Blender Bender

Let the purists have their sub six-foot fishes and supra nine-foot longboards and single malt scotches and American Kennel Club approved Pomeranians.

I’ve been on an unpure, anti-fundamental, mudblood, blend bender lately and I’m fucking stoked. Just shaped a 6’9 full-volumed, deep-and-wide swallow-tailed, beak-nosed, down-railed keel finner and I’m calling the thing a fish.

8’2 shovel-nosed pinched 50/50 railed blended concave to belly bottomed single fin? Log.
For what is shaping—or surfing, itself—without the blend? Flats and curves. Convexes and concaves. Ideologies. Styles. Geographies. Pulled apart and mashed back together in a lurid waterbased alchemy that defies language altogether.
My current favorite blends:
7’0. Longboardy. Shortboardy. Carvey. Skatey. Roundy-flatty. Smallish wave. Largish wave.

Clear.

If this were mine, I’d ride it all over the goddamn place. But it’s not, and it’s headed to The Surf Shop. If you live near there, you should buy it.

Great King St. Artist’s Blend. This stuff is the real deal, and the best scotch expression you will ever find for under $40. Pour it into a glass, add a splash of water, let it sit tight for ten minutes, then get your mind blown as wave after wave of salt, toffee, vanilla, chocolate-covered orange, then hot pepper get together and do it with your tongue. A blend.

Ben. Nobody knows what the hell kind of dog he is, and he’s not to be trusted in the house alone, but he’s a good guy. The girls jump on him all damn day and he never asks for anything in return other than maybe nosing the garbage when you’re not looking. Thank God nobody in the house is still in diapers.

Of Midlengths, pigments, and atmosphere

Words I’m not really that stoked about right now: Zillow. Drought. Romney. Mayonnaise. Lana del Rey.

Words I can really get behind: Dungeness. Pliny the Younger. Leonard Cohen. Caol Ila. WNW Swell. Blue.

I’ve been pondering this last one while looking at the pics of Adam’s new 8ft Broadsword. It’s a lovely color. Tony Mikus—master of pigments and one of the best laminators on the planet—calls it medium blue. I like that, too. Simple.

We’ve seen a lot of blue up here this winter. Mostly in the sky, but in the water, too. Etymologically, the word blue is loaned to us by the French: belle, for beautiful, and eau, meaning water.

The Thai word for blue translates literally to sky.

And there we have it. Air and water.

And if you’re a California surf enthusiast, like Adam, it makes perfect sense: blue for the immersion, the submergence, the surfacing. Blue for the melding of sky and sea and experience, and the endless cycles of light and ocean and paddling back out for another.

Then, maybe cracking, a PBR in the parking lot—it doesn’t get the blue ribbon for nothing.

Winterized

Been having a ton of fun shaping (and surfing!) midlengths lately. EggyHullySpeedyTrimmy stuff in the 6'8-8'0 range. Lots of convex up front to flats and concaves in the back.

Design-specific to Northcoast beachbreak.

Glassed up nice by Fatty Fiberglass in Ft. Bragg. Jake Sacks is carrying on the tradition of excellent, small-batch, attention-to-detail glasswork and has some pics up on his blog as well (click his name).

Poplar rail fins of the 'tiny' variety.

7.11x22.

Winter fun.

Log

Yellow Longboard.
Red fin.

Noserides.

Shana Tova

First board of the year!

I like New Year's Day more than New Year's Eve--clean slate and all that. Celebrated the arrival of 2012 with some foam mowing followed by a trip to the coast with the girls. Kites were involved, as were refusals to wear jackets.

Then tears.

Then ice cream with rainbow sprinkles.

Finished the (glorious!) day with a bit of champagne that we hadn't gotten around to drinking the previous night because we have kids and we're tired and we were busy with an epic Super Mario Kart session on the (glorious!) Wii, anyway.

This fresh 9'4 with a green high-density foam stringer bookended by dual cedar sticks will get a shiny candy shell at Almar Glass Works, then head to The Shop in Humboldt. There it will be ogled, fondled, caressed, until it speaks to someone so loudly that they will gladly hand over currency and make it their own.

On the way home, they will crack a window and turn the music a little louder. They will smile slightly as they imagine themselves flying across a wall of liquid energy, knees bent, fingers trailing in the purest green they could possibly imagine.

May we all experience such joy this year.

Qlear Quadsword

Thursdays are the best. First, my employer provides lunch on the condition I sit through an hour-long meeting without any lewd or unseemly outbursts. Done!
Second, it’s not Wednesday, which is the worst.
Finally, I take a moment for myself on Thursdays to post a recent board and fling wide the doors to the HHG inbox to see what’s on the minds of my comrades in the surf-bathing community. Here’s Paul's Quadsword 8'7 and a letter:

Dear HHG, When did you know you were getting old?

Sincerely,
Sleepy in Sebastopol
Good question, SiS. I first realized I was old one morning while suiting up in the parking lot with the stereo cranked. First, I was cranking it because I could barely hear it. Second, I realized that my get-stoked-for-a-session selection was Morning Edition on NPR. It was pretty hard to continue with my denial after that point.
We’ve been dialing in Paul's quiver for a while now, and this midlength really fills a critical niche in our unforgiving waters. Nice to have a little foam under your chest to paddle, nice to have a bit shorter board under your feet to throw around like it’s play money and your Boardwalk property is swathed in tiny plastic hotels.

Dear HHG, is my board ready yet?
Your Friend, Mr _______________ (note to readers: this is not the same Mr. ______________that appears in Alice Walker’s excellent novel The Color Purple. That guy was a total dick)

Dear Mr. ____________,
Yes!
Just kidding, it’s not.
Clear glass job by the stoked folks out at Northern Light Surf Shop in Bodega. Glass fins by Rainbow Fin Co. in La Selva.

Dear HHG, I’ve noticed that when my three-year-old puts on her pants, she leads with the right foot. Does this mean she’ll be a goofy? I love my three-year-old, but the rest of us in the family are regular foots, and I don’t want to have to consider a trip to Raglan when the rest of us are stoked about Scorps.
All Right in Guerneville

Dear ARiG, as parents, our job is to support our children no matter their stance predilections. That said, goofyfoots are an abomination of nature. Has there ever been a goofyfoot in the Whitehouse? I rest my case (I know what you’re thinking: Martin Van Buren, eighth President of the United States, was a goofyfoot, which is incorrect—he was actually the first switchtance surfer to reach the presidency). What’s of greater concern, though, is the probability of two regularfoots giving birth to a goofyfoot: one in sixteen hundred. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but you might want to ask yourself this: was your significant other ‘just friends’ with any Kiwi surfers/yoga instructors/massage therapists about four years ago? Remember, the accent might not always be a reliable indicator. Dreadlocks, unkempt beards, and juggling with devil sticks are dead giveaways. Good luck.

And with that, I once again close up the inbox and retire to my afternoon meeting. I hope there are cookies.

Of Thanksgiving, Turkeys, and Fresh Foam

Thanksgiving!

For some, the mere name conjures food porn of the highest order: turkey, duck, chicken (sometimes in the same overall package), ham, mashed potatoes, yams, and more pie than you can shake a big, pie-shaking stick at.

For others it's about family, offering thanks for the many blessings we've received during the year, and maybe having a few too many dry reislings before telling your uncle that he could probably better understand the Occupy Movement if he rolled down the windows of his Lexus and took his first deep, un-airconditioned breath of inequality. Oops!

Most of the world doesn't give a shit about Thanksgiving, though, and that's fine with me. Babies continue to be birthed, waves continue to roll toward shorelines, and my 1998 Toyota Siena minivan continues to guzzle coolant like someone I know guzzled dry reisling before having a few fateful words with their newly-estranged uncle. Oops!

And surfboards! Surfboards are dreamed-up, fantasized about, laden with impossible hopes and dreams, belabored, ordered, anticipated, then finally received in a ritual as complex as the holiday itself. The following is a journey of two fresh boards--one for Mike and one for Kelsey--delivered, surfed, and toasted during our recent Thanksgiving pilgrimage to SanO.

1. The reveal: 7'6" quad egg and 9'4" log.

2. The First Wax. Child labor makes the process faster, though much more likely to get wax in places where wax doesn't go, Like on the bottom. Or on fins. Or in finboxes. Tough call.

3. The Kicking-of-the-Tires: gonna be a good noserider! My 2yr old channeling George Greenough's hair.

4. The Hero Shot.

5. The Locating-of-the-Sweet-Spot.

6. The Staying-Out-Until-Near-Dark-and-Trading-Boards-and-Experiencing-General-Euphoria.

The seasonal spirit more than made up for the I5 traffic, though I have to admit the first spirit I hit after twelve hours of driving was a wee bit of the Talisker 10yr--another reason to give thanks.

As Artie from the Larry Sanders said of Talisker 10, "one day you will die and go to heaven. When you enter the pearly gates and meet God for the first time you will say 'hello' and he will say 'hello' back. When he does, this is what you will smell on his breath."

In my dreams God also has a post-sess saltwater nasal drip going, some serious surf hair, and a smile that says my secret spot is snapping, and I'm in a giving mood. That's an idea of heaven I could really get behind.

Thanks for reading, and hope you had a great holiday.