It's been a long, choppy summer. This last week saw the wind calming down long enough for the NW chop to mellow and the big beach to clean up. I wasn't the first on it, I didn't surf 9 hours (I'm calling bull$hit on that claim anyway) but I got enough to put a smile on my face.
The prior few sessions ranged from depressing to simply maintenance surf. On Thursday morning I got out for two hours of fun waist to shoulder high waves in dead glass with some organization. Not perfect, I would find a peak that was good, ride 2-3 waves and the sand would shift or something and it would be gone. After that I would peer up and down the beach trying to decide which way to paddle to try to find the next bit of magic.
I've been on the nearly-fish Junod (Daisy) for the last few go outs and have been unhappy with the way the board feels. It feels so wide and buoyant that I think that I'm outrunning the pocket all the time. So, I went to the opposite extreme with the board that normally feels too small for me, the minty green bonzer. I had some trouble adjusting to the lack of wave catching ability this board has, but in truth I think it was a benefit given the conditions. Most of the time I was sitting just outside of the sandbar. If I chased a small one too far in all I got for my effort was a brown dumper wall. The larger waves would get me up and running before the sandy closeout and sometimes hit the bar and enough of an angle for a speed run.
This bonzer, when under my feet, likes to pearl. I don't mean I'm paddling for the wave and the nose sinks when the wave picks me up. While that does happen it's far less often and I can sometimes recover. What I mean is that I get to my feet on a late/steep drop and hit the bottom of the wave and down goes the nose. When I first got this board I wasn't expecting it and would often be looking down the line and trying to project my bottom turn when "fump" would go the nose and off I'd go, flying through the air. This was something foreign to me, something I had forgotten about because it happens so rarely to me. But there I was, doing it time and again.
So onto Thursday's session and my first good wave. Up and down and "whua whua whua" I made it. Luckily the wave was just a jacking peak because I was completely out of control trying to handle the drop without sending the forward 1/3 of my board into the sand. A few more like it throughout the session. It made me think about the last time I experienced that, which was trying to make a longboard work at a jacking reefbreak. Which reminded me of a comment someone once made of the bonzer, that it had "longboard rocker." I don't consider this guy much of a surfer, he's the once every other month maybe type of surfer, but I was interested by his comment and asked him what he meant. He explained that modern shortboards have two part rocker and longboards have three. If you don't know what I'm talking about then I'm not the right person to explain. If you DO know what I'm talking about I'd like to have someone comment on that idea.
Besides all that, I find the bonzer a nice change from my wider/fishier boards when I'm in the mood to surf close to the wall with few turns. There were a few lips flying through the air and I managed to get 1/2 way under one (and dodge in fear from another) through the day. Other waves I enjoyed by just sitting in the pocket on the tail flipping the board from bottom turn to top turn, never really changing direction completely.
I think it's the wide point forward and narrow tail of this board that makes it work better for pocket stalling and worse for out to the shoulder roundhouse cutbacks.
