My first foray into finding a surfing fix inland involved cutting my sisters roller skates in half (yeh she never forgave me) and nailing them (later screwing them) onto plank which was hacked into a vague surfboard shape.
As one can imagine it was limited to about one footpath near our house which was new tarmac, unfortunately running straight through an old people's home! Not the quietest of boards a 'No trolley cart' sign appeared, was ignored of course, and then my mother being informed... Strike One !
Next was a board from the Tiki shop next summer (I'd done as many 'jobs' for people as I could do save some the money up) - basic board with the old clay composite wheels. This was the REAL deal indeed... reality check two days later as I found out that endless blue skies is not the only difference between California and deepest Derbyshire, paving slabs and rocks soon reduced the composite 'clay' roller skate wheels to dust! Strike 2 but for a while I was surfing at home!
As urethane was hitting the roads of Dog Town the 'Surf Flyer' was hitting England. Again the name was the enticement, you could surf the streets. I still have the board and while being woeful it was like a dream, it turned (sort of due to the rubber laden trucks) and the rubber wheels while being SOOOoo slow were soft and could cope with cracks and gravel and Matlock is not short of hills so being slow was probably a blessing and could have saved my body!
By the way the BRAKE was a joke and I know no one who left the piece of rubber on there!
Boards, urethane wheels and cuts and grazes came and went. And still I was searching for the ultimate land surfer. I rode my trucks looser than anyone else could bear, got custom boards made with rockers to help carving the local banked park and such places as Malibu Dog Bowl (in the depths of Nottingham) and Skate Empire (ill fated park in Sheffield which burnt down) - in my mind I was surfing Crantock, Fistral and Pipeline.
Next stage in the search involved slalom trucks and long board downhill with Randell trucks to simulate my surfing. Being in Tasmania at the time meant smooth hills, a plethora of banked parks and my Toes Over longboard skate review page which bought in lots of goodies ! It was this time that saw trucks being made to turn like surfing - Exkate and Kapu veid for the copyright and slowly disappeared.
So lets shoot forward from the mid 90s to 2016-17. In fact I had carver trucks way before that and thought they were the ultimate surf style truck but boy was I wrong. Then the world saw the arrival of the 'surfskate' as a 'thing'. Smoothstar and Your Own Wave (YOW) leading the charge and lots of exposure for them and carver through the Whitezu 'wave' ramps. Suddenly it seemed like the fact that surfing is heading for the olympics meant that sporting bodies were looking into training methods and being able to replicate the muscle memory hundreds of times in an hour of skating on a wave as opposed to the x number of decent rides you would get in an hour on the water was/is a no brainer.
Cutting a long story short I now have a plethora of surfskates and really should do some reviews on here - but thats for another time maybe.
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