From Magic Seaweed:
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One of the funny things about living in New York is the way the smallest apartments can accommodate tons and tons of shit personal belongings.
Other funny things include angry bums, happy drunks, vegan chicken nuggets on restaurant menus, wind tunnels, $14 six packs, $1 shots, incognito celebrities, cats in bars, 9% sales tax, taxi drivers who disregard red lights, PORK ROLL VOID (more like tragic), the facility of spying on your neighbors, the fact that your neighbors (and you) are shameless… I could keep going, but let’s go back to the apartment thing.
My board, which is really beginning to show its age, has never seen new fins. I feel like a bad parent. So, like many bad parents, I tried to redeem myself by shelling out. In honor of its premier voyage to Cali – or should I say, return home – I bought it a new bag (which, hopefully, will protect it from disgruntled luggage handlers) and a new set of fins.
Buying fins is a seriously confusing endeavor. I mean, I guess not if you buy them all the time. I Googled something along the lines of “find best surfboard fins” (that is an embarrassing admission) and what I came up with were a bunch of sites that didn’t make it much easier. You’ve got to consider the system first, right? FCS. Then the flex, depth, sweep, surface area… too technical for me. I ended up just looking at the different features and benefits of each type.
I decided on FCS K-3 Glass Flex, mostly because if Kelly Slater says “you should be set for pretty much any sort of waves you find,” well, that sounds like a safe bet. They’re also reasonably priced, but should be a definite upgrade from my 10-year-old plastics. I’ll let you know how it goes…
…Looks fine to me.
Swiped Carmen Vicari’s awesome video from Transworld : Sam Hammer, Balaram Stack & Clay Pollioni
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I was lucky enough to watch Rich Luthringer rough shape one of his beautiful boards a few weekends ago. It’s crazy to see a perfect, little swallowtail emerge from a pretty primitive blank. Luthringer has made thousands of boards- literally, he stopped counting at 3,000. Sawing and sanding are second nature to him now, and he can (amazingly) feel imperfections in the boards by running his hands over the foam. Then he simply smoothes them out. No big deal.
“I could probably shape a board blind,” he says.
“Really?”
“Yeah, I just wouldn’t use a planer blind.”