... I pop a copy of Bruce Brown's "Surfing Hollow Days" into the VCR to get into the groove and watch the original stylists do their thing. Watched this one many times before, but this is the first time I've really paid attention to the details instead of just having it on screen for atmosphere. After a half hour or so two impressions linger in my mind. First, the exaggerated arches and stylistic poses of the surfers of that era were largely dictated by the equipment they rode. Second, frankly, that equipment never seemed to be working well, even greats like Phil Edwards looking a lot of the time like they were about to fall. And not just on the first tries at Pipeline where riding a 10' log is plain nuts. Is this what I want? Maybe those boards just sucked and there's no hidden cache of stoke buried in the past and waiting to be dug up. Only one way to find out. I point at my 9'2". "How about buying this one right here?" Hands over smooth, soft sides. Feel the strange rise a few feet back from the nose. Humpback. Humpback whales migrate through our channel twice a year, and its the season for their return north. Spring. Between the lazy hazy days of slow summer souths and the pumping westerly surf of winter, they move thick through our waters. This one is pretty thick. They get thinner as they head north, not eating along the way. Springtime. Gotta have something to ride by summer, especially in this town where the channel has islands at one end that eat all the swell. Nothing to eat. Nothing to surf. It's thick. I wonder if I could knee-paddle it. Has anyone paddled a board across the channel? I wonder if they saw whales. "That's a great board." The kid at the shop leans over from behind the counter. He interrupts me from my reverie as I sight along the centerline of a 9'6" Yater Spoon, with a new wad of cash in my pocket. I look up briefly, say something in agreement, and go back to the board. Flat bottom throughout, an even rocker, and all 50/50 rails from front to back. I rub my fingers over the polished gloss, along the wedged stringers as they run wide to a layered tail block. A classic board with some history, not just because of the single line in Apocalypse Now. The arch in the deck forward of center echoes the same arch in the black Da Cat standing on the wall, except it's not really echoing so much as joining in a chorus. Rennie Yater worked with Dora on the original specifications for the Spoon, but the Da Cat deal eventually went down with Greg Noll, for reasons that I don't know. When Da Cat is involved, you can't possibly speculate on them. From there the two lines diverged into history. Today, I wonder how this board in my hands will ride. I push plastic at the kid, get my board, one fin, two handfuls of wax, and a t-shirt. The board settles easily onto the soft racks (fin forward and up) and patiently waits for its first tracks to be drawn. In some sense it's waited over 30 years for this. It needs to go into the water in the right place... Glide on to Part 3.
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