why chicks don’t dig you – the wetsuit

The wetsuit 

We have chosen the O’Neill Psycho RG8 Mutant Hailo ZEB ZIP FSW wetsuit – which is handsomely advertised as being an object that visualises total freedom and bliss. Bulk free warmth with water-tight seams. The Hailo is the protective barrier that blocks out all the cold elements of winter.*

Marvellous .. we should drop a few gross into Syria, a little Total Freedom and Bliss would go well over there right now.

< – – – The wetsuits pictured probably retail for about the same price as four air tickets to Bali and food for a month, however that is not the thrust of this hard-hitting piece of investigative online journalism. Asamatteroffact we stand proud of our achievements in this respect, the hard hit, particularly given the heat applied to us and others who practice this unforgiving trade – the unrelenting criticism hurled at us from the outside estates, the harshness of their cruel words.**

Back to the wetsuit.

< – – Good look isn’t it – tight,clean, new; pour a surfer into this unit and stand back.

Imagine mid-winter 10 ‘ clean Bells and there are fifty out there all wearing these suits. So excellent! You could stay in the water for up to five hours without getting cold. All that longtime sharing the three set waves every half-hour. Plus the losers out there in old suits, the hardmen in South Sydney footy jumpers, clubbies in sluggos – Winners, all of them us.

There is a blessed irony here, about how wearing one of these suits sets you apart from the mob and then inserts you into the mob – all those rubber monkeys..

But this article is about hygiene, this about the health of the great atheletes of this Nation girt by sea – The Cold Water Surfer. But first some facts.

(1) The average wearable life of a wetsuit is three years

(2) A modest estimate of the number of sessions a regular surfer would have per week (winter) wearing this suit is 10

(3) Time per session (check ^) 5 hours

(4) ergo; hours per year in the suit  1,300, or 54 days.

and the killer stat (5) The number of times a wetsuit is cleaned in its three year life – ZERO

So what we have here is a person who is more than happy to spend about 54 days, or about one and three-quarter months in a piece of clothing so tightly manufactured and fitted it is almost the perfect seal, perfect with regard to anything outside getting inside.

But what about that that is inside that really needs to get outside?

Imagine if you will, exactly what has been going on in there over the 54 days. Because not only do we have a repetitive and extreme physical effort cocooned within the bonded seams, we also have the bodies unfortunate impulses to rid itself of excess … eeerh ..  waste matter. Follow me here on this journey –

– a man needs to urinate about once every hour in cold weather: this is retained in the suit.

– a man, in my fair experience, passes wind about thirty times in an hour: this is retained in the suit.

– a man sweats off about 75.8 grams of weight every hour when he is under physical stress: this is retained in the suit.

– and at this stage I would like to remind you of killer stat (5) up ^ there.

So there you have it ladies, that stout fellow who parades himself so gloriously about the water’s edge, that vain blockhead with shoulders like a blacksmith’s anvil, that Master of The Surf is no more than a grub. He must surely be covered in all sorts of thriving bacterial colonies, his pores blocked with an accumulation of the genera Propionibacteria, Corynebacteria, Staphylococcus and Streptococcus, Propionibacterium acnes, Corynebacterium tuberculostearicum, Streptococcus mitis, and Finegoldia AB109769.

Hardly a man at all, more like a walking collection of toxic spores.

There is mention in one of Cormac McCarthys’ novels (Blood Meridian) about how a bunch of no-hoper murdering gunslingers was glowing and luminescent as they disrobed in the dark and prepared to bathe in some hell hole. The irony eh .. ?

– and it’s all because of the wetsuit – the wetsuit he so casually throws into the back of his car – IN THE HOT SUN FOR HOURS – until he needs it again. We are a truly disgusting sub-class of filthy humans are we not, and the proof of that harsh appraisal is that we don’t even know it, and we here in this home of The Hard Hit know all about sub-human surfers – we were there in the 60’s.

* With sincere apologies to Rob Bain, a personal friend – but in this business we do no favours.

** With sincere apologies to Nick Carroll &  rottmouth ,  personal friends both – but in this business ……… it’s the hardway or the highway.