Floridian Scott Buchard (above) powers a backside ollie on a wet and changing surface much as he would on a ramp or curb. Another good reason (below) to surf.
Longtime skater/surfer extraordinaire Tony Alva (right) brings in a front truck lock-up off the steel coping extension of a ramp in his own backyard.
every time you turn down the line the
pipe tries to suck you up the wall. So
when you go up to do a thruster or
kickturn, you get sucked even higher into
the tube, forcing over-vertical re-entry.
Blasting out of the tube into the light you
face a quarter-pipe with a riding surface
moving up the wall from the flats like a
conveyor belt. A halfpipe is not neces-
sary because the force sucks you up the
wall every time you turn. This is where
you do grinds (off-the-lips) and aerials.
A lot of skate moves became surf moves.
A lot of the surfers like Jay Adams and
Kevin Reed took their skate moves into
the water; the slashing, the laybacks,
the ollies and trying to get air and stuff.
Now, Christian Fletcher is the perfect
example of someone who takes skate
moves and does them in the water. But
Jay and Kevin were the first. -James
Muir
Suppose you rode out of the rotating
cement tube, carved the conveyor belt
quarter-pipe awhile and were then con-
fronted with another tube straight ahead.
54 THRASHER MAGAZINE
You could ride into it or you could ride
up and over it and down the outside of
the rotating tube. In surfing, this is called
a "floater." There is no parallel in skate-
boarding because there are no rotating
tubes. Carving on the outside, or the
"roof" of the wave, you often have to
ollie back onto the flats to set up your
next turn. Carving on the falling curtain
that is the lip of a wave, Ritchie Collins
perfected what he calls rock and rolls.
Letting his tail drop first, he appears to
be doing a rock and roll slide until the
fins catch and he whips back around for-
ward. This is also the part of the wave
where surfers attempt cess slides.
So surfing may have given skating its
birth, plus a couple of moves like the
bert and the layback, but skating is pay-
ing surfing back tenfold in the air/lip trick
department with endless variations like
lien airs, stalefish grabs, indy airs, ollies,
rock and rolls, and cess slides à la guys
like Christian Fletcher, Matt Archibald,
and Martin Potter. Even the concept of
wallrides translates into the vertical or
over-vertical environment of gnarly
shorebreak, much like grinding the
quick-transitioned shallow end of a pool.
Stuff like inverts and backwards tricks
are impossible to transfer to surfing
because when the fins catch on a
surfboard, you won't
be going back-
wards much
longer. Once the
fins hit, you
turn around
quick.
Skating is far
more tech-
nical with
flipping your
board
around and
stuff. In
surfing, it's
more like
cruising
down a
hill on
your
skate-
THE OLLIE
IMPOSSIBLE
FLOATER
WILL NEVER
HAPPEN ON A
SURFBOARD
JIM MUIR
H