The Wettie that would not die.
Sometimes,back in the mid eighties, my mum would take me and my sister surfing. We'd jump in the Escort, rattle up to North Devon, and camp. We'd hire boards, big horrible dinged-up pop- outs, with fins missing, and struggle into cold, holey, stiff hire suits. We'd snap the remaining fins off and lose our deposit. We'd have a great time, me and my sister, getting bashed about in the white water.
After a few years, we were doing this more and more, and this is how we got into surfing 'properly'. We were spending so much time in the water in fact, it was getting stupid hiring equipment every time. My sister and I didn't think we were good enough to buy boards yet, but we were sick of getting cold, so for our birthdays, we got a new wetsuit each. We were stupidly thinking that that would actually keep us *warm*, not just less cold. My sister got a short-john, and a kind of wetsuit jacket to put over it, and I got an end-of-line, neon orange and turquise 3-2, from Smile surf shop in Newquay.
It was still the eighties, so neon was not only fashionable, it was bloody well compulsory. I nearly didn't buy it, because if anything, this suit didn't have anywhere near enough neon. More glow was wanted. But it was a good suit.
It was made by Peak, an Aussie make and I'd put all my birthday money into buying it, a whole 70pounds. I bought this suit in '87, or maybe '88.
We would wear our suits with an old pair of trainers, 'cos we thought it would keep our feet warm. Yeah, we were clueless. Years passed. Tory, my sister, stopped surfing, and I drifted away from it, went to college, did education, the usual. But my friends back home were getting into surfing too now, and I never stopped entirely. The Peak wasn't dead yet. Oh no, not by a long way.
We were all learning, and these were the days of being totally keen, when we'd all go surfing in anything, no matter how cold, no matter how small, or how big. The Peak could survive everything. Ankle biters on a freezing easterly, in Feburary: no problem. This was the 3/2 from hell. Rup was being even more hardcore at the time..he was wearing a 2mm Alder, and it had hardly any neon on it. THATs how hardcore we were, we even wore non-neon suits.
It's amazing how you can stand 6 degree water with summer gear, just because you've never experienced a winter suit. You think that everyone is that cold, and you're just being a wimp.
After a few years of wearing the suit for all seasons, we began to catch on that most people wore thicker suits in the winter. Ah, realisation dawned. Time for a new suit.
So I sold the trusty Peak to Craig. Craig thought that this was the warmest suit in the world, this 3/2. It lived on, getting used almost every day. It was 6 years old. Craig finaly realised the meaning of warmth, and bought a new suit.
The Peak passed to Phil. where all wetsuits end up. It was getting holey, but abit of neoprene glue, and some stiching, and it still worked. The neon had faded, but that was a relief. Time had passed since this suit was fresh, and now we were into the monochrome nineties, where any colour on a wettie was a serious fashion faux par. The look of the moment then, was to look like a tadpole.
More years passed. It was less a 3/2 now, the neoprene had worn down to make it more like a 2/2. But it lived on. Phil had this suit for years and years, at least 3 seasons, winter and summer. Phil was still a grommet then, and was still growing. One day, Phil grew too much, and the suit ripped across the the bottom of the back, side to side.
The future of the trusty Peak look bleak, but no. More glue. More sticthing. It lived on it a slightly modified, slightly leaky state, but it lived. Phil realised the error of his ways, and bought a 'new' second hand suit, from one of us, but the suit still had life. Craig's mum was a foster carer at the time, and we used to take the fosterees surfing. They got the castoffs of castoffs.
Phil was growing out of grommethood, so we were running out of people to take the piss out of. The foster kids fit the bill. But the writing was on the wall, the lining was coming unstuck from the neoprene, it was full of holes, and the foster kids were seriously into wetsuit abuse. I don't know what happened to it in the end; it's probably sitting in a cupboard somewhere, waiting for the day when it can hit the ocean again. Seventy quid for a wetsuit, that lasted ten years.
By Jon
