Rhombus Surf Shop

Opening Soon!

85 Brunswick st, Fitzroy, Vic, Aust, 3065

Boards/ Takayama, Neil Purchase Jnr, Larry Mabile

Clothes/ Patagaonia, Lifetime Collective, Das Monk, RVCA

Wetsuits/ Nine Plus, Patagonia

Get Wet @ Rhombus!
E/ info@rhombussurfshop.com.au

Mr. Sanchez, On His Way. See You Soon, Buddy.

Getting Out of Dodge, EBNY on Remote

Dear Readers of Endless Bummer New York (all three of you),

Next week we will be opening a temporary bureau in another country. A different country. A country other than the country we are in at the moment.
There will be a fiesta complete with donkey and star shaped piñatas filled with pinto beans, concord grapes and miniature replica Hagia Sophias carved from coconut shells. There will be music and vegetarian food. There will be a mystic. He will tell fortunes while balancing on one toe. You are not invited to this fiesta. But worry not, the consistent reportage so vital to your surfing life understanding thing will go unabated. Regular updates are ensured. Insured. Please stay tuned for more of the same boring, redundant, unhelpful blather you have come to know and love. I think we can say that. If you didn't know and love it, well, you wouldn't be reading this would you? Unless this is an accident. In which case, there, up to the left of your screen there is a little button that says "next blog." Or you are just checking in for the first time from some link from another surf blog and you are finding yourself bored to tears already. Either way, don't worry, our feelings are not hurt. You've already made our Google Analytics look rad for the day.

Thank you for your continued, or quickly discontinued, support.

The EBNY Editorial Department

INTRODUCING THE NEW EBNY FEATURE: Dream Analyzation

The very latest feature in our never ending quest to provide our readers with scientific yet valuable surf assistance: DREAM ANALYSIS
If you would like to have a dream analyzed, please email us a recent dream. We will pick one lucky narcoleptic Walter Mitty out of a hat in the coming weeks (0r months) and you too could have a similaresque sort of analysis to the one above! Give it a whirl!*

*Nominal fee required for analysis. Comparable prices to standard union pay scale for ubiquitous East Village storefront Gypsy palm readers apply.

Do or die. Fish fry. We've actually never made it out to this thing, but by all accounts, it is a good time. Check the details here: FishFryNY

LATEST BREAKING NEWS : a switcheroo of locales

The Continuing Folly of Pondering the Future

There is an inevitability to misjudging the size of the surf whenever I am involved. I am pretty sure that each and every time I have paddled out I've had that thought in the back of my head "this is a wee bigger than it looked from shore." Maybe there was a time when I had a local sort of break, or when I was going on a couple weeks of straight surfing when I wouldn't be so hoodwinked, but I think I can say there is a consistency to my poor eye-to-brain wave contextualizing. Then, of course, there is the inevitable gaffe of overstating the session size after getting out of the water. To overcompensate, I almost always try to play it cool. I won't talk in terms of feet anymore. I don't even know what that means anyhow.


Head high, shoulder, nipple, belly and knee. That's about how far I go. Oh, and ankle slappers. If it's overhead, it's conversationally head high. If it's head high, it's conversationally shoulder. And so on. If it's way overhead, there is a slight widening of eyes, so that one's got a sort of visual cue.


Surf reports strike me in a similar way. I can never quite get a handle on the physical realities of a surf report. There is a hint of something that's happening, but until I get there, I don't really know. And then, well, then I just misjudge it anyhow. Best to just show up and paddle out.
-Toddy

The prior post, the one about the New Yorker article, did the trick of reminding me of my first stab at a surf blog, back in 2006, those dark years... I had forgotten about that short period of time between other periods of time before Angus and Antonio and the idea we could put together a sort of communal diary of ineptitude.  Funny stuff, to me at least.
-Toddy

Jordan Alport digitally sent these two New Yorker articles through today. Dating back to the August 24 & 31, 1992 editions, they are some the little warning droplets of what would be the inevitable avalanche that would hit the cultural awareness of San Francisco surfing in the nineties. My own time in SF in the middle of that decade was hardly fruitful in the surfing sense, lazy as I was, content to surf the odd OB small day between trips back down the coast. In many ways they were lost years. But perhaps that all serves a purpose.

In the realm of practice, the internet offers a thousand odd avenues. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, fantasy sports, blogs. Each a bizarre avenue to practice aggrandizement. To practice narcissism. To practice connection. Our social skills being honed in blips and bleeps, perfectly crafted PR announcements, gaffes and goofs. Many perceive this world to be a minefield, but the longer it sticks around, the more it flourishes, the more we become accustomed to a lack of decorum, the manipulation of forgiveness. Peter is an old acquaintance, one of the more accomplished surfers at our college. Always had the knack for deep rail power. That in itself is only the end result of a lot of practice. This photo is from Facebook, a veritable gold mine of surf media. This doesn't have so much to do with the above mini-diatribe, I just figured I ought to tell the other side of the story. And I love this moment.

The Liveliest

The pursuit of meditation and photography leads away from fascination with the extraordinary and back to a rediscovery of the ordinary.
- Stephen Batchelor, Confessions of a Buddhist Athiest

Just the sort of thing the Surfer's Journal is for.  I rarely get to mentally "live" the stories I read about in the surfing mags.   Usually they are hairball tales of daring-do in far more exotic locales.  I can't really connect in a muscle memory way with the juggernauts of the North Shore or Western Australia or Bali or South Africa.  The little fertile crescent of my surfing history is just that. Little. But on the subway this morning I am sure at least one observant rider got a treat, watching my body uncontrollably jigger and gander, my muscles tense, my jaw drop, as I read the Mike Davis story about the swell of '69 hitting Hammond's, carrying Pat Curren and he all the way down to Sharky's.  I know that little strip will enough.  It is, I figure, my own surfing fertile crescent.  If you haven't picked up the mag and read that re-telling yet, I can't promise it will make the same stomach-churning, eye-watering affect as it did for me, but I'll guarantee a well told story.
-Toddy

Is that niggling desire to belong an outside instigation, imposed, and gingerly accepted as the case may be, by some nefarious exterior force? Are we simply, on this level as proved on so many others, the guinea pig of society? Or, does this belonging have more to do with the interior sense of guilt, pointing not to a desire to be part of the culture, rather to knowledge of an action we know we must. I am cynical. I admit it. When it comes to feeling inadequate I tend to look darkly upon our intentions. I'll reckon it is the former then the latter, all in pursuit of a relational harmony we crave. Even so, even so, I'll let myself believe that the gnawing knowledge that I don't do quite enough to belong doesn't amount to anything other than a truly enlightened approach to taking things as they come. Suffice to say, sometimes the oddest things remind me of what's out there.
-Toddy

A Boy's Wall, April 17

New York Ether

Ok, so granted, during the push and go winter months we are a little slow on the uptake.  Even the most cursory glance at EBNY online content shows a gaping hole of initiative in the darkest months.  There are many reasons for this, most have to do with the burden of work, family and general light-starved malaise.  But the days are long now and our depression is lifting and having not glanced around too much lately we stumbled upon this little gem penned by none other than Mollusk Mike, our neighborhood ripper.  If you haven't read it and are looking for a little perspective, do.  Click on the blog title...

Mollusk BK Board Exchange (!)

Rebecca Olive's sea-bound view reminds me of late spring into early summer 1997, Hendry's Beach in Santa Barbara, afternoon swim.  A scant two months later and that moment turned itself into a small, no-invite-everyone-welcome ceremony in the garden behind the SB courthouse.  Nice.
-Toddy

The previous picture, borrowed from Salt Stained Eyes, tells a million healthy tales.  The following movie, borrowed from Hulu, tells one interesting tale.  Somehow, one reminds me of the other.

A quick perusal of the historians to the right lands me on the Pushingtide blog, a regular spot for the concise and thoughtful.  We are a species full of memories.  This, as everything, is both good and bad.  One must always remind oneself that the past no longer exists.  It is simply not there except in our imagination.  On the flip side, there is this wonderful quality to certain memories, the ones that are not necessarily specific, but exist through repeated experience and conjure themselves up magically sometimes.  One of the most cherished feelings in my arsenal is the feeling of ascending and descending on mountain roads.  It seems as if the whole of my youthful life was spent doing just that.  Whether up into the Cascades or down from the Santa Ynez Mountains, I can readily conjure the vistas and the changes of smell, warmth and pressure of the air.  It is joyful.
-Todd

All good thing comes through Grant. And he says he is switching brands tout suite.
This might be one of those ones that everyone has seen, and I just haven't sen yet. 
If so, someone MUST have figured out who the surfer is...can I get a clue?

Sitting in an office in Midtown, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It's 80 degrees outside, my room is dark. I have a little cold.
And then there's this.

Happy Easter Egg Day from Adam

The Happy Easter Egg Day series brought to you by a cursory perusal of my Facebook "News Feed" this afternoon. Once upon a time, Easter Sunday meant a sunrise service and a paddle-out. Both these things were far away from me today, but each of these photos brought a smile to my face. -Toddy

Happy Easter Egg Day from Ryan

Happy Easter Egg Day from Ray Knives

Happy Easter Egg Day from Cory

Happy Easter Egg Day from Vivi

Happy Easter Egg Day from Jordan

Beer Can Beach & Osio in Blue

Where did these guys go?
Two of our favorite check-ins, like those spots you check when nothing else is breaking, or everything else is breaking, and you want a little small time paddle privacy. My own blogy Miramars.
Gone into the darkness.

I know retarded is a loaded word. There is a big campaign about not using the word retarded in a pejorative sense, or in any sense for that matter, except perhaps the fire extinguishing sense, much like, say, the use of the word gay to denote anything other than, well, gay. And run on sentences with lots of commas. People hate that. But what if we used the words retarded and gay to mean something really almost great. Like so great simply because it is so gay and retarded? Really positive! This might fit into that category for me.  But I didn't just say that.  It was all hypothetical philosophical linguistical.  A conversation starter from one PC person to another PC person; between gay loving, retard loving, public radio listening PC people.  This clip is so retarded and gay it's great.  And the surfing is neat.
We got it off the Surfer's Journal site.