Foam board sales surge as performance shortboard community holds emergency meeting about dignity

SEAL BEACH, CALIFORNIA – The performance shortboard community has convened what participants are calling an emergency dignity summit following data showing that soft top surfboards now outsell traditional fibreglass boards by a margin described internally as humiliating.

The meeting was held in a garage in Costa Mesa and lasted four hours, of which approximately eleven minutes concerned surfing.

The Charge Sheet Against Foam

The summit’s opening statement identified the soft top as guilty of three unforgivable offences.

The first is that it works. Foam boards catch waves easily, float well, and do not injure the people they hit. Delegates agreed this was the most damaging aspect and moved swiftly past it.

The second is that it is fun. Multiple attendees reported witnessing adults on soft tops laughing in the water, an activity the shortboard community formally abandoned in 1997 in favour of frowning at the horizon.

The third and gravest charge is that experienced surfers have started riding them voluntarily. Delegates described this as a betrayal from within, and one speaker compared it to a chef being caught enjoying a sandwich.

The Numbers Are Not Good

Industry figures show soft top volume climbing steadily for over a decade, with particularly aggressive growth in the beginner and family segments, along with a smaller but symbolically devastating category the industry labels lapsed performance returnee.

The lapsed performance returnee is typically male, aged between thirty-eight and fifty-six, and has recently done something to his shoulder. He owns four shortboards. He rides none of them. He now owns a bright yellow eight foot foam board and he is, by every available measure, happier than he has been since university.

He is the problem, said summit organiser Braden Kolk, whose own three boards are stored in a temperature controlled environment and are ridden approximately nine times per year. He is having a wonderful time in full view of everybody. It is corrosive.

The Injury Statistics Nobody Wanted

The summit’s most difficult session concerned safety data. Surf injury patterns have been studied by coastal health researchers for years, and general water safety and beach guidance is maintained by organisations including the Surfrider Foundation and public health bodies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has published guidance on recreational water injury for years without once being consulted by anybody in a wetsuit.

The findings are inconvenient: a foam nose to the head hurts considerably less than a fibreglass one. Delegates conceded this point and then argued that pain was part of the education, an argument that collapsed when somebody asked whether they would apply the same reasoning to a bicycle helmet.

Observations From the Water

• Nobody has ever taken a photograph of a soft top and hung it on a wall, and the shortboard community considers this decisive.
• A soft top costs roughly a fifth of a custom board and lasts roughly twice as long, which is an economics problem the industry would prefer nobody articulate.
• The man with the most expensive board in the water is almost never the man catching the most waves. He is, however, the man with the strongest opinions.
• Children on foam boards routinely out-surf adults on performance equipment, and everybody pretends not to have seen it.
• The single loudest critic of soft tops at any given beach owns one and keeps it in the boot for days when it is small, which is most days.

The Proposed Resolutions

The summit passed three motions, none of which are binding and all of which are unenforceable.

Motion one calls for soft tops to be restricted to the inside section, a zone that already contains all the waves anybody is actually catching.

Motion two proposes a mandatory apologetic expression for anybody over thirty riding foam. Delegates were unable to agree on the expression.

Motion three, passed unanimously, states that everyone present is still very good at surfing and that this was never in question. Observers noted this motion had not been raised by anybody.

What Is Actually Happening

The soft top did not democratise surfing. Surfing was always free and the ocean has never checked credentials. What the foam board removed was the entry fee that a small number of people had quietly installed in front of it, consisting of expense, injury risk, and the specific social terror of being visibly bad in front of strangers.

Remove that and it turns out an enormous number of people wanted to go surfing the entire time and were simply waiting for permission that never came.

The systematic study of gatekeeping collapsing under the weight of something cheap and yellow is ongoing at Bohiney Magazine, while the British parallel, in which an entire class system was undone by people simply not turning up, is examined in the London Prat reporting on social hierarchy.

The next summit is scheduled for autumn. Attendance is expected to be low, as most members will be surfing.

The Rental Fleet Told Everybody the Truth Years Ago

The uncomfortable evidence has been sitting in plain sight along every beach in Southern California in the form of rental fleets, which converted almost entirely to foam more than a decade ago for reasons that were purely commercial.

Rental operators did not make a cultural statement. They observed that foam boards survive being dropped on concrete by tourists, do not require repair after every session, and do not generate injury claims. The decision was made on a spreadsheet by people with no interest whatsoever in surf aesthetics, and it was correct.

Kolk was asked about this at the summit and said rental fleets were not a fair comparison because rental customers are not real surfers. When asked to define a real surfer, he produced a definition that excluded roughly ninety-four percent of everybody currently in the water, including, on close reading, himself in winter.

Similar findings at NewsThump.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/