The following essay, How (Not) to Buy a Board on Craigslist, is part of the first chapter of Surfing the South; it is featured here with the permission of the author.
Buying a board on Craigslist in the best of circumstances is a fool’s errand. Sellers flake. They promise to meet you at the most inconvenient time in a distant location, maddeningly lost in the one percent of North America that Google has yet to map. More often than not, they sell the board twenty minutes before you arrive to some dude for $5 more than you were offering. Or maybe they give you the old bait and switch. The beautiful picture of the pristine, hand-shaped board that you thought you were buying morphs into a dinged-up beater that MacGyver fixed with duct tape and chewing gum back in 1987. If those are the normal problems of local Craigslist commerce, imagine the complications of buying on-line from 1500 miles away.
This particular attempt to buy a used log on Craigslist occurred in Houston at the beginning of a 2300-mile surf trip with my daughter through the American South. But arranging to buy (or even see) a board in Texas from my home base in Northern California proved nearly impossible. Several boards I made offers on fell through before I left San Francisco. Still, there were two possibilities.
One of the Craigslist prospects was a beautiful 9’6” longboard made by a reputable Florida shaper. There were a few red flags. The guy selling the board lived forty miles northwest of Houston, the opposite side of town from the beach. More ominously, he would take cash for the board, but he preferred to trade it for a four-wheeler, welding equipment, or guns. Perhaps you are hearing the banjo line from Deliverance. Or maybe you’re the person in the horror movie audience that screams out, “No, don’t do it!” right before a likable character volunteers to investigate strange noises in the basement of a rented lake house. Look, I went to college in Texas. I wasn’t too worried about buying a board from an adrenaline-fueled hobby welder and gun collector. Then again, I had my daughter with me. It might not be the smartest move to drive to a nondescript Houston suburb with hundreds of dollars in cash. Luckily, the guy didn’t return my calls. He later explained via text that he slept through our meeting. The board (bait?) was still listed on Craigslist two months later.
I had really been hoping to get the first board even if I did have to trade some guns to get it. The second option looked much less appealing. Both boards measured 9’6”, but the similarity ended there. The first prospect had been shaped with care for performance—relatively narrow and thin with a nice bit of rocker. If that board had been a naval ship, it would have been a destroyer, large and fearsome, but still maneuverable. The inspiration for the second board—wide, thick, and flat for ease of paddling—must have been an aircraft carrier. Actually, this is unfair to carriers. A better comparison would be to a school bus … if a school bus could float. To make matters worse, this board was painted the same exact color as a school bus. That obnoxious yellow paintjob supposedly makes buses safer for their passengers. This board seemed to be painted for the safety of anyone unlucky enough to be surfing nearby.
The board had been made at Bingo’s, a surf shop and café on the Gulf Coast not known especially for quality boards or food. One on-line review suggested that better eats and gear could be had down the street at a place called Kook’s, which has since closed. Bingo’s soldiers on.
With all of this advance research, I had low expectations for the Bingo Board. Part of me secretly hoped that the owner would continue my perfect record of Craigslist failures. Just when I had resigned myself to buying a used board from a shop in Galveston, my phone buzzed with an incoming text. It was about the Bingo Board.
“I should be home by 5:00pm and am happy to show it to you. Would you like to set a location in order to try and counter my potential ambush murder or just come by the house?”
I figured a crazed Craigslist murderer probably wouldn’t lead with that, so we agreed to meet at his house in Friendswood, southeast of Houston. Friendswood is such a vanilla suburb that Kirk, the seller, warned me not to speed unless I “look like Flanders” from the Simpsons. Coincidentally, the older I get, the more I resemble Ned Flanders, minus the awesome paintbrush mustache. My daughter and I sped through Friendswood in our rented SUV. No cops even gave us a second glance.
Kirk turned out to be a former military guy about my age with tons of surf experience not only on the Gulf Coast, but around the world. In his garage, Kirk had an impressive quiver of boards. There was a bagged 8’0” fun-shape in the front of the rack. I wanted it sight unseen. Nope, that was his favorite board, not for sale. Sadly, I watched Kirk move a series of nice boards out of the way until he unearthed the Bingo Board from its shameful place at the back of the rack. The Bingo belonged to his brother. Its leash had snapped during an ill-fated session, sending the board careening toward some rocks. The boulders beat on the Bingo Board like a gang of mobsters in matching tracksuits and unnecessarily heavy gold chains, leaving the board pock marked with pressure dings, but miraculously almost water tight. These boulders clearly knew what they were doing. Kirk patched the worst one of the dings, a gash on the right rail, and threw it up on Craigslist, hoping some fool would buy it.
The fool told Kirk about his crazy plans for the southern surf odyssey. Kirk nodded noncommittally. He exhibited the practiced poker face of a pro with a sucker on the line. We made small talk about the breaks in Texas. The best waves, he said were a six-hour drive the opposite direction from where I was headed. Of course, I had just missed a solid swell a few days earlier. The small talk wound down. I had a decision to make about the Bingo Board.
At this point, I was pretty desperate to buy the board despite all of its obvious flaws and blemishes. If I didn’t close this deal, I was going to have to pay a shop hundreds more dollars for a similarly suspect log. My only real concern about the Bingo Board was that it didn’t come with fins, a leash, or a bag, all of which were going to eat away at my already tiny budget. I voiced these concerns, and Kirk magically produced three bottom-of-the-barrel fins and a calf leash with a rusted swivel. Then, in a moment of charity or pity, he actually haggled me down in price for the board, fins, and leash. This was too easy. Was the Bingo Board a cursed artifact that could only be passed voluntarily to its next victim? Was that creepy old doll in the dark corner of Kirk’s garage really tracking me with its googly eyes?
I came to the conclusion that this was a win-win transaction. Kirk was getting rid of a white elephant—or rather a school bus yellow one. I was acquiring a board that, while not exactly a work of art, would catch even the smallest ripple in the Gulf or Atlantic. Given that ripples constituted a best-case scenario for this trip, the Bingo Board made sense. After strapping the Craigslist miracle on the car, an eleven-year old grom and a mustache-less Ned Flanders raced toward a date with the wild waves of Galveston, Texas.
*****
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