The Legrope Blues
The humble legrope ties us to our board, keeps us from losing it, and provides us with a buoyancy aid when we’re being held down by every wave in a cyclone set. I’ve been in situations where I certainly came close to drowning and may well have if it hadn’t been for the ready access to my board guaranteed by my legrope, and when it was all I could do to hang on for dear life while triple overheads smashed down on my head, with no more than split seconds for a breather between sets. Without that legrope I would have been in serious trouble, and well and truly up shit creek. Fine-tuned over many years, the legrope evolved from a bit of old rope strung to a sock for elasticity and tied to a hole drilled into the fixed single fin of a 1960s log, to the high performance 21 st century combo of velcro cuff, titanium swivel, polyurethane leash you can bungy jump with, and ingenious soft-fabric rail saver that will prevent our fibreglass tails from being hacksawed in half by the lit