During the years I lived in California, my daily rituals often involved a fifty mile car drive. No, I wasn't commuting to work and back, I was simply going surfing. Not that there's anything special about such treks, fans of action sports have long known that much gasoline is burnt getting to and from the places where play takes place.
All that is starting to change. Yesterday, the Associated Press carried a story about how rising gas prices are hurting surfers on every end of the equation.
Since beachfront property has become some of the most expensive in America, most surfers no longer live near the beach. There was an old joke, that surfing (with the possible exception of skateboarding) was the board sport with the lowest barriers to entry. All you needed was a pair of swim trunks, some wax and a board. But now, with $5 a gallon standing between most wave-riders and the beach, those barriers have gotten a bit bigger.
Worse, surfboards are big items that require big cargo holds to move around. Trucks, ships, planes-all modes of transport that also run on gasoline. And since manufacturers pass transportation costs on to consumers, what was a $400 surfboard a few years ago has lately become a $750 dollar board.
According to AP, this has led to a steep, nearly 30 percent drop in business.
Making matters even worse for surfers, the resin that shapers put on boards is, of course, petroleum-based. Sure, this isn't really making a dent in the big mass market board shapers who churn out product by the crate-load, but the heart of the board-shaping industry has always been hand-made boards created in tiny mom-and-pop shops.
Those shops are now seeing their costs of doing business spiral upwards, while the recession woes that are sweeping the country are also effecting the other side of the coin. The entire surf industry is taking a downturn and that includes the surf travel required to get some of the better spots around the globe. Plane tickets sales to locals in Asia are down almost 20 percent and there doesn't seem to be any easy solutions.
What makes this doubly unfortunate is that surfing has long been a sport of the common man, a blue collar affair almost every step of the way.
The only good news is that since surfers are always bitching about the waves being too crowded, those crowds have thinned as of late. These days, it looks like one of the core punk rock sports has suddenly become exactly the opposite: another, albiet inadvertent, playground for the rich.
