People don’t talk about this enough but the real value in soft tops is that you don’t give a shit about them. Yeah, they’re great for newbs, and sure, they’re fun when the waves suck, and hell yes, they can break you out of a high-performance (attempting) rut. That’s all true and reason enough to buy one or two. But what makes all that worth it is that you can do practically everything but run over the things with your car and they’ll just sit there and take it. They’ll perform exactly the same. Try that with your six-month-long-lasting PU thruster and see how that works for ya.
I bring this up because, for the last year, I’ve had a couple of South Bay Board Co. soft tops totally uncovered in my yard and they’re completely fine. We get blazing sun in these parts for eight months a year, with freezing rain the other four. The boards have seen it all, been exposed to the worst and they are absolutely good as new. The bottoms are faded, but hey, I don’t ever see the bottom so who cares.
A couple of weeks after I got the first one, the 9’6” Tortuga, I lost it into some particularly sharp rocks at a river mouth near my house. The board struck the rocks roughly amidships, right in the rail, whether the smooth skin bottom meets the soft-ish top—the only vulnerable part of the craft. There were some honest-to-god dings. So, I whipped up some epoxy resin and Q Cell and slapped it on there like Bondo.
South Bay Board Co.
Is it the right ding repair glop for a board like that? I have no idea. I don’t remotely care. It’s a soft top! It’s supposed to get its ass kicked. It seems perfectly fine a year later. I ride it all the time and it feels perfect.
The board is super fun too. Completely different than something spongy like a Catch Surf. These styles of soft top boards have fiberglassed foam cores, just with a thin layer of soft material over the top. Not quite as rigid as a regular board, but not as flexy as a Wavestorm. I run mine exclusively as a single fin, though it will take side bites too. It’s narrow, with a pulled-in tail, and handles steep waves really well. Especially backside. Super fun trying to pull into little tubes pig-dogging this thing.
The other board I have is the 5’5” Big Betsy. A little triple-winged quad soap bar thing. This is hilariously fun. Catches waves like a dream, squirts along really high on the water, and will actually let you set a rail. Also a blast to ride as a kneeboard. I’m getting older and don’t ride performance shortboards at all anymore, and I can go two months without surfing, hop on this thing and it feels right at home. It’s that forgiving.
Here, watch ex-CTer Travis Logie on the same board:
Both of these get dropped, baked, frozen, walked on by my kids, squished under beach gear, and bang off rocks–all the time–and they’re fine. I can’t believe they haven’t blistered or swelled up and exploded or delammed or anything in the sun, but they haven’t and at this point I’m never gonna bother to cover them up.
The cost is, for me, right in the sweet spot. The 9’6” is $799. Unless you’re Andy Nieblas, you’re gonna get 99 percent of the same enjoyment out of a board like that as you would a $1,500 P/U board and, again, you never ever have to worry about dropping it or if someone like breathes on it wrong. The Big Betsy is only $249, which may as well be free.
They work, they seem to be indestructible, and I don’t have to think about them at all. Kinda the perfect surfboards if all you care about is fun. Think about it.