I got it all figured out for you, the perfect way to end your days on Earth. First, preferably, get killed by a shark. There isn’t a cooler way to go for a surfer. But anyway, regardless of how you die, the next step is the final paddle out, as pictured here.
Next, you have your funeral lying in this surfer coffin.
And finally, saving the best for last, you roll into the cemetery in this psychedelic hippy hearse. British business man Matthew Shuter recently bought this 1989 Daimler and fixed it up for the Woodstock generation. I’m no where near being in that generation, but this is definitely what I’d like to be rolling up in. It’s almost enough to put a smile on a dead man’s face.
Source.
Ever wondered how a surfing community reacts when a local surfer dies? There’s actually a custom called a “paddle out,” in which the surfer’s friends and family (anyone who can surf that knew the surfer) paddles out to the surfer’s favorite break and says goodbye in a very unique way. Once at the break, the people who are attending this final paddle out arrange themselves in a circle. Each person says a little something about the surfer. Often, something like leis or flowers are tossed into the middle of the circle. If the surfer was cremated, their ashes can be poured into the circle.
I found a blog over on Surfer’s Village by Corky Carroll about a specific surfer funeral, during which the participants passed around a bottle of tequila. If you don’t already know, I’ll fill you in on something about tequila: It makes you crazy! Tequila can make clothes come off, have people dancing on tables, what have you. So it doesn’t surprise me too much to find out that by the time this bottle had gotten passed around a few times at this surfer funeral, more and more humerous things were being done and said by everyone there. When it was finally time to pour the surfer’s ashes into the circle, the person about to pour them ended up tossing the surfer’s ashes onto another surfer! A second later, they had a fight going on in the middle of the ocean, during a funeral, with a dead person’s ashes everywhere and everyone waisted on tequila. However, the story goes that the dead surfer had been quite a party animal; if he was able to watch his own funeral, he would have surely been laughing really hard. To be honest, that’s how I’d like to go; give me a funeral they won’t soon forget.
