So, out surfing yesterday evening, I struck up a conversation with a young guy, and we carried on an often interrupted conversation, as one or the other of us caught a wave. It's one of the really nice little pleasures of surfing. A simple conversation, that otherwise might only take a minute or two, can take half an hour out in the surf.
He was clearly from somewhere else, turns out San Diego, and I showed him my TunaFin set up; he was riding a quad, and we had been talking about the pros and cons of the different fin arrangements. At some point I asked him what brought him up to Sonoma county, and he said it was a job; he's a business law attorney. I quipped that I might need some legal advice at some point, and we agreed to exchange contact information back on shore.
So later after we had changed out of our wetsuits, we were talking, and he was interested in the TunaFin, so I pulled out my best prototype to show him. And after a minute (I am going through my spiel about the fin, this and that), and he says, 'I've seen this before somewhere.' I'm all, no this is totally new, and we talked about a passive hydrodynamic fin system that a dude in SF had invented (basically the fin oscillates due to the hydrodynamic forces on the fin as the board goes through it's motions). It's a passive system, which was its downfall since the fin is driving you rather than the other way around, with TunaFin you are driving the fin.
Then he looks at me kinda funny and says, 'I know where I've seen this before!' He had been in the parking lot when I had left that same board at the beach, like, all day a few days ago; and had seen me pull up and grab it, all relieved. But get this! It turns out just before I got there a kid was eying the board and had picked it up to take it (obviously not a surfer), and Theo had asked the kid if that was his board. He answered that it was not and put it down. It was then that Theo had gone over to check it out, having noticed the novelty of the foot pad and fin set up. And finally, just before I got there he had been the one who put it down in the location where I had found it, ten feet away from where I had left it! The dude saved my lost board from getting lifted off the beach by some hodad! Now that is a serendipitous encounter with a stand up dude who was able to fill in the details of the story behind the mystery of the board levitation!
He was clearly from somewhere else, turns out San Diego, and I showed him my TunaFin set up; he was riding a quad, and we had been talking about the pros and cons of the different fin arrangements. At some point I asked him what brought him up to Sonoma county, and he said it was a job; he's a business law attorney. I quipped that I might need some legal advice at some point, and we agreed to exchange contact information back on shore.
So later after we had changed out of our wetsuits, we were talking, and he was interested in the TunaFin, so I pulled out my best prototype to show him. And after a minute (I am going through my spiel about the fin, this and that), and he says, 'I've seen this before somewhere.' I'm all, no this is totally new, and we talked about a passive hydrodynamic fin system that a dude in SF had invented (basically the fin oscillates due to the hydrodynamic forces on the fin as the board goes through it's motions). It's a passive system, which was its downfall since the fin is driving you rather than the other way around, with TunaFin you are driving the fin.
Then he looks at me kinda funny and says, 'I know where I've seen this before!' He had been in the parking lot when I had left that same board at the beach, like, all day a few days ago; and had seen me pull up and grab it, all relieved. But get this! It turns out just before I got there a kid was eying the board and had picked it up to take it (obviously not a surfer), and Theo had asked the kid if that was his board. He answered that it was not and put it down. It was then that Theo had gone over to check it out, having noticed the novelty of the foot pad and fin set up. And finally, just before I got there he had been the one who put it down in the location where I had found it, ten feet away from where I had left it! The dude saved my lost board from getting lifted off the beach by some hodad! Now that is a serendipitous encounter with a stand up dude who was able to fill in the details of the story behind the mystery of the board levitation!