Carrying Your Gear

Well, we’re not quite ready to jump in the water. We need to talk a little about GETTING into the water.

Thanks to Wardog from SurfingSports.com for this section of tips and modifications to make handling your gear easier. These boards are huge, so carrying them around and getting them in the water can be a challenge in itself. If you’re in heavy shorebreak doing it wrong can be dangerous.

One extremely helpful item is a rope handle utilizing double leash plugs, or if you don’t have a double plug just attach the rope to your standard leash plug. The idea is to have an easy handle to grab–not your leash or your fin.

It’s way safer to hold onto your board in the shorepound with the tail handle, than holding onto the fin…
If you hold onto the fin, you will get sliced…these boards are big and the hydraulic forces involved are tremendous…

Walking the board and rig backwards when getting out works mo bettah…

Another helpful item are the inserts that we have installed on the rails…

Fabricate some webbing handles…they are not in the way…and come in handy while transporting the board to and from the beach…my wifey and her friends really like them…makes it easier to carry the handle with other hand…

…and if you run a bungee across the mid-section and nose…you can secure your paddle in front of a big wave and turtle roll using both hands…otherwise, the Golden Rule of standup is NEVER LET GO OF YOUR PADDLE!!!…;-)

Warm winds, good waves, & strong strokes…{:~)..WARDOG

Actually, I occasionally intentionally toss my paddle out past the break to surf a wave or two in the conventional lay down position. That only works well with a transitional board like the Jimmy Lewis 11′7″ or the Ku Nalu because they are narrow enough (26″) to hand paddle. If you do this it’s a good idea to wrap a turn or two of flourescent tape on your paddle handle so you can find it easily. I’ve never had a problem finding mine again–they stay put pretty well as long as they are past the breaking waves. You just stand up outside and look for them.

Adding handles and tie downs

From Jimmy Lewis via Linter: Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I emailed jimmy about inserts and within hours he got back to me with advice:
(JL) “You CAN put inserts in but make sure you follow these instructions. True, you can melt the foam but ONLY if you put the epoxy in VOLUME. It’s not going to heat up unless you have a big gob of it in the hole. So what you want to do is route the hole that the insert goes in VERY close fitting to the insert. Don’t make a big hole where the insert is rattling around.

Then you epoxy it in. Now, the important thing about doing this is that you need to glass over the top of the inserts. If you don’t, there is a better than GOOD chance that it will leak. After you’ve epoxied the inserts in where you want them, sand the insert down level with the deck and sand the paint off in a radius of about an 1″ outside of the insert. Don’t sand too deep; just enough to take the paint and the primer off so you can see the glass. Then put two circles of 4oz glass over each insert with epoxy. This will seal where you’ve cut into the lamination to put the insert in. Make sure you get ALL of the pin air out of the little circles. Then you just drill
through the “caps” to open the hole and you could countersink it a tiny bit too. Then you’d only have to touch up the paint if you wanted it to look better.”

Pretty nice of JL, as well, to take time out of his day to write that kind of detailed response, and it’s that kind of customer service that makes people say great things about a business. well done, jimmy. keep it up!