Old School Hi-Pro

Sally is a woman who knows what she wants. She lives with four huge dogs, makes her own sausage, and has little patience for smalltalk. I suspect she has roots in a Rocky Mountain state. Maybe even Alaska.
A few weeks ago she called to order a board.
"I want a log," she barked into the phone. "Ten feet long and wide as hell."
When asked about her most frequented surf spots, she ticked off a list that would make our most hardened, heavily-bearded northcoast hellmen pucker in fear. Real ugly stuff--top to bottom suckout dredgers, sharky rock pits, thick horror shows with freakish appendages.
"A log?" I asked.
"Yeah," she replied. "And make it old school. Rolled bottom, single fin, heavy as a mofo."
"You might have some problems carrying a really wide board," I offered.
"What do you care?"

The information-gathering process was no less thorny. When I inquired as to her weight, she replied, "Somewhere between zero and a freaking million." When I asked her what she wanted the board to do, she replied, "Everything I can't, I'm forty two years old for God's sake."
I was smitten.
Complex women have always held me in thrall. Their powers of vexation seem unlimited, their motivations hazy. Psychologists might speculate that these women are embodiments of my self critical nature. That I seek them out to deflate an ever-swelling ego. That I attempt to recreate a dynamic with my mother, a complex woman with a penchant for making delicious kugels.
I took on the project--what else could I do?

As is my custom, I emailed her a few snaps of the freshly-shaped board. She replied a week later (message sent at 3:23am) with the following message, perfect in its litigious ambiguity:
You bastard.
The postscript read: get a haircut.

A Man of Many Faces

Derek is a man with many names: D-Dog, D-Day, Double D, WonDerek Woman, Bro Derek, Dericky Martin or, if you're over 30, Dericky Schroeder.
He recently commissioned a "shaper's choice" board, which gave me pause--what do you build for the guy who owns property at J-Bay, paddle-battles PWCs in triple overhead French beachbreak, founded an eco-surf startup, has a ponytail, and hikes into mysto Mexican heavers, living off of bugs and his own hair clippings for weeks on end?
Answer: Hi-Pro twin finner.

6'8", full template, pulled in nose and relaxed rocker for glide and snap.
Double wing pintail=maximum fun in the pocket.

Secret surprise in the back!

Home-made marine ply twinnies with a modified MR template.

Can't tell you about the glass job, as I'm turning it over to Fatty as a "glasser's choice," but I can tell you this: I like surfboards.
And watermelon after Labor Day!

Long Division

I've posted this board before here, but I finally wrestled it out of Leslie's grimy mitts and into the bedroom where it belongs, awaiting pickup, wax, and shreditation.
The cream-tinted deck color is carried over to the bottom, where Fatty unleashed some serious resin kung-fu in what could be interpreted as a fertility symbol, a crop circle, or a libidinous stage of cell division.
Speaking of cell division, my wife was the recipient of a chain Amish Friendship Bread outbreak two weeks ago, and we couldn't be more pleased. Unlike its pesky cousin, the chain email, which promises only an illusory sexual nirvana, Amish Friendship Bread offers wonderful smells from your kitchen and the everlasting friendship that only the combined power of the Amish and baked goods can deliver.
It works like this: someone gives you Amish Friendship Bread yeast. This is the 'starter.' It looks like hot mayo in a plastic bag, but smells better. The starter is incubated for ten days in its plastic universe, then hatched into the world in the form of a lot more starter. You use some of this to make delicious bread for your husband and baby girl, and give the rest of the starter, which you have now divided into plastic bags, to a bunch more people.
They make more bread and starter, and the chain remains unbroken. We realize our human connectedness through hollow calories and sugary crusts.
The recipe for starter is protected by an ancient Pennsylvania Dutch curse, but can also be found on Wikipedia.
Speaking of babies on surfboards, here's mine. When a surfboard becomes available, she climbs on, waddles straight to the nose and poses, awaiting a photograph. Although this behavior seems to be growing in popularity in some longboard circles, it's much cuter if the perpetrator is fourteen months old.
You might be thinking 'regular-foot,' but she's actually switch-stancing here.
Hope you're getting some surf.

Cult of the Roundtail

People want to talk about roundtails. In lineups, parking lots, wherever. A surly old bearded dude stink-eyed me for an hour the other day, then finally paddled over. I braced for the altercation, but all he said was, "roundtail?"
"Roundtail," I confirmed.
He threw me a shaka. "Roundtail" he proclaimed and paddled away.
Old dudes throwing shakas up here is just damn funny, no matter how you slice it.
Here's a wide-tailed eggy roundtail, 6'5", with a single wing and some double concaves.
Both my dust collection system and my cd player are now on the 'injured' list.
The roundtail couldn't care less.

Strange Bedfellows

It's been a strange week. So strange, in fact, that it warrants a list. What follows is the strangeness, in increasing order, of things that happened over the last few days. Elaborations will follow.
1. 93.7 BOB FM
2. Westuit pilferization
3. Colored J-Bay board replacement
4. Lust
The week started with the CD player in my shop succumbing to foam dust inhalation (the White Lung), refusing to cooperate with my musical selections, and getting stuck on 93.7 BOB FM, whose tag line is 'we play anything.' It seemed strange to me, in the early hours of my BOB naivete, that a radio station's advertising campaign would boast of a purposeful lack of discriminating taste, but no stranger than a 'set list' that included Falco's 'Rock Me Amadeus' nestled up against Fleetwood Mac's 'Songbird,' topped off by Sisqo's 'The Thong Song' (that last one I had to Google to find the artist...here's to hoping that the wife doesn't check my browser history). And that was just the first hour.
I tried music-free shaping sessions, but that seemed wrong. I can't believe I'm actually writing this, but more wrong than Dylan's exquisite 'Girl From the North Country,' butted up against Europe's 'The Final Countdown.' Good lord.
Strange, also, that my wife and I had our westuits stolen off the drying line right here in our front yard. If you see a medium-sized dude and a size 8 lady wearing black, hooded Excel 5/4s in your local lineup, strike first and ask questions later.
Stranger still, my buddy J called and ordered a new board (pictured above). J is a Northern California surfer through-and-through (though he lives in San Francisco and calls Ocean Beach his homebreak, which is technically Central California), in that he hasn't bought a new board, well, ever. The ethic up here seems to rotate between beg, borrow, and steal, but never purchase. The last board J bought was ten years ago on a trip to Jeffrey's Bay. He surfs it exclusively (although he has they typical NorCal garage stuffed with bizarre, yellowing beater boards from decades best left behind design-wise), no matter what the conditions, and I have a sneaking suspicion it is only so he can say 'my J-Bay board' in mixed company. Which he does often.
He asked for a board to replace 'my J-Bay board' (see? He has to get it in there), and we agreed that a performance-y, modern-y, quad fish would be the call. J's a bi guy, so the design called for a stretched-out stick with a more aggressive rocker for navigating OB's less-than-welcoming sandbars.
We were about to hang up when he said, "um, we haven't talked about color yet."
Color? For an OB guy?
"Yeah, I was thinking about, like, a blue tint or something..." J sounded sheepish. "And a pinline," he added quickly, as if he were forced to speak an unpleasant truth about himself. Normally, I would have relished the moment, extending the conversation to color tones, pinline shades, and gloss/polish options, but I was caught unawares.
Sometimes when I finish a shape, it comes into the house. Some boards just shouldn't have to sleep in the shop. On rare occasions, the board makes its way into the bedroom, where the eyes can rest upon its curvyness as the mind drifts toward peace. This practice has gone on for years, and my lovely wife has been more than tolerant, but yesterday's events--the strangest yet--have called into question even this most innocent of indulgences.
J's board was a 'bedroomer,' and rested carefully against the wall closest to my side of the bed. The foundations of trust were being poured, and then I returned this afternoon from doing errands to discover this:
In typical NorCal fashion, the dastardly fish had snuck back into the shop, grabbed a hapless 7'2" hybrid, and lured her back for his own torrid purposes. The two were unglassed, unrepentant.
What's worse is that somewhere in the distance I heard the faint trumpeting of horns, a haunting melody, voices lifted in song. I glanced to the clock radio on the night table and noted the new positioning on the dial--93.7!
Mad with seductive inclination, the New J-Bay Board had reset my radio to BOB FM, and now, to add insult to injury, I could just make out the musical stylings of 80's duo Wham! who were encouraging me to 'wake me up before you go-go.'
I don't know which was more biting--the foamdust in my sheets, or the lyrical irony at hand.
Fortunately, I was able to quickly reset the dial back to 88.3, and the soothing tones of Terry Gross' Fresh Air interview with actress/chanteuse Julie Andrews filled the room, restoring order, making me wonder how do you solve a problem like Maria...?
In non-weird news, my baby girl is walking all over the place, as if crawling was something she had heard about but never really got around to trying. The joy of uprightness, this gift of mobility, is just the thing I needed to keep things in perspective.
Next update: Less jibba, more jabba--have no fear, board porn is on the way!

The Modern Brometheus

"I seek the everlasting ices of the North,
where you will feel the misery of cold and fronts."
-The Monster, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus

Local surf diehard Brent is my new hero. Born and raised in Sonoma County (heretofore referred to as SoCo), father, enviro-champion, and stoked beyond belief, whether it be freezing cold dawn patrol or freezing cold anytime else. Actually, I've never heard the guy complain about the cold, which leaves him almost peerless in this most unwelcome of surf destinations.
And he shows up with beers.
Many of those beers are represented in the design concept of this board.
The Frankenfish stands at 7'9" (the champagne of board lengths), is longboardy wide, fishy tailed and ???? nosed. It's a quad, and features a single wing at the rear of the front fins.
The wing creates a pivot point right at the spot where I dropped a Tecate on the nearly completed shape. My bad.
Of course, no Frankenfish would be complete without the beak nose--a feature I feel really ties the shape together.
This crisp Ice9 blank will get a stellar full board tint from Fatty in the weeks to come. Color? I'm not going to spoil the surprise, but let's just say it rhymes with 'yellow with a blue pinline.'
On a more gastrointestinal note, remember that soup my wife reminded me to buy last week when she was feeling ill? Well, I bought a ton of the stuff (can you ever have enough soup around?), and it really paid off this week as we both got really sick. The roasted corn and pepper is our current favorite--sweet and spicy!

ReSession

Up here in Sonoma County, we think about wine a lot. When asked about the impending recession, a local grower told me not to worry. "When the economy is bad, people want to have a drink," he said. "When the economy is good, people want to have a drink." He was old and wearing the crustiest Wranglers I'd ever seen, so I took his word for it. This was not the first time I'd heard this argument.
Some of us spend a lot of time up here thinking about surfing, and a similar logic can be applied: we surf to heal, to mourn, to express frustration or anger or fear or love or joy, we surf to celebrate, and we surf to feel connected to something greater than ourselves. A lot of people surf because they want to, but most surfers surf because they have to. It is how we make sense, and it can't be slowed by lagging economies, or falling housing markets, or births or deaths or aging bodies.
So, as another recession gathers energy and surges up behind us, it's our responsibility to put our heads down and paddle, drop in, and point it to the shoulder. And, as we paddle back out for more, it's our responsibility to hoot for the next guy or gal dropping in. What else are we going to do?
Of course, the best way to do this would be on some fresh foam, like this sugary little 5'11" diamond tail. New boards pump money into local economies, support American businesses, and rejuvenate life-giving stoke. The American businesses at work here are Ice9 Blanks, which offers, in my opinion, the best foam available today. They're a sugar-based MDI foam (no petroleum), so their carbon footprint is better than traditional polyurethane foams. They're strong and light and snappy and a pleasure to shape. This board will be glassed with Resin Research epoxy resin, eliminating VOCs, and producing a much 'greener' board than is being mass produced at the moment.
Of course, Leslie will do the glassing. Her labor charges are mostly divided up between her lizards, snakes, cats, chickens, dogs, Bob, and carnivorous plants, so you'll be hooking them up, too. Keep it local!
On a less triumphant note, my lovely wife is suffering from a cold right now. This is the sad shopping list tacked to the fridge that greeted me this morning...