No SUPs at Chun’s

This was originally posted in the Forum section in Tips and Tecniques, but I think it deserves to be on the front page. I pasted in both the poster’s and my responses. He makes some great points that I think are important to consider, albeit in a Dennis Miller persona that may rub you the wrong way. 

Kliner:

 the upcoming winter season fast approaching, the buzz on the north shore is not how this winter will compare with last winter or how big the waves are going to be but if a SUP guy will get killed or worse, kill someone in the line up.  It seems alot of people are getting into SUPs; some with a surf background and many with little or no surf experience.  The water is crowded enough with the surf schools and surf contests hogging the best spots during the best time of year (go somewhere else to sell your t-shirts and sport drinks… sorry different rant for a different day) without some SUP kook paddling out to the lineup.   Too many of your SUP kooks (oops, I mean breathren) think if it looks like a surfboard and I ride it, I must be a surfer.  Wrong.  You’re a dude that is willing to shell out $1500-$2500 for a over-weight, over-priced, oxymoronic (come on, you got to admit “High Preformance SUP” is an oxymoron) symbol of the evil comercial surf industry (It was sad to see super waterman Dave Kalama doing a SUP instruction video aimed at middle America - that’s proof enough that the “MAN” is behind the whole SUP craze when Kalama sells out… expect Naish to sell out but not Kalama).  There was a reason why standup paddling died out in the past - evolution (and the ire of the lineup).

So do us all a favor and SUP responsibly.  Educate non-surfer SUP dudes.  Work on your core muscles like a fat man on an ab lounger.  Create a new economy and business model by making the “surf” culture accessible to every non-surfer and land locked american with a credit card.  Paddle, paddle, paddle… just don’t paddle into the lineup at Chun’s.  

Aloha

ps  if you’re asking yourself “Where’s Chun’s?”, definitely, definitely stay out of the lineup.  Any lineup.

 

PonoBill:

PonoBill said:

I think you’d be surprised how many SUP surfer’s agree with you, even given your ill-mannered approach. I know that I have no business in any serious lineup, or any crowded one. I drive past Ho’okipa every day on my way to surf, give it a longing look, and keep driving.

Part of the draw is that you don’t need to crowd the usual breaks–you can go further and surf places that no one bothers with. I’ve found places on the Oregon coast that are within sight of crowded breaks (or as crowded as that half-frozen water ever gets) that are not only empty, but fit my geezer skills a lot better. I expect this year in Maui that I’m going to find all kinds of new spots, because I now consider a five mile paddle to be a nice warm up.

All the same, don’t expect the good guys to take you seriously if all you do is rant.

---

Kliner:

 

Ill mannered approach?   Rant… yes but ill mannered… come one, dude… a little humor about a topic that I don’t expect the “good guys”  to take serious anyway…

As with other new water activities, self regulation and education will go along way… one just has to review the past history of other emerging water sports (e.g. jet skiis, windsurfing, kite boarding), the subsequent clash with existing, traditional water use activities, and the resulting regulation (depending on your water activity of choice - banning might be a more appropriate word) of water use activities at particular beaches… so if SUP dudes (& wahines) wish to continue to have access to all beaches and live in harmony with others, a good base of what is “pono” and what is not will go a long way for a sport that is experiencing exponential growth…

Aloha

ps  I do SUP myself but only with a bag over my head and in the dark so no one sees me…

PonoBill:

You’re damned good writer. Take that bag off and write some articles for Ke Nalu. Or leave it on and help us spread the word that SUPers need to be pono, or at least strive for it.

Get Fit with/for SUP

We all know that SUP is great exercise, but It takes more than one great exercise to get fit. There’s also diet, other aerobic activities, flexibility training and general muscle workouts. It’s often a battle against social pressure, time, and genetics to achieve the kind of results you’d like.

Me last winter, there’s about ten pounds more of me right now

I’m from a family of large people. Despite being 6’2” and 250 pounds I look like an average guy in family photos. I’ve battled weight and waistline my entire life, despite being an inordinately active person and generally watching what I eat. I don’t eat fast food, don’t eat junk, but I’m a little too fond of fine food, wine and beer. My greatest weakness is the evening. If there’s any goodies in the pantry late at night when I’m watching the tube, I’ll find them.

As I get older (61) I find I’m eating less and less and weighing more and more. I need to step up the exercise side of the equation but I also need to gain some flexibility before I freeze solid like a cigar store Indian. I believe step one has to be to loose some weight. I think my downward dogs, distance paddles, surf sessions and workouts will all come a little easier if there’s a less of me.

What I find it takes to be successful at losing weight and adding muscle is some outside pressure—something to reinforce your will when those Ginger Snaps are calling to you just before bed. Something to drive you to the gym when you’d really rather sleep another hour. I find both positive and negative pressure work well—the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

I’m proposing a training program here on Ke Nalu, and you can participate. Whether you’re looking to loose weight or just increase your physical capabilities for the demands of Stand Up Paddling and surfing, find your outside pressure here. Join me, Stoneaxe (Brother Bob), and anyone else on Ke Nalu that chooses to participate. We’ll use the forum topic attached to this post as our training and weight loss log. Set a goal, build a plan, and tell us all how you do. we’ll praise you when you hit your mark and give you grief when you don’t. Publicly tracking your performance should be a good way to apply both positive and negative pressure—and I know I need both. Perhaps you do too.

And then there’s the bet. If you fail to make your weekly goal two weeks in a row you have to post a video of yourself on youtube doing stupid tricks on your SUP board. If you fail to make your final goal you have to post a video of yourself wearing a grass skirt and coconut bra, playing a ukulele and singing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” in falsetto.

This is what Bob will look like

As I said on Stand Up Zone, I’d rather give myself liposuction with a box cutter and a bicycle pump than lose that bet.

Join in, use the form below to set and track your own goals. Just copy the form, click on the forum button below, REPLY to the thread and paste in your form. A little rules clarification–if your goal is two pounds per week and you lose three one week, you carry your one pound extra forward as a benefit–so you can get ahead. My plan is to start really strong and try to maintain. I know there will be slip-ups so I need to get ahead.

You can build any form you want, or you can copy and paste mine into your forum posts. I’m going to report weekly since that’s the deal Bob and I have for our weight bet. Note that once you have set up a forum post you can edit it at any time. I think I’m going to create weekly forum posts for myself and treat it as a weekly diary. You can do it any way you choose.

Here’s the sign up form:

Name (handle is fine)_______

Current weight _________

Weekly goal __________

Number of weeks _________

and here’s the tracking form:

Week: ___ Start Weight___ End Weight

Daily Goals—Exercise and eating

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

If any of you folks are experts on doing any aspect of this: weight loss, general training, paddling, etc. Please share your information. For that matter I’d love someone to do a monthly column on fitness for paddle surfing, or coach people on how to paddle or surf.

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Starboard Dealer Meeting: General

Netarts Oregon, just after dark: I’m stumbling down a steep and slippery trail in pitch blackness, holding a pan of blackberry cobbler in one hand, trying decide what to do with it when I fall…

Netarts is a little town on the Oregon coast that sounds like it’s spelled backwards. Straten–hmmm, that sounds a lot better. Diane picked me up from the airport after a typically screwed return (canceled flights and all that modern air travel irritation) from Boston and the Cape Cod Challenge. We dropped off my bags from that trip, tossed a different set into the truck and headed for the Starboard Dealer convention.

I had traded emails about accommodations with Declan Sacre and his wife Tracy from Trident Sports–Starboard’s North American distributor. I told them I’d arrive a little late. Now I was wandering in the dark, looking for Tracy so she could tell us where we were staying. I finally staggered back to the campfire where Diane had remained while I searched, listening to Ekolu Kalama and several other Starboard guests playing guitars and singing. They sounded fantastic. The cobbler was still intact. My jet lag and recent lack of sleep has me somewhere in a time zone around Greenland. Tracy was there and she steered us to our accommodations. I’m seeing double. Off to bed.

Starboard Conference headquarters

Next morning–a good breakfast refreshed what’s left of my mind. We gathered in the living room of one of the houses Trident rented. While the first day of presentations mostly concerned sailboards (a topic I still have a lot of personal interest in) there was a lot of attention paid to general marketing trends, focused mainly on ways to revive the abysmal windsurfing marketing and the synergy between SUP and windsurfing. Starboard has access to a substantial body of market research both from trade organizations and it’s own surveying efforts.

Svein Rassmussen, Starboard’s CEO, holds forth on the windsurfing market

It’s clear that windsurfing did not follow the typical adoption curve of most active sports. After reaching a very strong peak it declined precipitously leveling off at a much lower participation rate than similar sports. They typical boom/leveling cycle for active sports goes through a very fast growth period when the sport is “cool” and everyone knows about it, then declines to a maintenance level at perhaps 60 percent of the peak. Windsurfing declined to something like 20 percent of the peak participation. Starboard maintains that was because all manufacturers focused solely on the performance end of the market, abandoning longboards and the simple fun of being on a board in light wind in favor of sinker shortboards and high-performance sails that required careful selection and tuning to meet conditions. They are looking to SUP to rectify that problem! More on that later.

The second day was devoted to Stand Up Paddlesurfing and wavesailing using SUP boards. It’s clear that Starboard is investing heavily in SUP and considers it the next major active watersport. Their manufacturing plans bear that out. For 2008 they planned to build 2750 SUP boards and actually will deliver over 3000. That’s more than double their 2007 production. For 2009 they plan to build 6800 boards–again, more than double, and for 2010 they expect to build 14000. That’s three years of 100 percent growth from a single manufacturer. That’s an important trend given that Starboard is perhaps the most sophisticated SUP manufacturer in terms of understanding international distribution and demand.

A SUP Board with a centerboard! The SUPer is super versatile

I’ll talk about the crossover they expect between SUP and Windsurfing in another article, but this new board, or perhaps more like this modification of their best selling board, is the prime example. I think we all forget sometimes how versatile a SUP board can be. You can surf it, race it, paddle flatwater, sail it, camp with it, fish from it, run whitewater rapids, wake surf it, and take the kids and dog for a ride. There really isn’t anything like it in any sport I know of, and that factor alone should account for a great growth in SUP popularity–if it gets properly communicated. The showcase for the sport is the performance end–people surfing big waves–but the characteristics that can give this sport huge growth and maximize it’s sustained level after that growth is the mundane use: poling around on a river, fishing in a mountain lake, surfing little knee-high shorebreak that no prone surfer cares about. We’re going to make a special effort to continue coverage of those aspects in Ke Nalu.

Svein demonstrates the special no-leak centerboard gasket

A little about this SUPer board. It’s a 12′6 with a very sophisticated full centerboard. The channel under the centerboard has a special L-shaped design so water can’t push up thought it and add drag to the board. The centerboard can be easily removed or it can be left in place with just the control knob removed to ensure it doesn’t get in the way. With the centerboard down the board goes upwind wonderfully under sail. Kick it back a little and you have more stability and drive for reaches, and you can kick it up completely for downwind.

The centerboard is a full foil and is very flexible

The centerboard also adds stability for teaching students to balance a SUP board. With the centerboard down the 12′6″ has much more initial stability. I didn’t like the feel once the board is tipped–the centerboard makes recovery slow, but I’m very used to the way a 12′6″ feels, so it probably bothered me more than it would a newb. Starboard foresees this board being used extensively in training facilities, both to teach windsurfing and SUP–or BOTH!

Complete sail kit–all in one compact carry bag

Starboard also has several complete sail packages for it’s boards from Severne Sails. I assume Severne is a subsidiary of Starboard. These packages are brilliant bits of marketing–a complete kit of everything you need to stick a sail on a board: Mast, booms, sail, extension and base, all in one handy carrying case. They have a line intended for SUP sailing that would stand up to the rigors of wavesailing. They start at about $699 complete. But for most uses I would actually bypass that and get the sail kit they have created for their beginner windsurf boards. It’s also complete, and it’s not designed for serious wave use, but it uses ultralight kite cloth for the sail, a very light boom and mast, and costs $399 to $499. Perfect for playing around on a lake or river, and probably even some lightweight wavesailing. I loved the light weight, easy rigging and fine sailing characteristics. With a few inserts on the nose of a SUPer board you could bungee this to your board and head out, confident that if the wind came up you could go wherever you wanted and continue to play. The price point makes it a casual purchase. Unless you bought well-used equipment you couldn’t duplicate this setup for less than $1200.

We’ll cover the rest of Starboard new lineup, and their plan for continuous refinement in the next article.

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Play nice while I’m gone

You’re on your own for a couple of weeks. Tomorrow moring at 00:Dark:Thirty I’m headed for Boston to do Stoneaxe (Bob) and ECSUP’s (Mike) Cape Cod Challenge. I’ll be in Boston for five days, then back to Oregon and off immediately for Netarts Bay for the Starboard Dealer Meeting. The nice folks at Starboard were kind enough to let me beg my way in to their new gear introduction and general “play with the toys” fest.

I plan on coming back with lots of photos, viddeo, and a bunch of articles. Lots of interesting folks at both events. I might make an occasional post with my iPhone, but I don’t plan to lug a computer. I plan to be in the water. And I plan to eat most of the clams in the east coast.

Grand Gremlins and SUP

I’ve found a great use for SUP boards–entertaining grand kids. I attached a carrier to my Starboard 12′6″ recently, planning to use it for fishing and camping, but the grandkids who have been here for a week (God give me strength) took full advantage of it. [Read more]

Surf Guest–That Soap Is Not For You

Once again this column is aimed mostly at guys. It’s not that I’m some kind of pig (though I am) it’s just that I’m male. The notion that I might understand a woman’s viewpoint about guest etiquette is laughable. I’m simply describing reactions and taboos from the position of dispassionate observer. Napoleon Chagnon observing the Yanomami in the dark heart of the amazon. Besides, the topic of this article is no help to women–they understand this stuff from birth. Though it may be useful to women to print a few copies, laminate them, and molly bolt them onto walls anywhere male guests might wander in search of a resting place, food, or relief of basic bodily imperatives.

So you’ve been invited to stay at someone’s beach house. It’s close to good breaks and therefore it’s a great place even if the floors tilt fifteen degrees. You’d like to come back someday. You’d like these people to still be speaking to you after three days of exposure to your habits. But you’re an untamed, natural creature, child of the ocean, at one with your true soul.

Well that ain’t gonna work. If you expose that dog to anyone with sensibilities, much less a woman, they will do anything short of burning the house to make sure you never cross the threshold again. This is a step-by-step plan for utterly fooling people into thinking you are remarkably civilized for a guy whose wardrobe consists of board shorts, rash guards, freebie T-shirts and a crusty hoodie.

You need to memorize this, so I’m going to keep it simple. No explanations–just rules. Besides, I don’t know why these are rules, they puzzle me too.

1. Case the bedroom: If the bed has a decorative cover, a sham (the ruffly thing that hides the wheels and dust bunnies) decorative pillows and/or stuffed animals you will not be sleeping there. DO NOT pull back the covers or disturb the pillows unless you take a photograph that enables you to put things back EXACTLY as they were. Either sleep on the floor beside the bed or try the front lawn.

2. Examine the bathroom: If it is a shared bathroom DO NOT undertake elimination after eating five Spam Musabe or even a single Chile Verde burrito. There is no spray, “aromatherapy experience” or amount of fresh air that will eliminate the lingering evidence of your gastronomic excesses. Lift the seat to pee, put it back down when you’re done. Seems like women could figure out if a toilet seat is up or not before they sit down, but apparently they can’t, and if you give them a surprise dip they will hate you until the sun is a black cinder.

3. The guest towels are not for you. They are easy to identify–they match, and they are brightly colored. You need to look for something in a drawer or cabinet that looks like a ratty beach towel, or perhaps something lifted from a holiday inn. Try not to get it too wet–it can double as a blanket when you’re sleeping on the floor.

4. The guest soap is also not for you. These are even easier to identify–they have probably never been wet and they are in some distinct shape–like fish or hearts. Again, search the cabinets and find a soap scrap with deep fissures, or perhaps an assortment of them that you can bind together with a little hot water.

5. If your buddy farts in front of his wife it’s not an invitation to a contest. Your best bet is a slightly pained and embarrassed look, like you’re not really sure what just transpired. Of course if she’s not around feel free to unleash your rendition of the 1812 overture.

6. Don’t offer to cook–a no win proposition. If it’s good you’re competing with the wife and upstaging your friend. If it’s bad you’re subjecting them to an unpleasant meal, if you make a mess you’re a pain, if you clean the whole kitchen you’re a neat freak who finds their housekeeping not up to your standards. When Suzy Homemaker makes you anything, including some strange casserole with green things and mushroom soup in it, act like you’ve just enjoyed the best thing since that crazy two weeks in Paris. Good idea to go for a walk afterwards (refer to rule five above).

7. Do the dishes. Takes twenty minutes, any fool can do it, and you’ll permanently be one of the good guys. You can screw up any of the rules above (except some parts of #2) and a bit of dish washing will put you back on an even standing–probationally.

8. Get lost. If you’re hanging out more than a single night you’ll be in the way. Unless your friends are a bit kinky they probably ain’t having sex if you’re hanging in the living room. A couple of days of that and even the kindest soul will wish you gone. Provide some space and make sure they know you’ll be gone for at least a couple of hours. Don’t come back early.

That’s about it. You can make life a lot simpler by staying with your bachelor buddies, but they usually don’t have much room, and their towels have hash marks.

How Not to Be a Surf Monk

We know you’re a soulful surfer, but did you really intend to be celibate? Are dates a wistful memory? The last time a girl gave you her number, did it start with 555? Have you decided that women are just too finicky, too flaky, too unobtainable?

You may be a surf monk.

[Read more]

How to Paddle Straight

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/EfLXV5Iekxc" width="285" height="242" wmode="transparent" /]I shot this with the new rear deck camera mount. It looks like a useful angle. I’m going to try one waist high. Only problem is you’ll be staring at my ass. Hmmm. Maybe not.

Goofy Hat Club

Does this hat make me look gay?

No. Really…honest.

SUP surfing is different than traditional surfing in many ways, but one way in particular is that you spend a lot more time on your board. A typical session for a prone surfer lasts an hour perhaps. If they are actively surfing all that time then they are exhausted–it’s a sprint sport and it takes a lot of energy. They go in, get in the shade, chill out, maybe have lunch, put on another layer of sunscreen. [Read more]