Many people in the bush head to the coast for a holiday over the January-February school holiday/wet season period.
If you’ve got kids, this means a car stacked high with stuff on the way to the beachside destination – and it’s even worse on the drive back to the farm or station at the end of a couple of weeks, when shopping booty has to be squeezed in as well, along with the sand and newly purchased beach umbrella. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Surfboards, such as body boards/boogie boards, take up a lot of space in the boot. Inflatable surfmats are a great alternative, but the trouble is, if you surf every day for a few hours and you’re not especially docile, the average inflatable surfmat will be lucky to last a full week without springing an airleak along a seam.
We used to head from the Riverina to the Gold Coast every so often to visit an elderly rellie, in the days when kids could sit in the boot of a stationwagon – no airconditioning or seatbelts in cars then. But it was still a squash, regardless of how the car was arranged. I had an old surfmat that was made of solid rubber – pale green and orange, with a palm tree on it. That surfmat lasted for years – you couldn’t kill it with a stick. Deflated, it took up next-to-no room in the boot. I did a swap with my brother when I bought one of the first Morey Boogie boards (1970s) which I still have, but it’s not a patch on the fancier designed new models.
After a beach holiday a couple of years ago and driving home with an overloaded car (as usual), I poked around on the internet for quite a while and finally found what I was looking for – the original, solid rubber surfmats – still being made. This relic from the polka-dot cotton bikini era is called a ‘surfoplane‘ (ok, it’s heyday was in the 1960s, in the days of Elvis and Gidget on the beach). Better still, the ‘surfoplane’ was invented by an Australian.
Goodtime Surf & Sail in Brisbane stocks these rubber ‘surfoplane’ surfmats, and today they told me that most of the sales are by mail order to people living all over the place. They’re $99 so surfoplanes are more than twice the price of an ordinary surfmat, but considering you’ll get 10 times as much use out of them, ‘Surfoplanes’ are great value.
Inflatable surfmats are highly recommended, to help reduce the domestic stress involved in packing holiday paraphernalia back into the car before heading back to the bush. It’s also easier to catch small waves on a surfmat than on a body board, and no-one ever got hurt by a flying surfmat.
If you decide instead to buy a body board – remember that you do get what you pay for. $20 in a discount shop will buy an unsteerable plank, useful only for young primary school kids and/or a one-off holiday at the beach. You can donate the lump of foam to Vinnies before heading home. Whereas a body board costing $100 upwards will buy something teenagers and adults will get a lot more fun out of – and $200 upwards will buy a good body board that you’ll get a lot more fun out of (faster, more manouvreable, easier to catch waves on etc), and for years. That might seem a lot of money but when you add up the total cost of an annual holiday, and the fact that you’ll get quite a few seasons of fun out of better quality surfmats and body boards, good quality ends up being a much better value choice in the long run.
There’s a truckload of information on the internet on different types of body boards, including how to choose the one that will fit and suit you best. There are also more expensive surfmats ($200 upwards) for those who want a high performance surfmat (more indestructible, faster, more manouvreable etc). If you’re going to the trouble and expense of driving to the coast for a well-earned break, it pays to do a quick bit of online research beforehand, regarding the ideal object to catch waves on.