Ha ha! No excuses this month because this one should be right on time! Midway through the following month is right when you should start looking for Baywatch, and I pretty much made it! Some months are a chore to write, and it feels like pulling teeth, but some months just flow easily, and that was true of March. I think there’s a really good selection of stuff this month, with some high priced items but balanced out by some interesting but cheaper decks too. But enjoy this one because April is looking absolutely terrible so far. I can’t remember a month with so few high priced decks and so many uninteresting mid priced decks! Really, it’s a barren wasteland out there so far this month! And it’s funny because I just had an argument with a guy on skullandbones who asked why there are so few good NOS decks on eBay these days. I argued that he just wasn’t looking hard enough, which was probably true in March, but judging by April he is right. I hope that this worrying trend ends quickly, because this is going to be a damned dull column going forward if things continue at…

Damn, it seems like I make excuses every month for how late the column is! Well this month I have a real excuse: I was in Maui on vacation. I considered taking a laptop with me for about 10 seconds, but then the hassles of getting it through security and having something else to carry made me realize that it was a bad idea. Not to mention the fact that I realized that there would be no way I would be spending 4 hours inside typing while in Maui. Sorry guys, I had other stuff to do. I also became a US citizen in March, so that chewed up some time too! It’s been a busy month all in all.

It’s funny how this column comes together. It’s different every month. Last month for example it took me about 3 weeks to put it all together. I’d do one section, wait to get motivated for a week, force myself to do a few decks, then come back a few days later and do some more. But some months like this one everything just flows and I crank out the whole thing in a couple of days. It feels much better this way; you get in a flow and just ride it out. Hours go by without noticing it. It’s good. Hopefully you guys enjoy them all, but this one feels extra special somehow. Of course the decks that get featured have a lot to do with that too. It’s tough to find new stuff to say when you’re featuring a Hawk birdclaw for the 50th time. So you might notice that there are no Hawks, no Natas and no McGill decks featured this month. That was half by chance and half by choice. I hope you don’t miss them! Check Out eBay Watch: January 2010.

I’m sorry that this is a couple of weeks late everybody. I could make excuses about how busy the Christmas season is and other shit that’s going on in my life, but truth be told there wasn’t much that went off in December on eBay that got me fired up. When I have lots of exciting stuff to cover I get fired up and this shit types itself. But when it’s an average month with tons of the same old same old to sort through, it gets difficult to get motivated to look for the unusual and type for hours on end. So it was in December. There was some interesting stuff, but very little that got me really excited. Now, looking forward to January I already have some good stuff stored, so that is looking a lot more promising! Anyway, that being said I hope you enjoy this months edition because I worked really hard on it, and tried not to give you the same old Hawks and Gators etc.

I want to start off this month with a couple of rants, so forgive me please. First up, to all people selling decks on eBay, stop using terms like “Vintage” and “NOS” when you are selling a fucking reissue!! Using the word vintage implies that the deck is 20 years old or more. Your shitty reissue was made 3 years ago. The only thing vintage is probably the crappy PC that you used to type up the shitty sales pitch! The same goes with the term NOS. It stands for “New Old Stock”, meaning it’s an old deck that is as new, and has never been set up. When using this term, the inference is that it’s an old deck, not one that I could walk into a store and buy today. Are the sellers being unscrupulous and trying to fool ignorant buyers? Probably, yes. By inserting the word “vintage” you are making a claim that isn’t true. So stop. Also, while I’m on the subject of sellers that piss me off, stop listing the same deck week after week, month after month with the same inflated price! Look, it’s not rocket science. If your deck isn’t selling at $399…

So October 2009 was a big one. If this was anything to go by, then we can say that the downtown is over, at least in regards to the pocketbooks of serious skate collectors! Lots of stuff went for over $1000, and some went far higher than that. What do some of our big spenders do for a living I wonder? And are they even skaters? Or do we have art collectors out there who are starting to expand into old skateboards? Or do we have famous/rich folk who used to skate and who know want to recapture a piece of their youth and they don’t care what it costs to reclaim it? And just who the fuck has $5,000 discretionary income burning a hole in their pocket these days anyway? Just some interesting thoughts to ponder. Check out eBay Watch: October 2009

Another month has flown by and here we have another installment of Baywatch. There’s lost more goodies this month, and hopefully some that you have never seen before. The longer I do this the less inclined I am to keep on featuring the same decks from the same companies, high ticket items though they might be. There’s only so many ways to describe a Hawk birdclaw without it being repetitive, so I’ll choose something else instead. It might not be as iconic, or go for as much money, but that’s not what this column is about. It’s not a price guide, more a sampling of what I find interesting, and hopefully you do too. So, variety is the key for me at the moment.

Here’s an interesting piece of history. Aside from looking really sharp, this vintage Nash skateboard features clay/composite wheels and something I’ve never seen on a board from this time period, wheel covers. Some people would have you believe these are a recent invention. Check out the auction while it lasts for some larger versions of the pics. A really nice board here. UPDATE: Some 13 years later I’ve added photos of the hubcap bearing protectors thanks to Mark Bader. I’m scratching my head as to why I didn’t post the pics from the auction in the first place.

It’s Woodstock on a skateboard. Celebrating random eBay finds that I forgot to document, but at least managed to drag an image into a folder and save it.

Let me start off by thanking all those who sent in links to auctions that finished in August. Like I said last month, I missed 2 weeks of auctions because I was out of the country, and consequently I didn’t have very many decks to highlight. Well you all came though and sent in tons of links, so thanks for that. Thanks to you, this month features about the same amount of decks as usual! And to think, I was looking forward to doing a shorter one this month! Now, unfortunately I lost all of the links to the featured auctions this month. I normally keep the auction link in the Spotlight Comments field of the file, but I ran some maintenance utilities on my MacBook Pro a few days ago, and it appears to have cleaned out all of the metadata in the files. So I have no original auction info to check back on for things like trucks and wheels on completes etc. If some details seem scarce this month, that’s why. Check out eBay Watch: August 2009 EDITOR’S NOTE: We seem to get a constant trickle of emails from people asking Neil to appraise a skateboards that…