🏄‍♀️ Should you give up on your shortboard? 😩

👋 Happy National Prosecco Day! We absolutely should have more surf-related national days. National Chicken Pop-up Day. National Kook Day. National Nice Locals Day.

🏄‍♀️ Let’s surf:

• Should you give up on your shortboard? 😩

• The Ugly duckling of a surfboard 🦆

• Ripping at the Bu 🏄🏻‍♀️

• From Brazil to Baja to back foot 🦶

• Surf news roundup 🗞️

^SURFODRAMA

🏄🏻‍♀️ Should you give up on your shortboard? 😩

Sometimes you just need a permission slip to quit, don't you? A member of our community asked to be absolved for giving up her shortboard.

You've heard this story before. Maybe you've been experiencing it yourself. You used to longboard, you feel comfortable on your midlength, but your shortboard is simply defeating you.

You struggle to find the right position. You can stand up if you manage to catch something, but mostly you're not catching.

Before you give it up, here are the reasons why you might be struggling and what you can do about it.

📏 It's not the length, it's the volume
The most technical answer from the community: two boards can be the same length and behave completely differently based on volume and shape. "Smaller volume will require much faster waves and/or aggressive paddling," one member wrote. "Hardly ever the same wave that you typically longboard on."

A 5'9" fish with high volume paddles like a dream. A 5'9" performance thruster wants a curling steep wave. They're not comparable. Multiple members have found their sweet spot by chasing volume, not length. One rides 5'5" to 5'8" boards at 24.5-26L volume, at 5'1" tall. Another just ordered a 5'8" mini Simmons specifically because of the volume.

📈 Go bigger before you go smaller
Jumping from 6'6" to 5'9" is a bigger drop than it sounds. Several members recommended trying something in between as the next step. One in particular: "I stubbornly rode a 6'1" for 2 months before catching one wave. Then went up to a 6'4" with more volume and looooved it."

⏱️ Give it three to five surfs
Adjustment takes time. A member with strong technical knowledge noted that it's normal to take three to five sessions to get used to a different size board. Not two, not one, but three to five. If you're on session two and hating it, that's not failure, that's the adjustment.

🌊 Permission to quit is also a valid answer
Or you could give your shortboard a break. A member who used to only shortboard in high school now, at 34, only rides a 7'6". Her line: "I keep saying I'm going to get back into my short board but the truth is I have a ton of fun on my longer board! I get tons of waves, longer rides, easier paddling… nothing to prove riding a short board I just want to have the most fun!"

Another member kept it even simpler: "Just surf the board that you enjoy!"

👑 The moment we didn't see coming
The shortest, but possibly the bestest reply in the thread came from Pauline Menczer.

Yes, that Pauline Menczer. 1993 World Champion, "the epitome of the Aussie battler." She began surfing at age 14, after she was given half of her brother's recently broken surfboard, according to the Encyclopedia of Surfing.

Pauline’s 1993 championship win is a Cinderella fairy tale. She didn’t have a sponsor and had to pay $25,000 of the $30,000 she earned that year in prize money just to get from contest to contest.

Two weeks before the final contest of the championship, Pauline had an arthritis attack that put her temporarily in a wheelchair. Only seven days later she began paddling her surfboard in a pool as a warm-up; on the day of the contest, held in windblown eight-foot surf at Sunset Beach, she scraped into the finals, and won the title. "I couldn't even brush my own hair," she said of her pre-title attack. "My body just shut down."

Her reply: "If you already ride a 6'6", then it's just about practicing on the 5'9"."

That's it. That's the whole thing. We can talk about volume, shape, and rocker until the cows come home. Then a world champion showed up and cut it down to the uncomfortable truth: practice.

If that's not permission to keep trying then we don’t know what is.

^{SURFBOARD SAFARI}

🤡 The Ugly duckling of a surfboard

In 1967, Con Surfboards ran an ad in Surfer Magazine that opened with this line: "It's called the UGLY. Everybody wants it anyway!"

The ad kept going. It told readers the board had a twenty-inch nose that looked terrible, semi-parallel rails that would win no beauty prizes, and a "silly-looking, scooped-out, popped-up six-inch square tail."

It's like the copywriter could not stop themselves: "There is certainly nothing handsome about a twenty-inch nose."

The message was clear: this thing is a total horror, and you're going to want one.

The man behind the Ugly was considered one of the best-looking men in surfing, Bob Purvey, called "Gentleman Bob." Craig Stecyk described him in Surfer's Journal as having "athletic grace and movie-star good looks going." He was a promoter's dream, signed to Con Surfboards for ten dollars a board. His name didn't even appear on the label.

🏆 Why the board actually worked
Bob Purvey won the 1966 Tom Morey Invitational Noseriding Contest in Ventura on this board. He averaged 41.5 seconds of noseriding time across six waves, took third overall, and walked home with $500.

The Ugly's design was Purvey's concept, executed by Con's shaper Gary Seaman. The absurdly wide nose (twenty inches, one foot back from the tip) meant you could stand on it and it would carry your weight. It was designed for one thing and it was very good at that one thing.

"I could have rode the nose on a tongue depressor," Bob later said, "which is what The Ugly shape kind of looked like."

🦆 The accidental invention of the midlength
Here's where it gets historically interesting. In late 1967, the V-Bottom design showed up and the shortboard revolution was on. Longboards started collecting dust. The Ugly was suddenly the wrong one.

Bob didn't give up on The Ugly. He asked Con Surfboards if they could make a shorter version. They shrank the Ugly to eight feet and called it the Super Ugly. Which, depending on how you count, may have been the first funboard-style midlength ever made.

The swan of a surfboard.

Big thanks to Matt Warshaw for keeping these stories alive in the Encyclopedia of Surfing.

^{PIC OF THE WEEK}

🏄🏻‍♀️ Ripping at the Bu

With a couple of overlapping swells about to hit Southern California, here’s another masterpiece by Brandon Kirk on Instagram.

Celebrating the traditional surf summer in Malibu, titled “Lulu rippin’ down the line and having a blast at the Bu.”

And while we’re on the subject of Instagram, do give us a follow, would ya? 🥰 @girlswhocantsurfgood

^{LATEST FROM GIRLS WHO CAN’T SURF GOOD}

💬 3 things we’re figuring out this week

🌴 Where in the world for a women-only surf camp beyond the usual Indo, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Mexico, Portugal, or Spain circuit? Community top picks: Brazil (a member native to Brazil runs an all-women retreat there, with Camburi on São Paulo's north shore also endorsed as world champ Gabriel Medina's home break), Canoa in Ecuador (a member currently lives and surfs there), El Salvador (there's a woman-run camp), and Central Florida if you're happy with inconsistent waves and warm-hearted locals. Morocco kept coming up too if you're willing to stretch the "not usual" definition.

🥶 Northern Baja from San Diego for early November, mellow waves preferred? Community reality check: early November is not really mellow, so watch the forecast because big swells are the norm. Community top picks for when the surf cooperates: Rauls at km42 and Las Gaviotas (both friendly), K38 area (a member who lives in Tijuana surfs K38 and K42 regularly), Km38 hostel right in front of the break, and Shipwrecks further south with camping. One piece of local advice: don't go on weekends because Las Gaviotas gets very crowded.

🦶 Do you need a grip pad on your mid-length? Community consensus: probably not, unless you actively want one. It's rarely necessary for anything but vertical-style shortboarding, but multiple members mentioned it's actually useful for feeling your foot positioning on the board while paddling (with a raised pad you can feel it on your shins or ankles). One warning: it can also encourage you to pop up with your back foot too far back, which some coaches don't love.

👉 Join us for more recs, chatter, and support

^{THE WIPEOUT WEEKLY SURF NEWS ROUNDUP}

🗞️ Wave pool eats. Kelly Slater turned back the clock, Hank Foto finished his ride, and a Navy vet beat the City of Newport Beach.

🍔 A guy who surfed 35 wave pools ranked their food
Wavepool Magazine's Mike Goldys published a deep dive on wave pool F&B, finding a wild range from Surf Ranch's in-house chef to Kobe Reyes in Japan's single vending machine, with Virginia Beach's Atlantic Park Surf making the good list.

🏆 At 54, Kelly Slater knocks three-time world champ Gabriel Medina out of the Tahiti Pro
Slater, given a wildcard after retiring from full-time competition in 2024, posted a near-perfect 19.06 heat score (9.73 and 9.33) at Teahupo'o and said he "almost started crying afterward."

📷 Beloved surf photographer Hank Foto dies at 62
Iconic SURFING magazine staff photographer Hank Foto, who shot the cover of Kelly Slater's 2003 book Pipe Dreams, died on Aug 8 after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December, leaving behind his 15-year-old son Fender.

⚖️ Navy veteran wins legal battle against City of Newport Beach over surf school access
Jason Murchison, owner of Learn to Surf, won a court ruling striking down Newport Beach's arbitrary three-school cap and can now operate under a five-year agreement matching the three incumbent schools.

🎥 Sessions Surf Festival returns to Encinitas and Solana Beach Sept 12-19
Taylor Steele's sixth-year festival is going bigger on music this year with Osees, Unwritten Law, Bully, Yoke Lore, and more, alongside surf film screenings, art showcases, and the Count Down Cup surf comp at Seaside Reef.

👉 Read the full news roundup

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⬆️ Aaaaaaand that was the last wave of the week!
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With stoke,

Zuz & The Wipeout Weekly