Eddie Vedder talks with Surfline about his new solo album ‘Ukulele Songs’

By: Tim Donnelly

For most rock ‘n’ roll frontmen, putting out a solo record of songs all done on the ukulele could be considered career suicide. But not for Eddie Vedder. The strum of the ukulele is the sound of the Islands and as of late, Vedder is an Islander. It is coursing through his veins.

Pearl Jam’s lead singer is set to release “Ukulele Songs” (Monkey Wrench) on May 31st — and it just may be the laidback summer soundtrack that’ll resonate on the beaches the world over. It’s tried-and-true beach music, which will echo from the Maldives to Maverick’s, from Lake Michigan to Maine. It is the perfect romantic accompaniment to stargazing under the swaying, lazy palms while the shifting tide laps at your feet — even if you live in a Brooklyn apartment. Maybe especially if you live in a Brooklyn apartment.

Vedder just checked in with Surfline from Pearl Jam’s warehouse studio, fresh off the plane, all full of Aloha to talk about “Ukulele Songs” — writing tunes while he rides waves, what songs not to get stuck in your head while surfing, and his love/hate relationship with his first surfboard.

A lot of the tunes on Ukulele Songs have a timeless feel to them, like they’re from the ’30s. How did you find these songs?

I bought a random, tattered book that had a few chords and these old songs in it. The kind that Darla sang Alfalfa (The Little Rascals), that kind of shit. [Laughs.] Somehow, I was relating to the lyrics and they had chords in them, but I had no idea how they went. So with restructuring some of the chords, I just made my own versions of them.

A couple of months ago we were finishing the record, and one of the guys I work with pulled up a couple different versions of different people singing them. There was a Billie Holiday version of one of the songs — it was this torch-song jazz kind of thing, but it was completely unrecognizable to whatever my take was on it. But it all seemed to fit into whatever theme is to the record.

I get a love songs and lullabies vibe from it.

Love songs, hate songs. I’d like to market the record as a “Ukulele Hate Songs Record.” [Laughs.]

When did this love affair with the ukulele start for you?

I was just sitting on a street corner and this ukulele came up and had a strong opening line and we’ve been together ever since. It’s never cheated on me. I don’t always have to pick up the tab. The ukulele is a good listener, but chimes in when it’s helpful. It’s really one of the best relationships I’ve ever had.

We are 14 years in, and going strong. I’m into long relationships. Oh, and another thing: it doesn’t get jealous when I play guitar. The ukulele has helped me with my relationship with the guitar. It taught me a lot of what I could bring to the other relationship, more about melody and song structure.

I think everybody should own a ukulele. People need a way to express themselves, they just do. It’s not like they don’t have time to learn because obviously, they’re watching shit like American Idol. Reality Shows offer nothing but hollow versions and the lowest common denominator of American lifestyles in 2011. I suggest turning off the TV and pick up the ukulele.

Because the friggin’ ukulele will write it for you! It’s not that hard. You’ll feel like you know how to play, just give it two weeks or a month, and you’ll lose 10 pounds! I can’t verify that, but it might be a good selling point. People lie in advertising all the time. Maybe it’s about time I start.

Lose 10 lbs and get bigger — and you’ll sell a million copies in a week.

No, a bunch of people will go on the Internet and pay nothing. Then what? [Laughs.]

Chaos…Surfing has always been a part of your creative process. How does that alone time effect your writing?

The good songs ain’t ten yards offshore, being out there for ten minutes and coming back in and going back out. You gotta go deep, and get into some kind of mad-scientist phase at some point, to where the good stuff is. Like when you wake up the next morning and look at it or listen to it, whatever you’ve done and you don’t even really remember. It’s your voice, your handwriting but you don’t remember doing it. You gotta get to an extraordinary circumstance sometimes to get to the good stuff.

I’ve always thought that as a surfer you need to be careful of what the last song you hear before you paddle out is going to be — ’cause that’s the song that could be playing in your head. Say if you’re at the parking lot at El Porto, and you are hearing maybe “Footloose ” coming out of one of the other cars as you’re putting on your wetsuit — you are f**ked. You’re going to be listening to “Footloose” for the next hour and a half in your head. So one thing I try do is to listen to The Ramones or Fugazi. [Laughs.]

It’s like, you hear something you’re working on and play the instrumental in your head. Then you go out and actually formulate it — and might have the whole thing written when you come in. Hopefully the lineup isn’t too thick or filled with people; you can actually get a lot of work done while waiting for waves.

Another thing: I take the underwater iPod thing and go out on long stand-up paddles on my own. I could paddle for like two hours if I had music, rather than 40 minutes. I go out on the Puget Sound where there are no waves; it’s a little like hiking on the water.

I had never surfed with music until a couple of years ago and the first wave I caught, I can definitively state that it was such a powerful thing that it was like almost hearing music for the first time.

What song was it?

I was listening to a Neil Finn live record; it wasn’t until my third session that day that l I had a wipeout. It was actually during a drum solo, and I was in the little mini-washing machine. The waves weren’t too big, so the headphones stayed in as I was getting tumbled to the drum solo. Ah, a fond memory.

Nowadays, I can take the music that I worked on, go for a paddle and actually catch waves. All of sudden the notes get a little higher, all of sudden the soaring chorus is right there for ya; it all works.

It’s an invention that I’d dreamt about since I was just a kid. I was 14 or so when the first Walkmans ever came out. The very first person I ever saw with a Walkman was the first time I met Mark Richards, in 1982. He got a plane and had this personal listening device in his hand. It was the first one I’d ever seen and I was in awe. Immediately, I started thinking about how you could listen to music in the water. They had shitty versions back in the day and now they work pretty good.

When you write music, you have chord structures. This part goes into that part. But I’ve always looked at it like skating a ramp — there’s transitions. To me, the difference between a song and music is the transition. A song is different than music. A song should sound like music, but sometimes it just sounds like a song. Sounds like a part, with another part and another part. But it’s those transitions that are the key to having a flow, like a cutback or a top-turn. It’s how you maneuver, how the lyric and vocal approach ties all that in. It’s like the music is the wave — the lyric and melodic structure — I feel that’s where the transition comes in; that’s the moves on the wave that you make and trying to pull that off without wiping out.

You’ve played music onstage with legends. Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, The Who. You surf with legends all the time, MR, Kelly and Laird. Do you ever pinch yourself, like, whoa?

You know as well as I do that when you’re surfing, the focus is on the wave. You can’t really think about much else. The one thing surfing with MR, Kelly or Laird is that it really comes down to wave selection. They assist you with wave selection. When they tell you they see one coming out the back and this one is yours and you know that one is yours, you have to go for it, no matter how late the takeoff might seem. They are always right.

It might help that someone like Kelly, Laird or MR thinks that you are capable of catching that wave and that little bit of confidence coming from someone of that iconic stature will lead you to believe that you can actually ride the f**king thing and then you do. That works really great. [Laughs.]

When you’re playing music with Bruce or Neil, it’s all about being in the moment. You don’t have a chance to think that, ‘this is really cool.’ There’ll be time for that later. You gotta make the play. If Bruce throws you the ball, you gotta catch it, because Bruce is gonna hit ya in the numbers.

Where was the first wave rode?

The first wave I rode was at Doheny Beach. I think I was 12. We had a friend that lived in San Juan Capistrano. I had a $12 board; we went to Jack’s Surf Shop, bought a bungee cord by the foot with a vinyl strap that cost $13. So with $25 invested, I caught waves. I was there for week.

It was the worst f**king board. I tried to buy a version of it — it was a Channin something-or-other. I tried to find one on EBay so I just so I could shoot arrows at it. I’m still frustrated. It set my surfing back. It put me in the red before I even caught any waves; it was the worst board ever. I’ve been struggling to get out of that hole ever since. [Laughs.]

I think now that beach, if I’m not mistaken, is the most polluted on the California coast, so um…that’s exciting. [Laughs.] Actually, that’s really f**king depressing.

Where was the last wave you rode?

Last wave I rode was on the North Shore; I won’t say where. [Laughs.] On the last day I was there, an hour or two before I got on the plane.

You’ve spent a lot of time in Hawaii over the past couple of years. What has Hawaii meant to you?

I could write my own book the size of James Michener’s Hawaii just on my experience. I can honestly say I feel that those Islands, that place — without being melodramatic, though what I’m about to say sounds melodramatic — saved my life. Not only that, but after it saved my life, it protected me.

I can be there and feel like that I am being upheld by the energy. Not to mention the deep relationships I have with some of the locals and other friends are in the top echelon of the best relationships I have to this day.

At the same time, so much of what I have learned about myself or learned humanity or learned about society or learned about nature, it was all from the time I spent there on my own, being in deep isolation for sometimes months at a time.

I consider it a privilege that I was able to exploit those experiences in a positive way. I saw it as a really healthy place to write from. When I say learning about society, you learn from society when you are out of it, you see it objectively. You spend a lot of time away from people, the more you like them, and it works vice versa as well, you know. It refuels the tank as far as your faith in people. I always trusted that whatever I was coming with over there that it came from a pure place. So I felt that if those ideas or ideals ended up in lyrics that people would hear, that they could be trusted.

Pearl Jam is celebrating 20 years together, which is quite a feat in today’s music industry. What is it like for you guys now as a band?

We have five guys who bring their lunch boxes to work, say hello to each other, pick up our instruments, make sounds and then interact, focus it, then music comes out of it, until there’s enough music to put out, then we go out and play.

It boils down to bringing your lunch box to work. It shouldn’t be that hard. It really shouldn’t. It’s not like music doesn’t offer you an open field to navigate and a million ways to grow if you are determined not to be stagnant.

Looking back at the past and honoring it is all well and good, but if you start walking backwards you might walk off a cliff, you may not see what you are going to run into or walk backwards into the street. I think we’re always looking forward. We can be proud of it and I think we are. But that lasts about 45 seconds. Seriously.

City beaches officially open for the season on Friday, May 27 for Memorial Day, and although Rockaway Beach is actually in Queens, there’s going to be plenty of Brooklyn on the boardwalk this summer. As sunners, surfers and swimmers return for another season, they’ll be joined by hordes of eaters this year, as three newly staffed food stands open on the boardwalk at 86th, 96th and 106th Streets, featuring dishes from some of Brooklyn’s favorite chefs and food entrepreneurs.

Rockaway Taco owners, Andrew Field and David Selig, submitted a proposal to take over the three boardwalk stands to the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. As they were drawing up the plan, they decided that the sheer size of the three stands was ideal for a partnership with other businesses. “We reached out to people in the food business who we liked, respected and admired,” Selig explained. (See the list of current parks concessions opportunities here.)

“We’re not following the strict prescription,” Selig said of the parks food vendor rules and the way they’ve been updated for the Rockaways stands. “The standard contract basically says we have to sell Sabrett hot dogs and Snapple–this is less rigid.”

At this point, all three of the stands are planning on opening their doors to the public on May 27, but they also caution that opening weekend will only be the beginning.”This will be a process,” said 86th Street partner and manager Michelle Cortez. “We’ll be coming into full form by about the middle of June but we will open in some capacity by the 27th [of May]–that’s what we promised ourselves.” They’ll be fine-tuning menu items, adding seasonal specials and setting their hours according to demand over the next few weeks, and opening their bars as soon as liquor licenses become fully operational.

Here’s a sneak peek at what you’ll find along boardwalk:

106th St.: This is like seeing one of your favorite bands open for another of your favorite bands. Caracas Arepa Bar and Blue Bottle Coffee are working together, serving arepas, fried plantains, iced coffee and espresso. The two businesses have a friendly relationship at their Williamsburg outposts, and they’re taking those good vibes to Rockaway. “We are super excited to finally bring our food to it’s natural environment–the warm sunny beach,” says Caracas owner, Maribel Araujo.

96th St.: The biggest, by far of the three spaces, 96th is going to be like going to a weekend-long music festival, with a wide variety of bands and scenes. Rockaway Taco will serve Mexican street food, according to Andrew Field. Tortas, elote (corn with cheese and mayo), ceviche and salads will complement the taco-centric menu around the corner from Rockaway Taco’s original location (which opens Thursday). “We don’t want to totally defeat the vibe we have going on down at the shack,” said Field, explaining the two different menus.

Chef Jean Adamson (an owner of Vinegar Hill House ) and Lindsay Robinson formerly of Diner, Bonita and other Brooklyn restaurant standouts, have formed a business called Motorboat & the Big Banana that is like a fry shack with a sense of humor. They’ll serve fries and dipping sauces, including a homemade cheese sauce incorporating bacon and pickles, oyster po-boys, fish and chips and seasonal items like tomato salad and raw oysters when available. They’ll also sell big bananas–chocolate covered frozen bananas dipped in pretzels, peanut, toffee, the works.

The vegan bakers at Babycakes just joined the 96th Street gang as well, and Veggie Island, a farm stand around the corner that sells produce from chef favorite Guy Jones, will add smoothies and breakfast items to the mix. A few other players are still in the process of finalizing plans for the space, and there will be coffee and a bar..

86th St.: This is your classic super group (Cream?, Cactus?, Velvet Revolver?). The Meat Hook and Roberta’s have joined together to form Rippers, along with Michelle Cortez, who has worked at Savoy and on her own catering events. “Rippers is about good vibes and good times,” says Cortez. The menu will feature burgers and dogs made by the Meat Hook, a quinoa black bean burger and other veggie items, boat drinks and more. There’s a surfing beach at 87th Street, so Rippers will also have a pro-shop co-curated by Chris Gentile from Williamsburg surf shop, Mollusk, where they will sell basic beach supplies like towels, flip flops, sunscreen and Sun-In, for that 80s nostalgia you ordered. Rippers will be open from 7am to 7pm, seven days a week, offering a surfer’s breakfast each morning.

Cortez indicated that Rippers plans to deep fry a number of items, and while she wouldn’t reveal their exact plans, she did say that they have been “experimenting with a fried pickle on a stick.” She also spoke highly of a Mexican wedding shot: a shot of tequila following by a lime wedge dusted with sugar on one side, finely ground coffee on the other.

One thread that seems to run through all of the stands is the desire to keep costs down and quality up in an effort to blend into the neighborhood. “We want to have fresh food that is fairly priced so you can walk over to the boardwalk and get a tomato salad with feta or whatever we’re making that day,” says Jean Adamson. “We don’t want to come off like, ‘We’re fucking taking over here.’”

The bar at Rippers will close at 7pm most nights (though it will stay open later for special events like surfing competitions) to make way for long-standing local bars. “Anyone who spends the day at Rippers should walk around the corner and spend their night at Connolly’s,” says Cortez.

The Parks Department has been working to emphasize local food vendors as much as possible over the past few years. Though he would not yet comment on the record about the Rockaways, Brooklyn Parks Commissioner Kevin Jeffrey had plenty to say about the parks food revolution in general. “New Yorkers have a very sophisticated palate,” he told Brooklyn Based. “And to be honest, the pretzel, the hot dog and the knish were not cutting it terms of street food.”

Jeffrey pointed to the Red Hook vendors as a watershed moment for the relationship between the Parks Department and authentic, locally made food. He noted that while Parks had to create some sort of oversight system for the vendors selling arepas, huaraches and tacos, it became an opportunity to bring unlicensed food cart cooks into the fold of legitimate businesses, while bringing soccer fans and avid eaters to the ballfields alike. “How wonderful to have non-processed, freshly prepared food that are healthier and more diverse,” Jeffrey said of the recent addition of local vendors to city parks. “The picnic table, the park bench–we have a long history of inviting people to eat in our parks.”

The New Wave

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Surf culture has long produced its own aesthetic, along with a tradition of surfer-artists. On the visual vanguard at the moment are Alex Kopps and Tin Ojeda. Kopps’s films, graffiti and collage-like prints (alexkopps.com) give an urban edge to what is usually a beachy domain. “The content and events that have influenced my artwork were not discovered at the beach,” says Kopps, who lives in the Bay Area and sells some of his T-shirts and posters (right) at Mollusk Surf Shop. His film “Displacement,” about “displacement hull” surfboards, uses 1970s Super-8 footage with abstract effects. Ojeda, the Argentinian-born painter and surfer behind the Drug Money Art clothing line (drugmoneyart.com), is bringing the beach to the city. His tees, on which he hand-prints phrases (“Beauty Is Boring,” says one), first gained a following in his home base of Montauk, N.Y. Now they’re at Barneys and in stores in Tokyo, Berlin and London.

The sun had barely risen over Rockaway Beach, melting what was left of the overnight snow, when Noah Ward and Manny Huth waded into the Atlantic. The bitter December wind was dragging the temperature into the teens and blowing through their wetsuits. There were small sheets of ice forming on the rocks.

But it will be a couple more months before the worst chill descends on the beach, and before they begin asking themselves, “What are we doing out here?”

On this Tuesday morning, they knew exactly why they were out there, with nothing but six millimeters of neoprene between them and the elements. The dark gray water was churning just about right. And in their book, that turns any weather into surfing weather.

Ken Maldonado for The Wall Street JournalNoah Ward and Manny Huth survey the water at Rockaway Beach in Queens on the rainy, 54-degree afternoon of Dec. 12.

Like any of the 50 or so regular winter surfers at Rockaway Beach, Mssrs. Ward and Huth do not turn down promising waves when they come. The way they see it, it’s not a matter of choice.

“If you don’t surf in the winter in New York, you don’t surf,” said Mr. Huth, 37. “It’s just the weather we have. Nothing to do about it.”

The first wave to the face is always the most jarring—when the icy water comes through surfers’ hoods and runs down the inside of their wetsuits, when it pools in their boots, when it numbs their fingertips. Then, as the saltwater rushes the wrong way up their nostrils and burns their eyes, the ice cream headache sets in, brief and intense. The cold is so bitter and the shock so sudden that nausea sometimes starts brewing in the pits of their stomachs.

They say it is invigorating at best. Paralyzing at worst.

“There’s a huge leap of faith that you have to learn to take,” said Mike Sherry, 33, freezing after his early morning session on Tuesday.

Their faith is eventually rewarded once their bodies grow comfortable enough in the water to actually surf. At that point, Mr. Ward said, it is no worse than sitting on a ski lift in Vermont. They learn to ignore the conditions and concentrate on the next wave until the cold catches up to them, usually after a couple of hours. Mssrs. Huth and Ward know that when their faces go numb, it is time to go home, taking the hour-long ride on the A train back to Brooklyn.

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Ken Maldonado for The Wall Street JournalMr. Huth before taking to the waves.

Surfers have been subjecting themselves to the Rockaway Beach winters for as long as the locals can recall. In the Boarders Surf Shop, two blocks from the shore, the owner, Steve Stathis, remembered surfing all year round as a teenager more than 40 years ago. In those days, the winter hardcore used to wear diving suits that were known to pop open at the seams, with heavy socks under their boots.

“You’ve just got to suit up and go for it,” Mr. Stathis said. “On a nice day in the winter, when the waves are nice, the wind is offshore, it’s sunny, it’s not that bad. But on some of the days, you’ve got to be tough to go out there.”

Though Mr. Stathis no longer rides Rockaway Beach in the winter—he prefers the gentler climate of Puerto Rico—he said more surfers are testing their tolerance than ever, thanks in large part to improvements in their gear. Even the hardiest surfers come down from the boardwalk in expensive full-body wetsuits that can be up to seven millimeters thick around the torso. They sport gloves, boots, and hoods, and only their faces are exposed. (They sometimes cover them with Vaseline to protect them from the wind.)

And in moments of frigid desperation, the surfers know they have a last resort to buy at least a few minutes of warmth, a time-tested technique that works every time—they urinate in their wetsuits.

“It’s disgusting,” Mr. Stathis said with a laugh, “but it’s true.”

Still, everything that makes the winter waves more appealing to surfers also makes them more dangerous. Mr. Stahis refuses to rent boards to anyone who does not seem experienced enough.

“If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re not going to have fun out there,” Mr. Stathis said. “But if you know what you’re doing, you get better waves in the winter and that’s the payoff.”

That is why surfers make whatever arrangements they can to make sure they catch the good days, juggling work schedules and erratic conditions. During East Coast winters, three good days of waves can easily give way to three weeks of ugly water.

So when the Rockaway Beach regulars stand around chatting about the weather, it is serious business. They pay close attention to low-pressure systems gliding over from the Midwest and through the Northeast, hoping they can figure out when their next waves are coming.

“I’m definitely more into windspeeds now than I ever was,” said Mr. Ward, 30.

But the amateur meteorologists do not always get it right. Last Sunday, Mssrs. Ward and Huth hauled out to the Rockaways, pulled on their wet suits and braved the wind whipping in off the Atlantic, only to find there was not a single set they could ride. The water was too choppy. So for nearly two hours, they bobbed up and down between the whitecaps.

When they finally gave up, with only wetsuits full of cold water and windburned faces to show for themselves, Mr. Ward turned to his friend and shook his head. “Not even close,” he said.

That was not to say they did not enjoy themselves, get a good workout, or relish an afternoon out of the city. “A day at the beach is still a day at the beach,” Mr. Ward said.

What the surfers appreciate most, though, is the solitude. There are no beginners in the water getting in the way. There are no crowds gawking on the beach.

And there are no lifeguards to tell them where they can and cannot surf—during the summer, neither of the two surf beaches sanctioned by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation is longer than five blocks.

“It’s just so beautiful, man,” said Kazuhiro Murai, 34. “You surf with the snow. And it’s so isolated and it’s very quiet, nobody’s walking around.”

If nothing else, it is the reward for making the long trek out to the Rockaways at the eastern edge of Queens, which comes with its own set of tricky logistics. For years after he moved to New York from Los Angeles, Mr. Murai would drag his gear and his board onto public transportation from Brooklyn and change into his wetsuit on the bus. Then, after four or five hours in the water, he would get back on a bus and do the same—only dripping wet.

Typical New Yorkers, the other passengers never said a word. They just sat there giving him “some strange looks,” Mr. Murai said, drawing out every syllable.

On Sunday, his change from bicycle messenger to surfer and back was slightly more private, as he gingerly stripped down behind the trunk of a car. Like Mssrs. Huth and Ward, he had hoped against hope to catch a wave on a bad day and ultimately given up. But unlike them, he could not make room in his schedule to be back on Tuesday, one of the coldest days of winter so far.

To Mssrs. Huth and Ward, the return trip was certainly worthwhile. They were able to try their luck on shoulder-high waves for more than an hour. But when they finally emerged, having overcome the surfer’s urge to wait for just one more wave, the deep freeze began to sink into their bones.

So they put their boards under their arms and trudged back to a bungalow they rent with 10 other surfers about 200 yards from the beach, leaving a trail of wet footprints on the sidewalk. Every few steps, Mr. Huth broke into a jog to get into a hot shower where the first blast of scalding water will be just as shocking as the first chilly wave.

“It hurts,” Mr. Ward said before warming up. “But it’s a good kind of hurt.”

Rivalry as Stand-Up Paddlers Head to Bigger Surf

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times All’s well in calm waters, but stand-up paddlers are starting to compete with traditional surfers for bigger waves.

Our colleagues in Styles recently featured an article describing the serenity of stand-up paddling on Sagaponack Pond, including a scene where a merry band of surf-paddling yogis glided into a glassy state of bliss.

Well, add Waves into the mix and kiss your om goodbye.

The scene out in the open ocean has been decidedly less peaceful this summer, as longtime area surfers struggle to adjust to life in the line-up with these upright giants of the sea.

Paddle-boarding is without a doubt growing in popularity, and that is certainly adding to the crowds at our coveted local breaks. But something else is happening: Some of the pioneering, early adopters of paddle-boarding are getting seriously good, good enough to get themselves out into some of the bigger surf alongside all the old-fashioned wave riders.

And these skillful stick men and women -– to whom we also refer as sea sweepers — can upend the traditional rhythm of a break. For starters, because they are always standing, they have a better view of incoming waves than their surfboard-bound brothers and sisters. With that edge, they can start maneuvering for prime position sooner. And because their tankers are generally much longer — and have so much more surface area — than average surfboards, they generally take off farther back on waves. Once an old-school surfer realizes a wave has arrived, a sea sweeper is likely already barreling down the newly formed line.

Jim Rutenberg/The New York Times An anti-stand-up paddling sticker on the back of a car.

It is enough to drive a surfing purist batty. And indeed, it already is. We have seen signs of tension on Long Island in bumper stickers of a cartoon stand-up paddler, dressed in a clown suit, with a dreaded red X across his likenesses.

“Just because you can catch everything with that boat that you are on doesn’t mean you should,’’ Khoi Le, an expatriate of California who now lives and surfs here, told Waves contributor Tetsuhiko Endo in an interview. “We are supposed to share waves.”

(Yet, underscoring the allure of this newly popular style of surfing, he added, “Seriously, not for nothing, I want to try a stand-up paddle board.”)

After describing some harrowing near misses that she recently witnessed between stand-up surfers and traditional surfers on Eastern Long Island, Adlin Deliz, a coordinator at a New York media company, said, “It just seems very unsafe and hazardous to people who are laying down on surfboards – it’s difficult to move out of the way in time when you are riding a smaller board.”

John C. Kutner, a New Jersey-based stick man, said that he understood why his traditional surfer peers might resent the likes of him on his stand-up paddle board. And he did not seem to begrudge them for it. “I have a totally different perspective — because I’m standing up, I can maneuver a lot better,” said Mr. Kutner, a 34-year-old lawyer. “And surfers get resentful.”

But he said he believed everybody should be able to get along as they get used to each other out there. After all, where other potential threats to surfers may have come and gone – like sea kayakers, tow-at surfers and kite surfers – stand-up paddlers seem here to stay. “I think it’s going to blow up,’’ he said.

Garrett McNamara, the big wave surfer and stand-up paddler extraordinaire, suggested one possible solution: “You need to separate the two groups and designate a spot just for stand-up paddlers,” he said Friday morning at Manahttan’s Pier 40, before the SeaPaddle NYC stand-up paddle board race around the city benefiting the Surfer’s Environmental Alliance and Autism Awareness. “They have done it in California, in San Onofre, and it works really well.”

Then again, this is New York, where it took forever just to get local officials to designate a small surfing area at Rockaway Beach.

So, in the meantime, Tyler Breuer, the director of the New York Surf Film Festival, said everybody should get over it now. “People are always going to find something to complain about,’’ he said. “If it’s not body boarding, it’s long boards, if it’s not long boards it’s SUP, or tow-in surfing.’’ He added, “I’d rather focus on just surfing instead.”

Waves concurs. And besides, we’ve got something new to worry about, and it has the initials B.F.

See what happens when an average yoga hooks up with a butt-kicking workout.
Low Lunge
Like a good matchmaker, DavidBartonGym is bringing together two seemingly different fitness types to create one strong fusion: Caponyasa Yoga.

The class, taught by NY yogi Carlos Rodriguez, seamlessly blends Vinyasa yoga, capoeira technique and modern dance.

“The mock combat from capoeira and the yoga moves build rhythm and strength,” says David Barton. “The endurance that martial arts helps to build and the flexibility benefits from yoga make these two a perfect fit.”

Incorporate the smooth n’sexy, fast-paced practice into your yoga routine with this simple move.

It turns out keeping the peace and finding inner peace go hand-in-hand.

Caponyasa Yoga is offered at DavidBartonGym on Fridays, 6:15PM at the Astor Place location, 4 Astor Place, (212) 505-6800.