Monster inspiration!

I love how this board looks like somebody caught naked

This is one of the crazy beautiful boards built by monsterboards.org's Eef, and this is just one of his many creations. The guy truly has a shed brimful of self-built boards, paipo's, handplanes and other weird surfequipment designs spun from his mind.

The shed also contains self-built and/or modified guitars, amplifiers and a lot of paintings. A pretty serious amount of inspirational stuff for one shed if you ask me.

And that's just the shed. The rest of his house contains a lot more beautiful artwork, and he even turned his bike into a moving piece of artwork! I had a blast checking it all out. And am very thankful for the hospitality of Eef and his family.

Eef standing in his shed with another one of his creations

I had tried to surf my fish earlier that Sunday. The waves were really small and powerless that day and my buddy Tim was even struggling on his longboard, so I thought surfing was impossible in those conditions. That was until I got to try one of the long handplane/short paipo creations of Eef on some very small crumbling waves. The first two waves passed underneath me, and I thought that it had been nice to get wet, to paddle around a bit an have a laugh with friends, but that  the waves just had too little power to do any kind of surfing. But then on my third try I got the timing right and all of a sudden I was flying!

The wave just catapulted me forward, and when I looked to my right I saw an overhead wall building next to me. Instinctively I managed to carve to the right and lengthen my first ride a bit longer, until the wave crashed on me. [Because your chin is about an inch from the water every wave is overhead and it really seems like your going insanely fast :-)]

Damn! This was fun! No, this was more than fun! Playing around on my fish making mini-drops had been fun, but this was much better. I was quite blown away by the fact that a pretty simple piece of ply (although beautifully painted) and a pair of swim-fins, could give such a surfing sensation. It's definitely time to get my head out of my ass... I'm building myself a long handplane/short paipo this weekend! And then a long paipo, and a normal one, and more handplanes! 

Thanks Eef, you've opened my eyes. Next time even if the waves are really small, I won't be stopped... I'm going surfing!

Me missing a wave, moments before the real fun started. Pic courtesy of Eef himself