Living and surfing the Northcoast requires low expectations and a sense of humor. And a dependable car. And a hood. And a good Thermos. And some healthy rationalization skills.Popular rationalizations include (but are not limited to):
Your many hours of driving the coastline are a form of reconnaissance , not a desperate mania that could be tempered with medication.
Your wetsuit is going to be totally dry in the morning.
Whitey chomping your ass is statistically less probable than _______ hitting your ______(feel free to fill in the blanks in the 'comments' section).
My favorites are board rationalizations: you need the exact same board in a pintail for when it has a bit more push. You need the exact same board with a double-to-single concave instead of a single-to-double concave because your buddy has one and it rips. You need the exact same board except in a quad setup just to see what it's like.
For some reason, our power of rationalization is sparked by our curiosity. I blame biology.
A stellar design with a trim-forward ideology, Displacement Hulls love clean conditions and peeling waves. Unfortunately, Sonoma County offers neither on most days. Enter the rationalization.Hulls have enjoyed some press and popularity lately, even up here. Media images abound featuring perfect San Juanico peelers, endless swooping and gliding, and feet-almost-touching buried rail turns that could turn even Karl Rove into a believer.
And why not? We've all seen pictures or heard stories of when our local spot, scoring somewhere between passable and unspeakable on most days, totally lights up. We ourselves might even be guilty of passing on such mythologies to others in parking lots, text messages, or, um, online resources.
And we order boards for these days. And we look at them. And we imagine. We're that guy from work who has a postcard of St. Croix tacked to his bulletin board, or that lady who buys the supermarket glossy telling her what really drives men crazy. We rationalize and say, "we might be held hostage, and the terrorists will demand to know what really drives men crazy, and I'll be the only one who can save us," but that's not what we mean. What we mean is: I want to be there right now. I want to be in the Bahamas, or driving men crazy, or trimming with unbelievable speed, free from the confines of neoprene on a waist high wave that's so glassy that I'm not sure where it begins and where it ends.Hulls do that for me.
This particular hull is a 6'7"x21.5 shaped from EPS foam and glassed with epoxy resin by Fatty. If you're thinking that a resin tint over EPS/epoxy is a difficult thing to do, you're right on the money.These boards are more or less combinations of convexes, meant to drive off the rails and fin. The third picture illustrates the rolled bottom, which continues until it hits the fin and transitions to a long, wide flat spot for extra zing.
It might take a moment to rationalize owning a board this specialized, but think of the payoff that one day a year when your break is doing its best impression of Lower's, and you've got the perfect tool for the job.
