Story about Glen Darcy surfboards in J-Bay

It was just one of those nice stories in life that I probably will never forget and i would like to share it with you: A couple of weeks ago I went on my first vacation in a long time. My girlfriend and I flew to South Africa, where we spend a couple of days in Jeffrey's Bay. I was thinking of buying a long board down there, but I wasn´t sure, whether it would fit in the small rent-a-car and whether it would be worth to drive the board all the way down the garden route. Anyway... One day I dropped into this small surf store and there was a really nice guy helping me out with the various boards and their different shapes. Turns out that the guy was Glen Darcy himself and that I was standing in his "flag ship store", which looked small from the front, but got pretty big in the back with the depot and everything ;-) He was very kind and even showed me how a used 9,0 longboard would fit into our tiny little car. I would not have believed it although he told me before: "It´ll fit. I am doing this for all of my life. Trust me." Of course he was right, since he is one of the most respected shapers in ZA.

Suddenly this little girl and her parents enter the store carrying an old board. I was happy for the interruption in order to keep on thinking whether or not to spend the money for the board. I listened in to the conversation: The little girl wanted to know whether or not it would make sense to repair the old board, which they found up on the attic and whether it would make sense for her to ride it... Glen checked the board and got a really surprised look on his face - maybe even his eyes started watering a little... turns out that it was a board he shaped in 1974 - one year older than me and probably with an incredible long history and many tales about South African waves to tell... Glen smiled and said: "Hey sure. We can fixe this up and it`ll do well in the waves. However you could also sell it to some restaurants in the area, they would probably love to hang it up somewhere." The family decided to have it fixed and I couldn´t resist to ask Nicole to take a picture of this moment, when three generations of very different surfers met in a little store in Jeffrey's Bay to check out a historic surfboard, one of them shaped a long time ago... :-)