PublisherNoteJuly1

NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
JULY 1, 2004

Longtime visitors to vagabondsurf.com may have noticed a serious lack of new content around here during the past three months. I want to take this opportunity to take full responsibility for this, and to explain why.

I'm a mutant, pure and simple.

Like some vintage Marvel Comics character, hero or villian or both, I've been cycling through changes so fast that even the instant access of cybermedia can't accurately keep up with them. It's taken me a few months to try to decypher the patterns, to try to discern if this is a series of cycles or changes or some horrific Twister-quality spiral which is threatening to suck me straight up into the sky.

If that sounds complicated, toss in a four year old website, an expanding group of contributors, and a core group of several thousand readers who remain kind enough to stop by once in a while. Since I chose some time back to forgo financial reward in favor of total editorial freedom, I can honestly write here that the main reasons this site remains up are the friends I've made through it and the e-mails which occasionally arrive from someone who stumbled across the site and discovered they were not alone in their interests or attitudes. Body surfers, bodyboarders, mat surfers, and paipo boarders - you know what I mean.

The summer of 2004 should go down in history as the most crowded surfer summer ever. The current fad isn't slowing down, and general society is more welcoming than ever. As the baseline of "surfing" gets shifted by the huge influx of new surfers, the mutant exceptions to the norm get pushed further out and in general will become more misunderstood, if not ostracized.

For me there has also been the question of all the content already up. New visitors mine the archives, making me reluctant to just dump it, but 4 years of work is feeling like a sea anchor at this point. Being a cheap and lazy surfer, I've decided to partition it. There will eventually be "old" and "new" sections or sites, with some intermingling like with the subject home pages. It will, perhaps, all make sense when you see it. There will be some new things like a Reader Contribution section, and possibly one major change which I am still undecided about at this time.

The "new" site may not have an updated section devoted to standup surfing in clearly defined terms.

I'm a second generation standup surfer with 34 years of experience, but the territory has been swamped by floodwaters and, while standup surfing is recognizeable to me, it is no longer of much interest. It hurts to write that, but when I opened the door to confront the skeletons in my closet I found the closet nearly empty. There was a surfboard there, but I moved it: I needed the space.

We'll see how this plays out, as I'm sure I will still have things to say about footboarding. I'm still going to do it, too. This little quirk is about me, not surfing. Things grow and move on and change and...mutate. Like it or not, surfing has been hit with a tidal wave of enthusiasm and money, and the water has yet to recede. Surfing is no longer a "young" sport. Time to see what adulthood does for it.

For those who primarily standup surf, there will continue to be photos and stories, and you are encouraged to contribute them yourselves. For the rest of you mutants with interests beyond the norm, let's restart the engines.

Nels Norene
Publisher and Editor
vagabondsurf.com