So I have this board - a 70's Gerry Lopez Lightening Bolt - 7'6", single-fin,
yellow/orange deck with a yellow bolt. It's signed by Gerry, and the shaper
has written "Bolt Power" under the glass job. It's not in terrific
shape - the nose is dinged, and at some point in its life it was used as a coffee
table - the underside has cigarette (or more likely, joint) burns on it.
But, you know, it was there, and when I look at it, I imagine some young
dude with wiggy hair (wiggy? look it up), still pretty stoned from the night
before, holding it at sunrise and looking out at the North Shore, wondering
what's going to happen that day. Or paddling it out at the Lane with maybe a
half dozen people out. Or dragging it down the path at Ulus, having made the
long, long treck to Indo, and not intending to come back for a year.
Well, it's dangerous to romanticize a particular period - the Surfer's Journal
does it all the time, to the point where I never want to know another
detail about some dude who ruled the Malibu lineup in 1953. But, heck, why not?
In the early to mid 70's, surfers had fantastic new boards that could slot themselves
into waves that had been impossible until then. The road to Asia had opened
up and was full of weird, high crazy people figuring out drugs, meditation,
communes, you name it, all for the first time. You could, with a lot of time
and determination, get to Afganistan, and see those most beautiful people at
peace - no landmines, no TV, no internet cafes.
You could take a board, like The Bolt, and head out and find things that you
had never imagined, had never seen video of, had no idea existed. That's harder
to do now - the heading out is much easier, and we can be grateful for that
- but the finding something new can take some real digging.
So, yes, I do idealize that time a bit. I think those who had the guts and imagination
to go and see the world and find waves during that time had the best of it -
we've got boat trips to Indo, and surfcamps in Tonga and Surfline to tell us
what's going to happen - but we dont have Uluwatu suddently jumping into life
with a handful of people out, or waking up at Tavarua and seeing Restaurants
blasting away for the first time...
Enough for now - if any of you have stories, or better still, pictures of that
time on the road, feel free to send them along and I'll post 'em.
The definitive recollection is, of couse, The
Far Shore.
And here's a great site of hundreds of photos of the classic 70's Asian travel
routes: Asia Grace.
my email is: jdj@pacificwaverider.com
an archive of these columns is here
