Session 98 - Death of a shortboard

Maybe death is a bit dramatic...the board is just severely wounded. I paddled out on my Rusty 6'1" today, with these crappy plastic skegs that I pulled off of one of the other boards I bought in Brazil years ago. The skegs are so flexy that on fast waves the board gets squirrely and it's tough to hold a line, not to mention the fact that the skegs make this loud humming noise.

In any case, I surfed terribly today. I won't place all of the blame on the board, I'm known to have my bad days regardless, but the board with the crapo skegs definitely was not helping. I couldn't stick a late drop for the life of me, and I've actually gotten pretty good at those late backside drops...I think with this board I'm just not able to set the rail correctly. In any case, I kept trying, which led to multiple nasty wipeouts in which I landed on my board and/or skegged myself. I've never tackled my board so many times in one session. This was bound to end bad. I took off deep on a left, and basically gave my board a flying elbow to the nose. As a result, I'm now missing a bite size chunk from the nose of my board, and have a bruised arm/ego. My board looks like it had an encounter with a hungry Ken Bradshaw.

After breaking my board though, I actually snapped out of it and was able to catch a few decent rides, one of which I stupidly rode too far to the inside and then got caught paddling through walls of whitewater for the next 15 minutes. My shoulders could handle it, but I was cranky nonetheless having to duckdive 15 waves in a row.

All in all, this session sucked. I hope my next 98th session is better!