated this time out there, Taylor doesn't have one, keeping it vintage on that board. In fact the contrast between the 2 boards - Taylor seems very conventional, almost tribute to the old school only-what-works train of thought, nothing fancy, just clean straight lines, 3 fins, squash tail -- keeping it functional. The Kirkshapes on the other hand incorporates all kinds of bells and whistle elements: traction pad, swallow tail, "sting fish" (for lack of a better word, I don't know the actual terminology) tail rail shape...all in all both pretty supersweet boards -- tough to beat the two Kirkshapes I got for $50 each though when it comes to steal-of-a-deal status, that is pretty ridiculous! Thanks dude! (As I don't think I've mentioned this before, last weekend I got three new boards. Underground SC shaper Kirkshapes was selling off some of his inventory -- wife said time to empty the garage -- so he had a garage sale Saturday morning and Paul and I stopped by. He was liquidating his boards at real cheap prices, sold me two used by him (Lightly) 6'8's plus a brand NEW 6'6 quad...$200 for the brand NEW quad and $50/each for the lightly used 6'8's...INSANITY! Now that I've used one of them I'm more pumped on the deal now than I was even then. Good, local, hand shaped quality boards, supporting my local shaper -- he lives a few blocks from the Hook. It pays off to live in Santa Cruz -- board bargains are much easier to find there than over the hill in money-filled surf-deprived Silicon Valley. I'll take some pictures of all my boards soon and get them up here. Joel a long long time ago did an interesting "board history" post on his defunct often entirely too ignored excuse of a surf blog, I'll do something similar soon) (note I can't for some reason link directly to Joel's board history post, but if you really wanna read it, it's about half way down).

But I digress from my surf session, it was fun. Pulled into the parking lot and saw a matching Yaris to mine, so parked next to it and chatted up the owner, older guy, longboarder, he was jealous of my too fast too furious rims and moreso of my roof rack -- he was using soft racks -- but we discussed our little MPG surfmobiles for a bit. Then I was gonna leave but saw Manabu pull into the parking lot so I wound up going out with him for a couple hours, turned out more fun than I expected. Good mix of lefts and rights, fun, fast, but not too fast waves, mostly shoulder highish, not the long walled up lines of the premier in town points but fun frequent fast beach break waves, good to mix it up. And like I said above, new board was really fun, easy to surf, enjoyed it. Oh and not to mention for most of the session it was just the two of us out there trading waves. Score!

Now, for the bigger question...forecast for LM tomorrow morning is fair+. I have a 9am meeting. Do I surf anyways? Dilemma!
Update: No surf. Was at work at 8:45. I'm so responsible!