![]() I recalled Owl’s vision of himself as a surfer, “It’s a better me”.Īnd, then scant few months later I am in email exchanges with Maurice about a custom board. Just like me this person is learning about life. Just like me, this person is trying to avoid suffering in his/her life. In calming shades of blue and green was written a series of compassion exercises. She pressed a little card into my hand when we parted and said “read this”. Sometime during a particularly toxic exchange I had to take stock. Maybe we came to virtual blows when Rory Parker ended up in conflict with Cole and I got caught up somehow. I was a Maurice fan since he took aim at racism in Australian politics. In the interim me and Maurice had beef, sometimes epic beef on the internets. I’d had an epic Tom Curren inspired 7’3” reverse-vee sometime in the nineties which circumnavigated the globe and ended up left behind in Guam as rental payment on a house. My prior experience with Maurice wasn’t quite so chummy. Rielly identified the strengths and weaknesses in Smith’s approach and they got to something that worked. ![]() BeachGrit’s own Chas Smith wrote an article in Surfing Life where he detailed some of the struggle and outsourced the knowledge to his pal D. No activity engenders so much self deception. The line up is full of the surfer stinking the joint up on the wrong sled. Self-knowledge, or lack of is the biggest obstacle. You’ve probably got your own scenario where you looked at the freshies in the rack and thought “That can’t be it”. My mate ordered a single fin and got a thruster, from a shaper who has spent a career railing against the hegemony of the three fin. The list of horror stories when trying to order custom equipment is long and never ending. That view was formed by tutelage under North Shore resident and Cherokee Indian Craig “Owl” Chapman, who continually stressed the importance, the advantage conferred, by having the “best board in the line-up”. It’s my belief the working gal of an intermediate or beyond skill set can gain ground, tortoise and hare style, over the more naturally gifted through the development and acquisition of superior equipment. ![]() You’ve probably got your own scenario where you looked at the freshies in the rack and thought “that can’t be it”. Fuck, it’s got my name on the stringer. One quick lap around the internet surf forums, or in real life carparks puts the vexed issue of surfboards front and centre. ![]() Right now, I fight the strongest impulses to down tools and get out there again. Today ends in a blur of surf stupefaction and a blank screen. Every day I’ve broken contracts with myself. Double-overhead Point surf, high-speed racetracks. The exact same surf I envisioned the board to ride in. Not because I have nothing to say about the process of ordering and receiving a custom surfboard off Maurice Cole, a 6’3″ Protow round-pin designed for good-to-excellent Point surf, but because the whole last week and while Derek Rielly has been busting my nuts every day to get the review done, the surf has been relentlessly pumping. This has been a king hell biiiiatch to write, this review.
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