It's Just An Old Photograph, but..

Once upon a time, it wasn't so easy to get good surf photographs, so mostly what we had were images like this. Either before or after we went out, or some photo taken by a friend that didn't really capture the feeling of the sport. Now, we can get almost anything photographed, and although I haven't gotten any drone footage yet, I think that by the end of this year that will happen.

What makes this photo interesting to me is that it was the last time my brother Paul and I went surfing. We still hang out, but Paul found that even though he was a good surfer, he didn't like "sand in his shorts"....and he lives at the beach...something I will never understand. Here, we were coming out after a session at Matanzas inlet, a place I only surfed at that one time....later I heard too many shark stories to want to go back.

A couple of other things are really significant to me: Paul is carrying a surfboard that he got from me, one I bought specifically for a trip to Costa Rica with my family. That trip turned out to be one of my family's big adventures...please note that there are no known photos of me surfing in Costa Rica...there is one somewhere of me walking on the beach with a surfboard. That surfboard is still hanging in Paul's garage, but it did not age well. Paul and I did much better.

In this photo, taken back in the late 1990's, judging by my haircut, I was riding a board that I bought from a classified ad, for something like $200. I was very proud of my dealmaking, and tended to overlook the fact that it was pretty much shaped like an ironing board. Then there was this weird logo on the board that no one I ever met could explain: ANOVA. I had fun riding the board, but got a lot of strange looks when walking with the board. One of life's mysteries, never to be explained....