"Auntie Mo" - Maureen McNamara - Maine

"Auntie Mo"   - Maureen McNamara - Maine

On Halloween of 2023, when Surfline shared her (now viral) video, we fell in love with a salty New England surfer hurling clean insults and sage advice to an offending “whippasnappa” in the lineup. “Auntie Mo” barreled into our hearts and has since graced our feeds with her elixir of deep surf knowledge, self-deprecating humor, and truly helpful surf (and life) tips embedded in gentle ribbing. Talking to the "the whole Mo," I discovered that “Auntie Mo” is a character she created to manage her own grumpiness about the bulging surf scene and her body’s refusal to act like a grom. For the usual flow of this podcast, Mo’s story is in reverse. An accomplished surfer since youth, she is learning to bring a beginner’s stoke back to her surfing as her ability declines. The whole Mo does not disappoint! She is brilliant, compassionate, articulate, thoughtful, kind, and funny. She is also an incredible talent - writer, photographer, shaper, triathlete, and storyteller. You may be surprised to hear the accent slip away, but the heart and soul of “Auntie Mo” shine through every moment in our interview as she espouses her ultimate mission:  "Share the stoke, and spread the stoke.” But heart-forward as she is, she is no shrinking violet. She has plenty to say about how contests temporarily killed surfboard innovation, why so many people are still riding the wrong boards, and why surfers need to play not just the big notes, but the long ones. 

@waterwoman74 on IG
Waterwomanphotography on fB

Links to the Surfline posts - 

The one that started it all:  https://www.instagram.com/reel/CywQqHQxAz8/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

Wetsuit Truth Bombhttps://www.instagram.com/reel/Czy2tQAREHq/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

Video we reference that the journalist shot and Surfline edited:https://www.instagram.com/reel/C09qJLmRHSx/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

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Transcript

[00:19] Sheila: Welcome to the dropping into Power podcast where we'll be hearing stories about the transformational power of surfing from women surfers of all ages, all levels and all over. We'll hear about courage, commitment, struggles, frustration, epiphany, and of course, life transformations, large and small. I'm your host, Sheila Gallion, and I am stoked to share these conversations with these amazing women full of so much passion with all of you.

[00:56] Mo: Jeepers, the nerve of that young witnessnapper. He looks right at me, sees me going for the wave, looks right at me, takes off, rides the whole way right in front of me, squiggle pumping his little soft top with the one fin. It's a trifin set up, but it's only got one single fin in the back, about a five inch fin. Squiggling rides the whole way in front of me. Kicks out, I'm right behind him the whole way and he looks back and says, oh, sorry, I didn't know you were still there. Well, Sonny, I may be slow as a moose stuck in the march mud up to Maine, getting to my feet if and when I get to my feet. But when I do, if I do, I still know how to surf, sonny. So you watch your manners and stay out of the way. All want you, mo.

[01:54] Sheila: Aloha and welcome to the dropping into Power podcast. Well, I'm pretty excited today because I am getting to talk to you. This is going to be really kind of an unusual episode in all kinds of ways. But you know what, I didn't ask you before. I'm pretty sure you're going by Auntie Mo

[02:12] Mo: Yeah, yeah, that's how we say it up to Maine.

[02:15] Sheila: So Auntie Mo came into my consciousness probably when she came into a lot of people's consciousness, which is when a surfline video went viral. Now, I had actually previously interviewed somebody who had very clean cuss words, clean cuss outs in terms of how she dealt with the youth in the lineup. Young man, don't you talk to him. She was really funny. And so in addition to just this being such a great rant, it really stood out for me just because of the cleanness of it. And I am going to actually play this mo. When I actually did the recording, I'm going to edit it in so people can hear it that didn't hear it. But basically this viral video, I can tell you some stats on surfline itself was shared, almost had 34,000 likes. It was shared 8470 times. It has 644 comments. Most of those are tagged, so most of those are shared. And this doesn't come close to representing what really happened with this video because I shared it. Everybody I tagged shared it. Everybody I know shared it at some point in the surf world. So I don't know the real numbers. Auntie Mo's really an extraordinary water human, and just in addition, I had no idea until I started going through her feed that she's a shaper, she's an incredible photographer. And Mo, I'm going to grill you on your water knowledge in terms of surfboards, because I know that definitely everyone listening wants to know more about hydrodynamics. But anyways, I just want to say welcome, and it's so fun to have you. We still go through terrific tech challenges getting to this point. And you were just telling me the story of actually where you were on Instagram versus what's happened since then and how you kind of described, you described it that, you know, you're writing this great way, but tell the story of this video. How did this all happen?

[04:16] Mo: Well, I think I tried to analyze it myself, and it's like, why did this particular video take off? And a couple of things. I'm turning 65 next month, surfing, at least on stand up boards for, it'll be 50 years this coming summer. I really kind of started on little foamy belly boards when I was younger, but I count 1974 as my start date. And like a lot of older surfers who've been through the earlier times when, especially in New England, I'm sure in California, it's always been crowded. Hawai, they've dealt with that. But in, you know, we used to drive down the, you know, see our friends and count, know a couple of hands how many surfers there were in the area. And I think older surfers have a tendency, it's kind of a twofold issue. Their abilities tend to dwindle, and the crowds have been ever increasing. And with the advent of all the new technology, the new wetsuits, especially in New England, so it's really easy as you get older to get really grumpy. And I was trending in that direction, and I couldn't surf the way I used to. I used to be a pretty good surfer by local standards, and I didn't like the way it made me feel being grumpy all the time. I'd go out and I wouldn't have a good time, and I'd be grumpy because I couldn't perform. I'd be grumpy because I was competing with other surfers who were much younger and had more energy than me. And even when I would line up a wave and be in perfect position, there always seemed to be somebody that was either going to drop in on me or they were going to out paddle me and take the wave and just be more aggressive. And I didn't have it into me to be aggressive anymore. So I think when I made that video, I'm guessing it touched a chord with a lot of surfers because surfing has gotten so, so crowded these days. Everywhere. Everywhere on the planet you go where there's surf and there's surf. Everywhere there's an ocean or even lakes, it's crowded. The joke is everybody surfs. And I made a conscious decision that I didn't want to be that grumpy old surfer out in the lineup anymore. And I didn't want to be a grumpy person to begin with. As you get older, I work in a nursing home around elderly people, and I realized that a lot of how we get through life is based on our own attitude, and we're fully in control of our attitude. And you can choose to be grumpy or you can choose to have fun. And for me, surfing started. It was all about fun. The act itself was fun, but it was also about the people in the water around you, your friends, the locals that you know. And when I started, everybody was a character. They were all unique, individual characters. And you look out in a lineup now and they just look like a bunch of clones out there. And I'm sure everybody has their own individual personalities, but it's harder to get to know those individuals when you look out in a lineup and you see 30, 40 people out there, as opposed to maybe ten when I was at my heyday, and you got to know each one of the characters in your tribe. Anyway, I think the video touched a chord in that sense, why I decided to make that video. Well, I'm part irish, and I think sense of humor comes. It's my birthright to be full of humor. And I just thought it would be a funny little video that if people might be shocked to realize that on the day in question, when this young surfer rode the entire wave in front of me, it was literally a knee high wave. And there was only three of us in the water that day. It was me, my friend Dale, and who was a frequent co conspirator in our watery adventures, or like today on the beach. And this one young kid on a soft, you know, I've seen it before. The kid looked right at me as I was going for the wave, and it was a nice little wave, and I struggle with my pop up, as a lot of older surfers do. And I managed to get up relatively cleanly. He might have thought I wasn't going to make it. So he went, and I rode right behind him the whole way. I mean, once I'm on my feet, I can still surf pretty decent. And I kicked out right behind him. And I always do that when people drop in on me. I make sure I get right out behind him so they know I there. And he looked back with kind of the shocked look on his face, like, oh, I didn't know you were still there. What do you mean still there? Like you expected I was. It's like, listen, kid, I've been doing this a long, long time. Anyway, he apologized and everything else, and that was cool. I mean, it's knee high. Come on, you don't fight over knee high waves. And the three of us were just having fun and goofing out in the water, which kind of brought me back to how it was when I was younger with some of my friends. We would all just goof. We'd go out in the worst, crumbly, crappy, knee high, onshore, blown out. And I had a friend, my old friend, local legend here named Dick Lovell, and we used to sit up on the beach for an hour just checking the waves. And finally at 1.1 of us would look to the other and say, well, I've been out, and worse. And that would be all we needed to paddle out and get suited up, paddle out and go out. But anyway, I came in from that day at the beach, and I thought, well, I'm just going to make this funny little video for my friends. I got some followers on Instagram, and I'll just make this goofy little video. And it was mostly meant tongue in cheek. I wasn't serious. I mean, I was ranting, but I was in character ranting. And Auntie Mo was, it's not that I'm not Auntie Mo. I am Auntie Mo. Antimo is very much me. But I developed this Auntie Mo character, the longboard I currently ride. I made it ten years ago, and I wrote Auntie Mo model on it. And one of the reasons I wrote that, because even back then, ten years ago, I was still struggling with this whole being the grumpy oldster out in the lineup. And I was trying to overcome that. And I said, well, maybe I'll just be the kindly old auntie. And that idea in hawaiian culture, as I understand it, of the aunties and the uncles out in the water, they're kind of there to mentor and guide the younger surfers and that feeling of extended family, the Ohana and everything else. And kind of like the african tradition of it takes a village and it's like we're all a big family and a tribe and we all should be supporting each other instead of bickering and fighting with each other. So I came up with this character and then for a few years we went to live down on Nantucket, and I'm already rambling. It didn't take much to get me started, but we went down to live on Nantucket and I kind of miss Maine. Maine has been my spiritual home for a long time. I've lived in other places, but Maine has always been home in my heart and just kind of to make me feel more connected, missing. I came up with this character, Auntie Mo, and I would do these little videos that I would send via social media to my friends back home in Maine. And. And I would give weather reports and surf reports, stuff like that. And so I just kind of adopted this Persona and I gave an exaggerated caricature main accent, which is not meant to poke fun at the accent or the people because I adore them. And it's more of an honorific towards the people of this. So, you know, you put those two things together. The idea of an auntie being the mentor out in the, you know, being from Maine, which, let's be real in know, most people have never heard of Maine, let alone know anything about Maine and New Hampshire, too, because New Hampshire is just over the border. I literally live on a bridge that separates Maine and on the other side of a bridge that separates the two states. And I've lived in both states, so I'm kind of connected to the, we call it the seacoast area here. New Hampshire has got, I don't know, it's like 15 plus or minus miles of coastline. Maine's got considerably more. But New Hampshire has a lot of really good quality surf breaks.

[12:47] Sheila: I think it was news to a lot of people that there's that much surfing in. And I saw, I went through some of the comments and people were really asking about the accent, which I'm not from there, but I think what you really feel in that video, in addition to everything else, it's funny, but there really is just so much love in it, for lack of a better word. Like you can feel the love of surfing. You can feel this kind of mentoring, coaching done with just a lot of humor and spark but I saw some comments where people are trying to figure out your accent. One person is like, is she know there's some hilarious comments about the accent.

[13:29] Mo: Changed accents five times. And I'm like, no, I didn't. You've just never heard the main accent. The funny thing was I did feel a little bit of validation that there were some comments from people who are local to New England who know that accent, and they kind of. That it was authentic. And like I say, it's exaggerated, it's embellished. It's a little bit of a caricature. But the essence of it, I think, is honest and true. And like I say, it's meant to pay homage to New England and Maine specifically. I absolutely love where I live. I grew up in a military family. We traveled around a little bit when I was younger until my dad retired, and then we moved back to this area. And I just love it here. I haven't really traveled extensively. I've never been to Hawaii, but I've lived in other places. And I think there's a distinction between living in a place for time as opposed to just traveling to visit a place or current times. With regards to surfing, people make these quick hit and run excursions to, oh, yeah, I'm going to go catch the swell at whatever exotic location is, and then they move on, and you get nothing out of the experience other than the waves you caught.

[14:53] Sheila: That's a good point. Yeah.

[14:55] Mo: For me, it's more about getting to know everything about a region or an area or a town or whatever, or a surf spot and taking more time to settle in and get to know it. And that's always meant more to me. Maybe it's because I felt rootless as a youngster traveling around that I yearned for a place to call home. And we used to vacation at the same cottage in the same town in Agunquit, Maine, which just happens to be one of the best surf breaks not only in Maine, not only in New England, but I feel on the entire east coast it has one of the best breaks. And then there's other good quality breaks, a short drive north or south. But it just felt like a spiritual home to me, being in Maine. And whenever I was away from Maine, living either on Nantucket or in New Hampshire, I was always, like, yearning to get back to Maine.

[15:55] Sheila: We started surfing in the 70s. Where did you start surfing? Was it in Maine?

[16:01] Mo: Yeah, it was in a gunquit, Maine. My family started vacationing in the early 70s. We had a big family. There was seven of us kids. And we rented a cottage. It was supposed to be a one off. My parents thought my father had just recently come back from Vietnam and all of that. And I don't know what prompted them. Know, you'd have to ask them. And they're both gone. But they decided we were going to spend a summer in Maine, July and August. And they found a cottage, and it just happened to be in a gunquit. And we started playing in the surf, and we water people, we were doing all sorts of activities, canoes and rafts and tubes and in the ocean, riding waves on these little foamies. And that kind of coincided with, I had seen the endless summer when I was probably, I don't know, seven, eight years old when it first came out in the global distribution at the movie theaters. My older brother took me to the movie theater and I saw the endless summer, and my eyes were just a gog at the screen. I was mesmerized. I kept looking at the screen. I'm like, what seven or eight year old kid will watch a movie and look at the screen? And I got to do that.

[17:18] Sheila: Yeah.

[17:19] Mo: Kept thinking, I have to do that. And it was a few years after that that I got my first stand up surfboard. But it stayed with me and it never. And every time we came back to a gunquit, we'd go out on those little foamies. And then when I got old enough, one of my younger brothers and I, we both decided we wanted, the next summer, we're going to buy surfboards. So we saved up babysitting money because my parents weren't in those days, they sure as heck weren't going to buy us a board or wetsuits or anything else. So we both bought surfboards. We started pestering our parents. Like, day one, we got to a gunquit and we're like, when can we go get our surfboards? And we had to shop around to find them because in those days, it was only, I don't know, the surf shop. I bought it. All they had was surfboards, wetsuits, and wax. That was it. No soft goods or anything. It was just hardcore. And my brother found a used board in somebody's backyard. That's how we started. And we never looked back. The wetsuits we wore back then were old handmedown dive wetsuits, my brother's wetsuit. The zipper wouldn't even close because it was all corroded. So we took a bungee strap and wrapped it around his waist and around his chest and tied it together in a knot with bungee to hold his wetsuit.

[18:33] Sheila: Oh, that must have felt good while paddling.

[18:35] Mo: Yeah, he had the paper tails hanging down and, oh, my God, let me tell you, we used to get the worst rashes under our arms, inside of our elbows, backs of our knees, our necks. Oh, my God. It was horrible. When rash guards first came out, it's like, it was like, oh, my gosh. Nirvana we have for the rashes.

[19:01] Sheila: You have a funny auntie mo post about wetsuits, people surfing in the cold versus, you know, when you started. So, yeah, let's talk about the progression of wetsuits in your time, starting from the bungee cord till now.

[19:21] Mo: Well, that old bungee cord my brother had and mine had a working zipper, but it was a dive suit. And in those days, the basic dive suits were a quarter inch thick. And you wore these pants. They were literally pants, but they went all the way up to just halfway up your chest, under your armpits. And then you had a jacket with the front zip and then the beaver tail. But the beaver tail had these little buckles on it, but you had to leave it unbuckled because otherwise it would dig into the deck of the board. So you had that beaver tail flapping around as you were riding your waves. But we used to walk 2 miles home from the break across the beach and up over the dunes. And then we would either walk across, it was a tidal river and it was either shallow enough to walk across or we would paddle across. So it was quite a know, 2 miles through the snow, uphill, both ways kind of deal.

[20:12] Sheila: Yeah, right.

[20:13] Mo: But when they first started making surfing specific wetsuits, there was one shop in York beach, was just south of algonquic, called bikini surf shop. Interesting story there is the owner of that shop. It was an older couple. They had a daughter who was actually married to warren bolster at the time. He was a famous old surf photographer in the surfing magazines. But that's just an aside. But we bought our first wetsuits there and it's like, wow, these things are made for surfing. But really in recent times, the wetsuits are such a game changer. People don't have any clue what it used to be like that. And I made that video because I see so many people out in the water now that they don't realize what we dealt with in previous decades. And like I said in the video, my first winter suit didn't have a built in hood. It was O'Neill original and it had a nice sealed neck and it had a front zipper instead of, I mean a back zipper instead of a front zipper. So the zipper was cross shoulders, which is kind of binding and stiff. And it was measured in increments of inches, not milliliters and millimeters. And it was an 8th of an inch thick, which I did the conversion on Google one day and I'm like, oh my God, that was a three mil that I was going out in 30 plus deg water in the middle of the winter.

[21:52] Sheila: What year was that?

[21:54] Mo: Anybody would wear in that water?

[21:55] Sheila: Oh my God. Yeah. Do you remember what year? The ish, that first thickness.

[22:02] Mo: That suit came out in the later 70s because the first couple of years of me surfing, my dad was at the Pentagon, so we were still commuting back and forth from Maryland DC area. When he retired in 75, we moved back to this area, but the really good suits came out a year or two later. But even then they were too thin. O'Neill is based out of California, and I'm sorry, but California's idea of cold water is not the reality of somebody surfing in New England in the winter. And it took a while for the wetsuit manufacturers to catch up with what we were dealing with back east here in the northeast. And when I say northeast, I'm including everything from like the admitted atlantic states, from even as far south as the Carolinas, all the way up to Maine and Nova Scotia. And we get warm water in the summer, what we call warm water. But when it drops down in to us, 50 deg water is not cold yet. It's when it gets down below 50 into the 40s, which is where it's at now. And then in those days it would drop down into the low thirty s. It doesn't seem to do that as much lately. It hovers right around the 40 degree mark, sometimes dipping down as low as 37, 38. But there's a huge difference, huge difference between 38 degree water and 48 degree water or 58 degree water. And the way things evolved, I think it took a while for the manufacturers to realize that, hey, there's people surfing back east that need these suits to survive and to enjoy themselves. So they started making the suits thicker. And that was a game changer. That opened it up to people who would never even consider going in the water. And all of us more wizard and older surfers stupidly said, oh yeah, it's not that bad when you got the right suit. We should have told them realities of the way it used to be. I used to come out of the water, I would crank the heater in my car, I would sit there shivering. And that's not an exaggeration. I would be out in the water, in the lineup, and you'd first start shivering, and then when you stop shivering, that was a sign, and I researched that was a sign of hypothermia. And when your speech would start slurring again, exaggeration. When I, it's like, okay, the next step is unconsciousness and death. Maybe it's time to get out of the water.

[24:49] Sheila: So how long would you stay out in those kind of conditions in your three mil.

[24:55] Mo: But back then, after an hour, you were really cold. Okay. There's some hardcore people, they'll say, oh, yeah, I was out there for 4 hours. That's a bunch of baloney. Maybe 2 hours. But you'd have to come in and warm up, and usually you'd come back and sit in your car, and if it was really good, you'd try and warm up in the car, and then you might paddle out again. But I can remember the typical scenario in those days is coming home, pouring as much hot fluids as I could down my gullet, hot soup, hot cocoa, jumping in the shower for 20 minutes to half an hour, trying to warm up, getting out of the shower, bundling up with as many layers I could, and still sitting there shivering as the core temperature.

[25:37] Sheila: Surfing in that. So I've often told the story because I started surfing in Humboldt county in northern California, which doesn't get to you guys. It's like 47 to 54, 50. And when you say you can tell the difference between 38, 48 and 50, I believe it, because I could tell the difference between 48 and 47. Like, I would know when I walked out, the level of ache in my ankles and where I surfed. I had gone to college there in the late 80s, early ninety s, and nobody surfed. And then when I moved back in 2000, there were all these people surfing, and I'm like, what the heck? I used to just sit above this beautiful point, camel rock, and it was like my spirit home. I totally relate to what you're saying. And I would just go there when I was in a mood and cry and whatever, and the waves would crash, and it was my spot. And then suddenly there were people surfing down there, which is when I started. So I became obsessed. I just couldn't believe they were out there. I'm like, how is that possible? But it was the wetsuits. And I remember hearing about a couple of people that was surf there without wetsuits. But I started in a used four mil, which was shredded and threaded and no booties. And I would be numb in, like, 30 minutes. But I still thought that was pretty awesome. And then I got my first new four three. And then I finally got seven mil booties and gloves. But I never surfed beyond a four, which now, I mean, I don't know, five sixes to imagine that. And taking it down ten degrees and then. Oh, my God. Yeah.

[27:15] Mo: The one thing I didn't talk about in that video, because I was trying to keep it as short as possible, and I have trouble with that, is some of the ones I've done on my surfboards, I've gone way over. Part of that is just because I'm passionate about it. But I didn't talk about. Not only were you dealing with the core temperature issue of hypothermia, but I didn't mention the frostbite, too. Your fingers and your toes. Seven mil booties didn't exist in those days. Right. And five mil or go home and I would stay out in the water until I just couldn't take the pain anymore because the frostbite cold is a different type of cold than court cold. It's like a painful cold. It's not that you're shivering and slurring your speech. It's just like, this is painful. My toes and my fingers are painful. And some of the people correctly noted, and I think people on both coasts can relate to this. Coming out of a cold session, and you can't turn the key car to get in the car, and you sit here like. And you see an old man walking by, hey, can you help me open my car? I think anybody that's been in water in the 50s can relate to that kind of cold, but, yeah. So you're dealing with the hypothermia, you're dealing with the frostbite. And the seven mil booties became standard around here. Now a lot of people are wearing eight mil booties. If you have a good mil booty, it's doable. I typically will wear a liner sock, and in the warmer water, I wear just a lycra sock. When it gets colder, I'll put on a fleece line. One. Some of that is for extra warmth, but it's mostly to help facilitate getting my boots on because I'm older and stiffer and I have back issues and I have to be careful getting in and out of my wetsuit. That's one of the biggest determinants of whether I'm actually going to paddle out. It's like, is it worth the effort of getting in and out of my wetsuit? So for me personally, those lycra or fleece line socks, and I wear a long sleeve rash guard because I can slide the suit off of my shoulders and down my arms a lot easier getting out of it and getting into it as well. Nobody wears rash guards under the wetsuits anymore because the wetsuits are made to be smoother and not as restrictive. But I still have memories of walking those 2 miles back from the break to my home and getting the chafed armpits. And so when rascal guards came out, that was a game changer for us in the woods, and I've worn them under my wetsuits ever since. In the warmer months, I wear a short sleeve one under my suit, and in the winter, I wear the long sleeve one, partly because that's ingrained in me, but it's funny to me that nobody wears rash guards anymore. Even around here, they don't wear rash guards under their wetsuits.

[30:28] Sheila: Well, it's funny because I thought living in Hawaii now, that a rash guard was to prevent the rash from the wax on your board, not from your wetsuit. I didn't know that it was actually supposed to go under your wetsuit at some point, that there was a time for that.

[30:44] Mo: I started on those foamies way back when, when I was just a real young kid. We used to wear t shirts because those foamies were very abrasive. Right after 1520 minutes out in the water, your whole torso would just be all torn apart and red and sometimes to the point of bleeding almost. Of course, we loved it too much to stop. Right idea of wearing t shirts out in the water. So those were the early rash guards, I guess, but that was because the foam, because they weren't glass. It was just a slab of styrofoam, and it was very abrasive on the skin.

[31:21] Sheila: Right.

[31:23] Mo: Those old memories die hard, but the wetsuits are definitely a game changer, I think, on both coasts, but especially around here. Like I tell you, people don't realize there's ways in this area of the country, even people that are local here. I get people, acquaintances, coworkers and stuff. They ask me all the time when I tell them, I surf, and I was like, you can do that here? And I'm like, yeah, we can do that here. Because in New England, most people only go to the beach in the summertime, and the summertime is when it goes flat.

[32:03] Sheila: Ah, okay, got it.

[32:05] Mo: They only associate their frame of reference is know at best, maybe two foot crumbly waves onshore, soft breeze blowing off the, off the water. And that's their whole frame of reference. And maybe when a tropical storm comes in, if they just happen to be on the beach that day and they'll look out and say, oh, gee, look at the big waves, and, oh, are those surfers out there? But they don't associate surfing with this coast.

[32:36] Sheila: A lot of surf start then, like roughly in that area.

[32:40] Mo: The funny thing is, because I think most regions have their flatter times, and for us it's the months of maybe mid June to mid August. And then usually the tropical storms will start kicking in and my cat is coming over here. Oh, good.

[32:59] Sheila: We love cats.

[33:00] Mo: But that's typical, the tropical season with the tropical storms, and that's our first swell activity this year. And this was an anomalous year. It was the longest stretch of continuous surf that I'd ever experienced in my 50 years of surfing. But we had 40 plus days. It was probably 45, maybe even nudging 50, but at least a good solid 40 to 45 days of continuous surf. Now, it wasn't always big and exhilarating and all that, but it was consistent surf. And that's the main thing that we lack around here, is consistency. Yeah, through the middle of August, right through this time of year is fairly consistent. We're getting waves. Usually we'll have two or three days at least of waves a week. And granted, some of those days are just small, thigh high to chest high, long board days, but the surf gets pretty consistent once the winter kicks in. We get nor easters and the typical pattern for noreasters. But again, that trend has been changing. Along with the water temperatures, we seem to get more storms more frequently. But in the old days, the typical scenario was a nor easter would come up the coast. It would blow hard like it is today. The ocean would be a mess, and then the winds would switch around back around from the northwest, blow offshore all night. You wake up the next morning and you got dream waves and it's like, yay, we got real surf. But a lot of times those winds would blow so hard for all day long. Maybe a day or two later, the swell would be gone. So you get maybe two to three days of good surf, and then you have to wait maybe another week or sometimes in the wintertime we get flat spells that are just as long as the flat spells in the summer. But when the storms come in, they're pretty powerful and we get some good surfing. It's my perception, I guess, that it seems like we get swell more frequently than we used to. Like I said, granted a lot of those are longboard days, but longboard is still surfing. Hey, if you're paddling, you're surfing waves anymore.

[35:21] Sheila: Want to, I really want to hear about that. That part of the journey for you is one of the things we chatted about on instagram that was interesting because a lot of people, when I started this podcast, a lot of the people that I interview are people who are new to surfing and who are starting at all different ages. The latest being starting at 67, starting in your 50s, starting in your 40s, starting in your thirty s. And part of it is because generally the subject of this podcast is how is surfing transform your life? And most of us don't have quite as much transformation younger in life. So a lot of the people I've interviewed have had just a little more story. But what was interesting to me about your story is that you have been an accomplished surfer and now you're facing this humbling, challenging, just onslaught of, what's the word I'm looking for degradation of your surfing in this way. And you talked about it in the beginning of how you even found this Persona and how you're dealing with it. So yeah, I'd love to hear more about your journey, of how you're managing.

[36:29] Mo: A lot of it comes down to what I said before about attitude. And I don't know if you saw the latest surf line profile they did. A local girl who just got out of journalism school did a profile of me. She followed me around for half a day with a GoPro camera and she got some shots and interviewed me all day long. And then Surfline edited it down and they just posted it yesterday. As a matter of fact, I did see that.

[36:56] Sheila: And both the video and the text is really compelling.

[37:01] Mo: It was a struggle that day because the surf was pretty good that day. And the first place we went to was my home break, which the wind was not quite the right direction. And I knew it would be a struggle to get any rideable waves. It would be a struggle for her to hold position in the water with the GoPro to get any. So we went to a more sheltered beach. But the surfer is still pretty good that day. And I was so nervous because I'm like, please don't let me cook. Please don't let me cook because my head, I'm still that surfer. And it's kind of like, oh, I used to be good, so I can't let anybody see me be a kook? I think I finally found the key to getting over myself, and I talk about that a lot in some of my videos. It's get over yourself. Don't take yourself so seriously. And I think that's important because I think that's one of the reasons why there's so much tension and friction out in the water, because there's so many people out in the water that take themselves too seriously. And the whole goal of surfing is to have fun. And if you look really closely in the two waves that she captured of me riding waves, that I caught a few other waves, but they put two waves in that piece. And the first one, you can see me stumbling and bumbling and looking like just the total kook that I am sometimes trying to get up to my feet. And once I got to my feet, I had kind of gotten, my timing was off. So I was behind the section and I kind of blew the wave. But if you look real closely, as I'm stumbling and bubbling and struggling to get up to my feet and trying not to fall on camera, I just started laughing. And I was laughing at myself. That ability to be self deprecating and just make fun of yourself, it's like, don't take myself so seriously. And that was, like, the key that unlocked my attitude of just having more fun with this experience. It's like I'm never going to be the surfer I once was. But what's the goal? The goal is to have fun. So turn that frown upside down, clown. Have fun. So I laughed through that first wave. And the funny thing is, we went in, she actually got cold because she was treading water and I wasn't wearing a leash. And I lost my board after one wave. And she went in to help retrieve it, and she was visibly shivering. She was ready to call it a day. And I was thinking, I still didn't get a good one. And I said, well, can we try just one more wave? I promise I'll get one quickly. And so, to her credit, she did some jumping jack to warm up. And we both went back out, and I was so zoned in. Maybe that's the old me that took over of like, I'm going to make this wave and I'm going to do it cleanly and I'm going to do it right. And I did. And it almost shocked me. It's like, oh, I got up to my feet smoothly or relatively smoothly for some my age with all my physical infirmities, and I rode the wave and I'm like, okay, so people can see that I'm not a coop, that there's still vestigial remnants of what I used to be, which I hope is conveyed in that one fleeting image of me riding a wave. It's like, yeah, she can still surf. And obviously she once did silt. She was an accomplished surfer of sorts, not world class by any stretch of the imagination. But a big part of it was just changing my attitude, not getting so down. I mean, there was times I'd be out in the water, and I'm sure some of my friends could attest to it. I'd miss a wave, and I'd be out there swearing and muttering and not having a good time. It's like, what are you doing out here? So it's just changing the attitude. And the other part of that, know, I talked before about the characters that were around when I first started. Everybody was very unique, individual personality. And a lot of it was. I think some of it's a New England thing. We are constantly putting each other down. We're sarcastic. We're always on the lookout for somebody's head getting too big. So even with this now, people are sticking a pin in my balloon. Don't get too full of yourself right now, and it'll be over, and then you'll be back to your usual self. And it's like they're poking fun at me, but in a good natured, in a loving way, because they care about me and I care about them. And that's how it should be. That's to me, the essence and spirit of surfing is the tribe is so much larger now, but within the larger tribe, there's smaller pockets of you and your friends. And like Barrett says, in know, what matters is your know, you go out with your friends and you have a good time. And it seems to me, over a good portion of my life, at least bookending the beginning of my surfing life. And now I'm in the waning years. I had it at the beginning, and I'm getting back to it now. The middle, when I was a much better surfer and I took myself too seriously, was in some ways not as much fun. Interesting talking story with your friends in the parking lot is as big a part of the experience as what you do out in the water.

[42:50] Sheila: Yeah, it really is. And, I mean, it's probably why, just riffing on this, that when somebody witnesses your wave, when you get that moment, and maybe you didn't even surf it the best, but it was just that moment when you get that and somebody whoops for you or cheers for you or whatever, or laughs at you. I do spectacular wipeouts. I do a lot of somersaults. But there is something when you have that, and it makes the moment last so much longer. It's indelible. It's a whole thing that happens when it's just in your own mind and it's over and over again. Then you might have a really beautiful, glorious moment, but it's kind of more focused on. It might be focused on connection or. Yeah, I finally did that bottom turn just right. But there's a lightness that you're talking about. There's a lightness, and it is really hard to cultivate with the people closing in and there being so many more people. So how different. You said you went from a crowd of ten to 30. Is that what you're looking at now?

[43:50] Mo: Yeah, I mean, the crowds, depending where you go. And I was as guilty as anybody else. And being a photographer, I take pictures, and sometimes some of my, even my friends are not that crazy about me shooting some of the better breaks on the better days, because they're like, keep it on the down low. We don't want everybody coming here. And I'm like, my main break, it's no secret, and there are no secrets left. I saw a video the other day of this company that's putting out surfing mounts for the entire east coast. And then I realized they had one for the west coast, they had one for Hawaii. And there are these maps that point out all the spots. And I'm like. And I'm thinking to myself, like, wow, you better never go to some of those locations. And I look at the websites and stuff that talk about, like, I can look at local surf breaks here, and I see the write ups to get people who are coming from outside the area. Oh, this break is like this, and it breaks on this kind of swell and this kind of wind and everything else. And most of the time they're like, maybe 50% accurate. My main break, it's kind of like the Malibu of the east coast. There have always been crowds there. In the 70s, there wasn't a lot of us young people doing it, but when the 80s came around, a lot of people got into it, and then the 90s came around and it got even more popular. And then basically, towards the end of the 70s, early 80s, every time you paddle out there, there's a crowd, but not always. And I lived close enough to that break that I could check it on a daily basis. And I found a lot of times when the crowds were minimal. And there's spots around here. It wasn't until recent years. Recent, I say the last 1015 years that I started surfing in a lot of breaks that I never used to surf before, simply because I could go there. It's like, here's the perfect dichotomy. That's my dog. Sorry.

[46:01] Sheila: It's okay.

[46:02] Mo: Perfect dichotomy is my main break. I'm very attached to it. I feel like I'm a local there. It's my break. And come hell or high water, I'm not going to give it up for anybody. And I will put up with. I go out there and I might not catch any waves. I might catch one or two waves the whole session, but I'm going to continue to keep being a presence there. Just so people know, old Auntie mo out at that spot, she's going to be here, and you better keep an eye out. But to counterbalance that, there's a few spots I go to where it's never crowded. And they might not be the best breaks, but it's kind of like I can go to them and feel like, okay, you don't have to eat, you can just relax, you can take the waves that you want. You don't necessarily have to outmaneuver everybody else in the water. So it gives me the balance between the two of the hyper agro adrenaline paddle battling or the more Zen moments where I'm just sitting out there and it's like, here comes three or four wave set and I can pick any one of them that I want. And I think it's important that people seek that out because around here, spots that were never surfed before, we have some slab breaks around here in Maine because nobody ever used to do that thing. And now that slab surfing is a big deal. Turns out Maine is predominantly rocky coast. There's quite a few slabs around here. We even had one of our hurricane swells this past summer where a couple of pros from New York came up and towed into a slab. That's down in New Hampshire. And that was the first time I'd ever witnessed that I'd seen waves at that break before. But it breaks like a quarter mile out to sea on this reef. And it's pretty sketchy out there, but they were towing into it and they were getting these bombs and I took some photos of it and it's like, wow, we're legit now. We got pros towing into our slab. That's righteous.

[48:09] Sheila: So I know you don't have a crystal ball. But do you see this fading away at all, or do you see surfing staying at this peak? Because it did peak before and die out?

[48:22] Mo: That's an interesting. Because exactly as you're asking the question, you kind of answered it. I saw this boom in the 80s, but as the 80s progressed, at least in this area, I don't know about other areas, but in this area, it boomed and then it faded. And then the 90s came and it started to boom a little bit again, but it wasn't a big boom, and then it faded. The worst thing in the 90s was twofold, and I think this is a worldwide phenomenon in one regard, that everybody was riding the wrong surfboards. Everybody thought they were going to surf like Kelly, and they were all on these little rockered out potato chip boards, and they were sub 18 inches wide, 62 flip tip thruster, barely a quarter inches thick. And if you're an 180 pound guy wearing five mil a wetsuit, that board just doesn't make sense. Not in shoulder high New England waters in the middle of the winter, but everybody riding those boards on the flip side of that. And this might be just a New England phenomenon. The 90s drove me absolutely crazy because everybody started riding long boards for a while, but to my view, they were riding them merely as a crutch to get into the waves sooner because they couldn't physically compete. They weren't competent enough surfers to catch waves on short boards. So everybody started riding long boards. And for a while, I felt like the last holdout on a short board, I couldn't catch any waves because they're catching waves 2030 yards further out than me. And I'd have a wave all lined up and I'm like, okay, this one's mine. And then some kook on a long board would glide into it and then just stand there and pose, and they wouldn't surf the wave. They would just stand there and I'm like, that's just a wave catching tool. If you're going to surf a longboard, at least surf the longboard the way long be ridden. Don't just use it to catch waves. But we went through that in the wrong short boards, the long board thing, but that kind of faded out. And I think I can't really put a finger on when the wetsuits made the really big change in the 2000s. Early two thousand s. And the other phenomenon, and I don't begrudge the local shops that are doing this, but the surf lessons, too.

[50:56] Sheila: Yeah, for sure.

[50:57] Mo: They're ubiquitous and part of me again, going back to that grumpy side is, do I begrudge them? And it's like, surfing is incredible. Why should it only be limited to me? Isn't that kind of me, to think that I want to keep everybody out of the sport? It's an amazing experience. And just like we are all in control of our own attitudes, surfing is a beautiful thing and if we all approach it with the right attitude, I think my parents in the day would have said it sounded really trite, but I think it can help change people's perceptions in a larger sense. There's less to be learned from surfing and realizing the connectedness that we all have and not taking yourself so seriously, being a little bit more altruistic towards your fellow surfers and not going out there and feeling like you got to catch every wave that comes through and start sharing more and having fun, making it a fun experience, goofing and riffing with your friends out in the water. I'm not saying that it's not valuable to push the performance end of things, but surfing, as far as I understand it, in ancient hawaiian culture, it was a whole village thing. Everybody surfing. When the surf was up, the whole village would go and everybody was welcome and that was that. And now it's like we went through the whole localism thing, which is pretty much gone. And there's people that bemoan that. Back then we had rules and there was etiquette and everything else. And now nobody knows the rules, nobody knows the etiquette.

[52:49] Sheila: It is a really tricky, it's sort of a whole new world of trying to explore on all these different sides. And definitely, I mean, there's an enormous surge of women surfing, huge surge of women surfing, and a lot of those women are doing it in community, like with that intention. But then they come up because I've talked to a lot of women and you come up against this place in yourself where you also want to progress because it's such a difficult thing to get any better at. So that part of yourself just bubbles up whether you like it or not. And that part of you that has fought, especially for those of us that have been surfing a little longer that didn't have the coaching and the YouTube and this and the that, then we can get a whole attitude like, I'm not a great surfer, but I paid my dues and nobody told me. Well, it's probably just a balance of being human at this point and having so many people on the planet and resources. It's the scarcity of waves, it's all of that stuff coming up. And how do you, and there's the people you just don't like, like they're out there, but you're just like, I don't like you. I don't like your vibe. You paddled out and you just affected my session because you exist. And then you know it's me, not you. I know it's me, not you, but all of that stuff coming up. And so I think these dialogues are so important. Like, etiquette is important for safety, it's important for respect. But at the same time, you made fun of yourself and this kid on this 1ft wave, right, or two foot wave. I had it happen to me years ago in Santa Cruz. This guy fought me over a six inch wave. I was like, what the heck? But it's dialogue. It's all we can do is keep talking about how do we find, how do we poke fun of ourselves for being the competitive monsters we are, but also mentor with some respect. And it's just finding this balance. Yeah.

[54:40] Mo: And I think for elders in the serve community, it's important to, we're the ones that can bring back that ethos of what this experience can and should be. A couple of things that you said, number one, the performance end of things. Surfing is without question, in my view. And I played a lot of sports in my life. I ditched most of them when I started surfing, but I picked up a lot of them again later on when I realized that surfing wasn't going to keep me fit around here in New England because we don't get surf often enough. So it's like you better develop other interests, which I think is a good, you know, don't just be so zoned in on one thing, the surfing thing. Develop other interests, have other passions. But it's very difficult. Surfing is hard to learn, and the older you are, the harder it is to learn. And you get to that point where you're an intermediate surfer and you do want to progress, you do want to get better. And in some ways, I liken that, too. Like a martial art. If you take up a martial art, it's a lifelong process of trying to get better. And when it comes to surfing, I think the lifelong process aspect of it is learning how to accommodate your dwindling abilities with grace. And that's a thing that runs through my mind now, trying to be more graceful out there as far as how I approach the whole experience and how I am around others. And like I say, it's a conscious decision do I want to be the old grump out in the lineup, or do I be the one? Do I want to be Auntie Mo? Right. I've had many titles in my life. I coached soccer for 25 plus years, and I wore that title of coach very proudly because I took it seriously. I felt my job as a coach is to mentor people, to teach them what I know. And I don't coach soccer anymore, but I have a lot of surfing knowledge, and why not convey that to a younger generation and give them a better experience? Another example of the tribalism and part of it's our culture, where we all got our phones in front of our face and nobody's connecting with each. It's, you don't go to the coffee shop to hang out with your friends and just chat. I was watching this documentary on the irish pubs over in Ireland, and it was a documentary, and they went around to all these different pubs, and that was one of the things they talked about. And these oldsters that are sitting on the same bench that they've been sitting on for 40, 50 years, drinking their guinness, and they said, I don't really watch much tv. I don't spend any time on the computer or the phone. I come to the pub to talk with my mates, and we've gotten away from that. And like I said, when I started surfing, I knew everybody out in the water, and we talked and we chatted and we goofed and we riffed and we'd probably spend more time up in the parking lot just talking story. And there was more of a sense of community with it. And one of the ways of getting some of that back is just smile, talk to people that, you know, one of the problems that we have, and it's not really a problem, we make it a problem. And I'm sure this is common to most locales in the surfing world, but here in New England, one of the influxes that we've had over the last 20 years or so is we get a lot of surfers coming down from Quebec because Quebec is up in Montreal, in greater Quebec area. It's a six hour drive for them just to get to the coast. That's a huge commitment for them, but they make it. But one of the issues we have is when they come. And now with the advent of all the websites to check the swells, everybody knows when there's going to be a swell and they know where it's going to break and what the winds are going to do, and they show up a lot of times in these big sprinter vans, and five or six of them will pile out and it's like, instant crowd.

[59:15] Sheila: Oh, wow.

[59:17] Mo: So there's some friction between the local surfers and this influx of surfers coming from Quebec primarily, but also other locations. Now, in recent times, we're getting surfers come from other states and stuff. The people from Quebec, there's a language barrier there as well. But I have found when I make the time to interact with them one on one, and rather know, I see a group of five or six of them piling out of a sprinter van and I was like, oh, jeez, an instant crowd. But if I see one or two of them in the parking lot and I chat them up and they're just stoked surfers. Like we are trying to have fun, and they're making a huge commitment. Six hour drive just to get to the coast, six hour drive back. They usually come down for the weekend. They spend the weekend in their vans. You got to give them credit for that. But we kind of hold them at a distance and we don't interact with them so much. And I think that's part of it. Smile at people, talk to people. There's so many glum looking, serious faces out in any lineup you go into.

[01:00:25] Sheila: For sure that's true, because the only thing it's going to change is how it feels in the water.

[01:00:35] Mo: Yeah.

[01:00:36] Sheila: It's the only thing it's going to change because people are on their mission. They're going to do what they're going to do so we can just make it better. And it's, oh, I'm as guilty as anybody. I mean, oh, my gosh, I have to talk to myself all the time, and I have a little spot I can paddle to where I'm alone a little more, and then I can get my little moment in, and then I'm ready to just make sure that I'm like, yeah. Because it's really just you that's suffering. I mean, really, you can make everybody suffer, but you're really suffering yourself. I want to ask you so many more things I want to ask you, but I know, I think we've been yaking a little while. I want to ask you because of your expertise of shaping, because I was really fascinated. I started watching your board ones, and I'm somebody that has a really hard time picturing hydrodynamics. So this obviously could be a whole podcast in and of itself. So I'm going to try and target a question or two, but, okay, let's just say, I mean, the bulk of the people listening to this podcast, we definitely have a lot of longboarders and some amazing people who really put in the commitment, learning how to work, really surf their longboard, stay in the pocket, do all the stuff, and then definitely people who are transitioning or who are surfing shorter boards, they're really trying to so maybe say intermediate surfer. So let's talk about it. I mean, in the wave, of course, makes every difference, but let's talk about the difference, say, between harder rails, softer rails. What do those channels do? And tails? That's probably way too much already.

[01:02:23] Mo: Well, let me give a broader view. I talked about the surfers that were riding the flipped out, little thin, narrow boards in the, how they worked for the bulk of surfers. And I think if you talk to anybody who's got any sense of history, they will admit to that, that those boards, it was such a stagnant time in surfboard design. A lot of what we deal with in current times with surfboard design, and that's one thing I'm hoping to touch on when I go over some of my other boards. A lot of the design thinking was all geared towards what works in the contest. And 99% of us don't surf in contest. I don't know, maybe in other locales, everybody's into contests, but around here, nobody surfs in contest. I don't mean absolutely nobody, but the boards were designed for contests. But in the early days of pro surfing, most of the contest surfing was done in small, gutless waves. Huntington beach had a contest every year in California, and it was this know, outside sandbar with this soft spot in the middle. And that's where the Huntington hop maneuver came about. Know, they're just basically trying to keep the board moving so they can connect to the inside section and get one more little turn or one more little lip bash off it. And it was so aesthetically displeasing to the eye. But they were surfing for points, and most of us aren't surfing for points. That martial arts arts aspect of trying to get better. And to me, I talked a little bit about it, about the flow. It's really apparent when I'm photographing surfers, and I can see the surfers loading up the move. I can see they're like, okay, I got to give it a couple of pumps, and then I'm going to go and I'm going to hit that lip. Bam. And I see it coming and I'm like, snap. Okay, I got the big lip bash. That was rad. And a lot of times they fall or they blow the wave or whatever, but it's like I've got the timing down where I was joking with my friend Dale earlier today. It's like a good photographer can make anybody look good for a thousandth of a creative composition cropping timing, you can make somebody look good. But what happened before and after the wave isn't as readily apparent. And for me, surfing has always been more of an artistic endeavor. It's a dance, if you will. And when you talk about the arts, my wife is a singer. And it's not just the big notes that you hit in the song. It's the flow between those big notes. And in surfing, I feel it should be the same way. It's how do you flow and connect? Those know, you watch old dancers like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and how they floated across the floor, and then they would do this big thing, but it wasn't big and flashy. It's just like if you blink, you would almost miss it because it was so fluid. And then you go back and realize, oh, my God, she just kicked her leg up over her head. But it wasn't like she loaded it up and she did like a gymnastic tumbling routine, and bang. Then she hit that big move. That's where I come from with my surfing philosophy. One of my favorite surfers was a local surfer here. He lives out in the ranch in California now. And to this day, I've never seen anybody number one was that tuned into the waves and was just so fluid. When I would try and take pictures of him, though, I never really got a good dynamic picture of him because a lot of it was about his flow, and he was just beautifully aesthetic to watch him surf. But when it comes to surfboards, going back to that issue of the stagnation of the think, in some ways, it's the greatest time to be involved with surfing and surfboard design, because people are experimenting again with. There was a lot of experimentation when I first started because it was just after the shortboard revolution and in the, everybody's trying everything, and a lot of them were dogs, but some of it worked. Some of them had little elements that were interesting and intriguing. But when the contest surfing started, they discarded all that. The first one that came along was Mark Richards with his twin fin. It's like, oh, my God. Suddenly single fins were obsolete. But not everybody could ride a twin fin. Mark Richards could, and he won four championships, but not everybody could ride it as well. So Simon Anselson tacked on a third fin and it's like now he had that stability and that power, and everybody started riding those and twin fins faded away. Well, nowadays you see twin fins, you see trifins, you see quads, you see long know all the different designs, and everybody's playing around with all the different elements, and they're bringing old stuff back and combining new stuff with it. And to me, that's very refreshing because people are revisiting designs that I think were discarded too quickly, but they're blending in new, modern approaches with them. And on the other part of it, you asked about the channels and the tails and stuff. Let's be real, a lot of it doesn't really make that much difference to the average surfer. You might ride a board that you really like and it's like, wow, this board rides great and you'll have no idea why it feels the way it does to you. And somebody could try and explain it to you and you're not really going to understand. But like I said, everything is valid. Everything works. I was joking around. One day I pulled up a cutting board, and you can surf that. You can use it as a hand plane, you could use it as a pipo. It all works. And those foamies that I started on, it was a slab of styrofoam, maybe about 16 inches wide. It had these channels. That was the weirdest thing. It had these channels in the bottom, which probably gave it a little directional stability, but it was just a slab of foam, and it worked as long as you're using it in the way it was intended. I think maybe professional surfers, but sometimes I think they're full of themselves and fool themselves into thinking that they can tell the difference between an 8th of an inch here and a quarter of an inch there. I don't think their senses are that finely tuned to tell such nuanced details. And that's one of the problems in the boards, got so hyper refined, and it's like they'd bring the board back to their shaper and it's like, well, yeah, it went really well on my reentries, but maybe take an 8th of an inch off the nose there and it's like, really, dude, come on. When you look at surfing from, like the 80s when trifins were at their heyday, as opposed to the boards from the 90s, there's not too much difference other than thickness and width.

[01:09:59] Sheila: Okay.

[01:10:02] Mo: And the surfers, if you watch the surfers riding the waves, they're not surfing a heck of a lot different. Despite those changes in the board configurations and designs, the actual surfing is pretty much the same. I break it into broader. You have longboard surfing, but even in longboard surfing, you have a difference between high performance longboarding or old school walk the nose, toes over, that sort of thing, which I prefer. If you're going to surf a longboard, be fluid and artful about it. But shortboard surfing all comes down. And the one trend I'm not a fan of right now is I see everybody riding these sub six foot boards, which some surfers can ride them and they can ride them well. But when I see somebody paddling out on their five, six little stubby fish, and the surf is one and a half times overhead, if you can make that, fine. But to me, a bigger wave demands a longer arc, a longer rail line. So you could draw out those turns, the little squiggly turns. I'm not a fan of squiggly turns, as you might have noticed.

[01:11:20] Sheila: I sort of guessed that. Well, you have a great. There's another one of your videos where it's an auntie mo, which is about hubris, and says, don't be so prideful. Get yourself a bigger board. When you're in a big water, get a serious board. It kind of sounds like what you're saying is, give yourself enough flotation, really. Especially if there was one thing to say to an intermediate surfer wanting to surf a shortboard, what would be the for female intermediate service surfer trying to surf a shortboard? What's your best advice?

[01:11:59] Mo: Okay, so it's really hard because most of the boards I make are for my own use. And one of the benefits of making my own boards is I can always tailor the boards for me. What's going to for me in the specific waves that I'm riding? People say, I've got 13 boards in my quiver right now. And everybody says, why do you need so many boards? I'm like, well, how many clubs does a golfer need in their golf bag? Right in agreement with only your driver. No, they're all for specific purposes. And when you build your own boards, you have that luxury of being able to tailor different boards for different situations, different breaks. It's a little bit harder. And I have made a few boards for customers over the years. One of the first things I always do is ask them a bunch of questions. I ask them a bunch of questions before we even talk about what kind of board they want, because a lot of times they come in with an idea and they saw somebody with a board that looked good under their arm, or they saw them pulling, moving, they want to do that. And I always ask them, I visually look at them, how tall are you? How much do you weigh? Do you look like you're athletic or are you not? And I'll even ask them, do you consider yourself athletic or not really that athletic? Because that makes a big difference. That's why the pros can make those little rocket out boards work, because they're extremely good athletes.

[01:13:28] Sheila: Right.

[01:13:29] Mo: And I think even with the pros, a lot of times the boards they use and work against them, but they're going to do what they're going to do. I would rather speak to the everyday surfer, how big are you? How athletic are you? And the next question is, how much experience do you have? How long you've been surfing? If you've been surfing a year or two and you're trying to upgrade from that seven, eight foot pop out board that you got, okay, that's good. That's a good progression. You want to upgrade to something, but let's not go overboard. Maybe let's not go from that seven, eight foot pop out to a five eight quad little disc. That's not going to work for you and you're not going to have fun and you're not going to be happy. And I talk to people all the time about boards that they've had that they wanted at the time, but then when they found out that they couldn't make them work, they discarded them, sold them, whatever, and they moved on to something else. So I think most average surfers should be on what we call mid length boards. Now, 20 years ago, they were derisively called fun boards. So every board that was between maybe seven to 8ft was called a fun board. Isn't that the idea? Now, the criteria for what's considered a mid length is basically anything over 6ft, which I don't consider 6ft a mid length board, necessarily. Yeah, it depends on the shape and the design. Like, I showed my 69, which is every bit as much a mid length type board. It's kind of classic of what's currently in vogue right now, mid length, but it's a little bit wider. Width makes a big difference. You can go shorter if you go wider, but like I say, back in the 90s when people were like, the boards were ridiculously narrow and there was no flotation whatsoever. But I think most surfers would be best on, like, around a seven foot board. Seven, eight foot board. You can still make boards in that range that are still going to be highly maneuverable and the added bonus is, if you don't have a lot of money for a lot of boards, you can make those boards work in everything from knee high to double overhead.

[01:16:08] Sheila: This is really kind of out of the blue, but I have to because I went to your instagram. You've been at this for a while, and there was a time that you were a triathlete. You're a bicyclist, so there was a haiku. I found in your test that I have to read a haiku that it said, headwind. I hate you. You crush my will to ride on. I pray for your death. I just kind of pop question, do you happen to have any surf haikus?

[01:16:41] Mo: I haven't done that. I'm actually working on something right now that I want to make a video of. I don't want to divulge it. It's a take on another piece of literature, but rewrite it in surfing specific. I am still a triathlete. One of the things, when I realized that surfing wasn't going to keep me in shape, I took up triathlon back in the 80s when it was originally popular. And then I stopped for 30 some years. And then I had a friend pass away from breast cancer about eight years ago. And it had always been in the back of my mind that I had done all these triathlons, but I never did an iron man. And so when my friend passed away, I wanted to do something to honor her. And I thought, well, I never did an iron man. Why don't I do an iron man as a tribute to her? But it wasn't only as a tribute to her. I mean, let's be real. It was partly for me, too, because I felt like it was something I had left unfinished. And part of that has to do with as far as my surfing journey goes, there's lots of things I felt I have not realized that were old golds of mine. Like, I always wanted to go surf Jeffrey's Bay because that long point break, it's similar to my home break, only on a much better scale. My home break is good on good days, but it's not world class like Jeffrey's is. And of know, the original impetus for me was endless summer know Cape St. Francis, so I always wanted to go there. And then, of course, every surfer wants to go to Hawai. I've never been to Hawaii. I've never been to Jeffrey's Bay. I've been out to California once, and that was years and years know. So I felt like somebody asked me earlier about writing a book and I'm like, well, it's funny you should say so, because I'm a writer as well, and I've written four novels, all of them unpublished, three of which I'm pretty proud of. The other one's garbage. But it was my first novel, and most first novel supposed to be garbage. It's actually what I went to school for. And besides surfing, writing has been my passion. But I've been writing as much as it's important to me as breathing. And for most of my adult life, I've been serious about writing. Just haven't realized that validation of having my big, great american novel published. And that's a tough pill to swallow when you get to your later years and you realize, gee, that was a goal of mine from way back when. So you combine that writing passion with a goal unrealized, and my surfing goals unrealized. Triathlon was a little bit more accessible. So I'm like, yeah, let's do an iron path.

[01:19:51] Sheila: Right on. Did you do it or are you training for it?

[01:19:55] Mo: What's that?

[01:19:56] Sheila: So have you done it, or are you training for it?

[01:19:59] Mo: No, I did it a few years ago. I did it when I was 62. I'm turning 65 this year. And I went to Lake Placid, New York, which was the site of a couple of different Olympics, and I did the race. I made a ton of mistakes because I had never done a race that distance, obviously, but I did it, and it took me almost all day. I only made the cut off by 17 minutes. They give you 17 hours to do it. But one of the issues I had that day, amongst all the other issues I had, was I had some real bad bone on bone arthritis in my knee. And my knee kind of locked up early in the day, and it made it a struggle not only with cycling, but then the running afterwards. And I knew by the time I finished that race, it's like I blew my knee out playing soccer years ago. And up to that point, I had had six surgeries on that knee or five surgeries on that knee. I've had six total knee surgeries, one on the other knee. But I knew after I finished the race, it's like I was happy that I finished it up. Like, damn, my knee really held me back a lot. And so I figured I would address the knee issue, and I went and had partial knee replacement last year, and I spent most of this last year and a half recovering from that and starting to train for a second iron man in July. I'm going back to Lake Placid part of that is because the competitive side of me is I can do better. It'd be kind of cool at my age, 65, to do an iron man again. And the other part of it's like, I just think it's kind of cool to say, two times Iron man, I'd.

[01:21:46] Sheila: Be blown away by one. Well, we'll wait for all the new divulgence that are coming up, and then I'll put this in the notes, of course, but it's waterwoman, 74, on Instagram and then on Facebook. Water woman photography on Facebook. Because there's so many. You are a renaissance woman. So many talents. But thank you so much for talking today. It was really awesome. You're just an all around kind of spectacular.

[01:22:20] Mo: Know, if I could just say one last thing. Share the stoke. Spread the stoke. That's my mission right now.

[01:22:28] Sheila: I love it.

[01:22:30] Mo: You're not happy with where you are. Change your attitude. It's all in your control. Don't blame anybody else or any circumstance. It's all in your control. I've been through a lot of stuff in my life and had some really hard times. I lost a house to foreclosure. I lived in the main winters for four winters with no heat. I went through the summers with no electric or water. And somehow I persevered and survived it all. And I came out the other side just like coming out of that barrel you didn't think you were going to make out of. And here I am. And I'm happy to be alive. I'm happy to be vibrant and able to do the things I do. I work with elderly people who. There's so much that they can't do. And I'm around suffering on a daily basis. And the fact that I can still do all the things that I do, it's a source of joy for me. And rather than being grumpy about, I tell my residents this all the time, don't lament what you can no longer do. Celebrate the things you still can do.