The story in the SMH Good Weekend was about Joel Parkinson, not Mick Fanning.ctd wrote:Ok, Nick, you may have answered this somewhere in the last 10,000 posts, but the SMH had a thing on Mick Fanning in its weekend magazine including anecdotes of being a grommet and the 'tricks' played on his (buried up to his neck in sand with a dog turd shoved under his nose).Legion wrote:I wish someone would milk this thread of the current topic and get back to something (anything) surf related ...
So what were your favourite/least favourite/most memorable experiences?
And, while we are reminiscing, I noticed that Bob Meistrell - 'inventor' of the surf wetsuit - just died. Any war stories on the development of wetsuits/dealing with wetsuits in the olden days... some of the obits mentioned that there was significant resistance to use of wetsuits when they first appeared and I imagine they werent quite the slimline flexible things of today.
Also, pure white board or fancy spray job?
There was no grommet abuse of me and my peers at Newport for the excellent reason that most of the generation of guys above me were dead from motorbike accidents or zonked on smack.
Bob Meistrell was 82 years old. I'm 53. When Bob and his peers, including Jack ONeill etc were dicking around with surfer rubber wear, I wasn't actually alive. So I can't help ya there. But I can tell you that prior to around 1995, almost all wetsuits were shit.
Re spray job, in my halcyon youth I was fortunate enough to be sponsored by two companies -- G&S and Hot Buttered -- who boasted fantastic airbrush artists. One, Jim Davidson of G&S, developed with me a kind of outline spray, set on the deck and about two inches wide, that ran right around the deck of the board parallel to the rail edge. I took two of those boards so sprayed to California in late 1979 as captain of the Australian team, and helped crush teams that were buttressed by the as then 14 year old Tom Curren. Later Tommy adapted the same outline spray on many of his boards including the famed Black Beauty. So there is one of Jimmy D's many claims to fame.
The HB spray guy, Martin Worthington, is a fcuken legend and I've had several great boards airbrushed by him, I have a 7'7" TF wing pin tucked away right now with a crazy airbrush design on the bottom.
So yeah I am a sucker for that but really, they don't make a fcuken hair's worth of difference to the performance of a board.
"Statement" boards, and people who ride them, bore me shitless.