Of Beards, Boards, and the Naming of Things

It would be a nailbiter if TofuChris and I had a beard-growing contest. My Scottish/Jewish heritage has me predisposed for both facial-hair density and uniform coverage, but Chris's lack of shame and humble grooming habits more than make up for the sparseness of his face bush.

9'4"

Plus, Chris pays little heed to the Full Beard Protocol, which clearly mandates beard-free faces between Memorial Day and Labor Day (similar to the Law-of-White-Pants for douches).
Beards aside, we figured it was time for Chris's signature model, mostly because he's been begging me for a 'signature model' for years, and I don't give a shit either way. We nailed the design, a high-pro noserider for  beachbreak shredding, but got stuck on the name.

In Genesis 2:19, Adam named all the animals in one big push. Impressive. We tried this with the help of a few IPAs, but came up with bupkis.
The obvious choice was the TofuChris model, but agreed this could isolate hysterics and meat eaters--my core constituencies.
I like keeping it simple, and offered Hi-Pro Beachbreak Noserider. Shot down.
Chris liked The Throatee, after his beard, which comes in low and hangs on dearly. Perhaps a bit close to the Neckbeard model by an industry leader in imported boards...

Names are central to identity and should be taken seriously. Scientists are keenly aware of this, which is why we have the Dumbo Octopus and the Dhole wild dog.
So I'm taking matters into my own hands and calling this hi-pro beachbreak noserider model the Helen Putnam, after Sonoma County teacher, mayor, and county supervisor. What a lady!
Plus, it's the name of the Ike's sandwich TofuChris is most likely to shred after one more punch on his Sandwich Card--avocado, breaded eggplant, cheddar, and french dressing, yo!

 It's business time.

Le Bronson

Who introduces a new classic longboard model while the NW swells are still pumping long-period juice onto our rocky shores?
I do, bitches!
This is The Bronson. In France, you would call it Le Bronson.

Know what feels good? trimming.
The Bronson is designed to be an all-round, crazy fun, trim machine. The nose is pulled in so that it finds the pocket, then lodges itself firmly into it. The tail is wide, the bottom is rolled, and there's an edge behind the fin for release.

Will it noseride?
 Like its namesake, The Bronson is no one-trick pony. But yes, it will noseride.
The rest of the time you can find it locked in trim after taking the drop, fading back toward the curl, wrapping around, and finding the sweet, sweet, sweet spot on the wave.

This one is for Northcoast ripper Brendan. He likes surfing cold, dark, meaty waves. He looks like Paul Bunyan and could totally kick my ass, but he's a super nice guy. It has a tailblock.

Bronson. Nuff Said.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

When the Weird sisters, foretellers of Macbeth’s fate in Shakespeare’s play of the same name, describe Scotland with, “fair is foul, and foul is fair,” they may as well have been talking about surfing the Northcoast. Surfers get absolutely jazzed about conditions up here that are, by most standards, terrible. Wind, cold, rain, wind, cold, fog, wind, thunder, whitecaps, monstrous sucking beachbreak dumpers, sharks, wind. Whatever.
The first year I surfed up here I made the mistake of bitching about the wind to another surfer as we hunkered in the lineup, sideshores blowing so hard we had to keep our eyes squeezed shut. “Not a big fan of whitecaps,” I confessed after an hour of this nonsense.
“Whitecaps?” he asked, spinning his board and clawing into an absurdly thick double-up. “Up here we call ‘em glassycaps!” he shouted, then disappeared over the ledge.
Several years ago I was checking a sandbar at one of our local beachbreaks on a typical day: windy, blown-to-bits closeouts, glassycaps galore, and not even the hint of an open face. Still, five guys were on it.
As I watched, absolute in my decision to head back home to a hot cup of coffee, all five spun on their boards and made haste to the beach. Not a common sight up here, but not an uncommon one, either.
“See a fin?” I stupidly asked one of the guys as we stood on the shore, squinting toward the ocean.
“Couple,” he said.
“Gonna pack it in?” I asked.
He shot me a what-you-talking-about-Willis face and said, “and miss out on this?” His hand gestured to the malevolent shorebreak, the pounders beyond unloading onto an ill-formed sandbar barely visible through the pea-soup air.
Five minutes later the five men huddled, agreed the two sharks were long gone, then paddled straight back into the fog. I made my way back to the parking lot, quickly pulled on my wetsuit, and agreed with the dude on the beach: who would miss out on this?
It’s not until the fourth act that the Northcoast/Macbeth parallel dissolves.
“Such welcome and unwelcome things at once,” says McDuff, the play’s moral champion. “’tis hard to reconcile.”
If he were a surfer up here, it wouldn’t be hard to reconcile at all.
This 9’something LB is for local shredder/teacher JL, stranger neither to The Bard nor our frigid waters. Shaping boards for teachers is a pleasure—these guys understand community better than almost anyone I can think of. Plus, you can say something like, “let’s screw our courage to the sticking place” when suiting up on a big day and they don’t think you’re insane.
Win win.
As per usual, all color is pigmented resin, and all glasswork by Leslie Anderson at Fatty Fiberglass who may or may not be making out with some dude in Alaska at this very moment. Much to give thanks for this year!

The Best Fiance You Never Had

The title of this post refers to a short story by Pam Houston, selected by none other than John Updike for his Greatest American Short Stories of the Century anthology. Upon completion of a writing class with Ms. Houston many years ago, I was left with two memorable bits: the first is that if you ever get a novel published, make sure that the cover is blue. They sell better.
Next, she really likes dogs.
That's about it, but not a bad takeaway as far as writing workshops go.
The spirit of the post refers to soon to be married SF surf enthusiast Sara, who ordered this longboard for her fiance. What a lady!
Let's get technical in our discussion of the pigment work on this board: all color except the orange stripes were added via resin tinting during the lamination.
Ok, not really that technical, but impressive nonetheless.
Speaking of love, Fatty's got it bad, and in her ardor has been flipping boards at a fever pitch. Good time to add a new stick to her queue.
Pictured alongside 9'2" surfboard is a 33"tall 3 1/2 year old (seated) for perspective.

Airing out the Inbox

Sophocles once quipped, “The true mark of a man lies in his email activity.” Amen. Modern social anthropologists, like yourselves, long ago forsook sifting through the garbage of humanity in search of answers, choosing instead to focus their lenses of scientific voyeurism onto more digital affairs. Is someone aligning themselves with terrorists? Check their email. Is there one amongst us who shops Amazon with Les Affaires abandon? It’s in the inbox. Do thoughts of adding girth to his flaccid schvantz occupy the lion’s share of your teenager’s time? I wouldn’t recommend it, but a quick AOL search would reveal the answer. You see, only email can fill in the blank spaces on the map our character.
That is why, under the banner of honesty and full disclosure, every third Tuesday I fling open the doors of the HHG inbox from the past few weeks. Onward into the unknown!

Dear HHG,
Is it possible my husband Paul ordered another board from you within the last month? I ask because there’s a blue longboard with double pinlines in the garage that I haven’t seen before. When I ask him about it, he just mumbles and points at our son. He's eight.
Thank you,
Paul’s Wife Who Is Saving Up For The Down Payment On A New House
Dear PWWISUPFTDPOANH,
Under the Shaper’s Disclosure Act of 1999, it is not compulsory for me to answer your query. However, I will say that as of last week, Paul is one step closer to a free sandwich*. Also, when he picked up something the other day (not saying what it was that he slipped into his new 9’6 board bag), he did mention how much he loved you, and how understanding you are. Maybe not in those exact words, but still.
*The HHGSC (HeadHighGlassySandwichClub) offers a free sandwich** from Traverso's, a Santa Rosa tradition for four generations, for customers who reach a certain number of board orders. In order to stave off a run on new orders, I won't give the exact number, though it's between five and seven.
**Sandwich includes one (non-alcoholic) drink, but no chips, as chips are ridiculous.
This may, or may not be your husband's new stick.

Dear HHG,
Is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 the best fall-related ode?
Yours in poetry,
Tina from Marina

Hi TfM,
No. It is clear Shakespeare never visited California during this most lovely of seasons when he penned, “when yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang/Upon those boughs which shake against the cold…”
Instead, let me recommend Keats’ To Autumn. At just 24 years old, he nailed it right from the opener: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness…”
Huzzah!

HHG,
How do you know when you’re getting old?
Fondly,
Humbolt-er Every Day

HED,
Do you make strange noises when you sit down?
Do you ever wish your board were 2” thicker?
Have you ever opted out from a surf session to work in your vegetable garden?
Wait, that might just be me...

Dear HHG,
I’m thinking about relocating—does Sonoma County have good surf?
Sincerely,
California Dreamin’

Dear CD,
No, SoCo does not have good surf. Especially last week.
San Diego does, though!
What we do have is excellent wine. Let me recommend Trentadue’s Old Patch Red (2005). A 2008 Sonoma County Harvest Fair winner in Best of Class, and a steal at Bottle Barn right now for $9.99. The convenient screw top makes it even more appealing as a daily drinker.

And with that, I seal the HHG inbox for another month.
Don’t forget this Thursday’s Surf Movie Night at Santa Rosa’s Toad ‘n The Hole Pub in historic Railroad Square. This month’s feature is going to be solid. Festivities begin around darkish.

Twins

Ever since the first zygote divided into two separate embryos, humans have reserved special places in their rites and mythologies for twins.
The Igbo peoples of Nigeria saw twins as a curse, and would sacrifice them to the forest (as detailed in Chinua Achebe’s excellent novel Things Fall Apart).
The Navajo honor twins as descendants of the twin gods of sun and moon, believing that they will help restore order to the chaos of the world.
Americans like to stick a fake goatee on one of them and call them Evil.
Dr. Spock’s evil twin showed up in 1967, sporting the trademark Evil-Twin Beard.
Cartman's evil twin broke social boundaries, becoming the first elementary school kid with an Evil-Twin Beard to go prime time.
Surfers have our own preoccupacy with twins--twin fins, twin pins, Twinzers, the Hobgoods. Even our own Leslie Anderson isn't immune to their thrall, as evidenced by a pair of longboards that recently left her shop.
Jason's diamond tail log with 3/4" red cedar stringer seems to have shared some embryonic developing time with its twin below, blogged about here:
Both were shaped by hand in Sonoma county with smaller Northcoast waves in mind . Both feature single fin goodness, volan glasswork, and resin art by Leslie.
But what is perhaps most intriguing about twins is how they differ--which one is more popular with the ladies, which one is more fearless in the hockey rink, which one dances with their tongue out.
The differences in the above boards are equally intriguing—the bigass cedar stringer vs. the high density foam one, the diamond tail vs. the rounded pin, the clean shaven vs. the goateed one (one of these is not actually a design feature).
Although some may see one of the above boards as an evil incarnation of the other, I prefer the Navajo interpretation that twins are two parts of the same whole. That they, together, can separate the good from the evil, and order where before existed only chaos.
Or at least score us some waves when it’s head high or under.

Long Board and a Short Sentence

Like most of us, Ted’s aquatic aesthetic mirrors his terrestrial one. In the water, his lines are clean, sparse. His movements always seek the economical. I once saw him track so high on a wave that it seemed reckless, but his fin trail was a thing of beauty—a lazer-straight scratch etched into an impossibly steep wall.
On land, Ted has brought the voicemail board order to a similar artform. His messages are so spare that they, too, flirt with recklessness. How else could you interpret his first voicemail order?
“Ripstick.”
Or this single-syllabic beauty from a few years ago:
“Fish.”
This gem came in last year, wide-open in its interpretational range:
“Quad.”
Sometimes Ted’s voice seems disguised, as if trying to limit the actual breath he's expending.
Thankfully Ted opened up a bit with last week’s message. Compared to the others, it seemed more Tom Robbins than Ernest Hemingway.
“Hi Pro-Log. Styro.”
Still, I had to admire the effort. Beside the abbreviations for 'performance' and 'longboard,' he substituted ‘EPS’ for ‘styro,’ saving himself a syllable.
Nice.

Glasser's Choice

The exhilaration in making a shortboard lies in the imagination—wondering what lines the board will be asked to draw, what spaces on the wave-map it will be asked to fill.
The shortboard, the thing of it, is a tool. A vessel. It gains us access to something else.
Shaping longboards, for me, is a different experience. The joy in making them comes from the thing itself. Witnessing its taking-of-form—its process is its own end. Not that the lines of a shortboard aren’t beautiful, or that shaping a longboard doesn’t stimlate the imagination. The bend of a nose rocker or the curve of a rounded pintail can absolutely shorten the breath, and walking down the length of a longboard rail is as close to shaking hands with Velzy as I’ll ever get.
But when people are in my shop and there’s a longboard on the racks, they can’t keep their hands off of it.

And sometimes I can’t get my hands off of them when they come back from Leslie’s shop.

This one's got some bells and whistles--blue high density foam stringer, red cedar sticks, opaque pigment volan deck patch, glass leash loop, and some sweet resin deck lines from the hands of La Meistra.
Poplar and bloodwood fin, and some resin tip-nips to keep things real at the nose and rear.
Andale!

Planes, Burros, and Automobiles

Shakespeare-enthused educator, adopter of pound animals, mountain-man-turned-Monterey-Bay-shredder, and San Francisco Giants diehard Kevin had a proposition for me when he picked up his board last month. After the requisite rail fondling and rocker sighting, he put the board gently down, cracked a fresh Tecate, and sat at my kitchen table. I knew what was coming.
“Instead of something impersonal, like cash, what do you say we work out a trade for my new sled?” he asked, smiling.
I didn’t flinch. “Nope.”
This happens quite often up here NOTB, where currency can take many shapes. So far this summer, I’ve been offered a ginormous bag of weed (declined), a live pig (declined), a to-scale hand-tooled Russian miniature train (declined), and two authentic WWI British Army helmets with a ginormous bag of weed on the side (declined).
Kevin’s smile widened. “So I guess a trip to Cabo would be out of the question?”
“Um.”
“Flight, car rental, hotel stay, and all food and drinks included?”
“Um...”
Kevin knew I was close to breaking. “First wave on my new longboard?”
(Lamination, sanding, Giants-inspired resin panels, and polish by Leslie Anderson)
So I did what any other wife-fearing, child-providing father would do in this situation: put the family on a direct flight to the grandparents and headed south with a diverse quiver, a backpack stuffed with fins, and a revitalizing lack of neoprene.
The mission was short but successful. Many waves were ridden, boards were put through their paces, smiles were in abundance, and the swell was unfailing. The only tension during our five day stay came from this over-curious mini-local:
Whether this burrito was a longboarder, a photo slut, or a Giants fan is anyone's guess, but after checking out the fresh foam, he wandered into the shade under a palapa and began eating someone's flip-flop. Way to regulate!

A Clean, Poorly-Lit Surfboard

There's something about a clear longboard with a T-Band stringer that makes me feel good. A simple, elegant set of curves without bells, whistles, mudflaps, spinners, dingle balls, or anything else to distract the eye and the water.

I'm thinking of calling this new model: The 9'2x22.5 2+1 Squash Tail Longboard Designed with both NorCal Beachbreak and Central Cal Poinbreaks in Mind for a Tall, Svelte History-Teaching RipMaster.
Thoughts on the new marketing approach?

There's something about a guy showing up to pick up his board with a cold sixer. The board is a speed demon, as well as the brew.
And, like the IPA, this shred sled is all Sonoma County. Take that, fossil fuels!

The Long of It

Enough jibba-jabba, here's a longboard for Bodega Bay surf enthusiast Mike.
Mike is famously hard on his boards. Despite the hefty glass job on this 9'6" noseridin' special, I drew up a Bill of Longboard Rights upon order that looked something like this:
I, Mike, hereby pledge to take care of this surfboard most beautifully glassed by Fatty. I promise not to leave it on the top of my car, uncovered, when I spontaneously decide to drive to Tahoe for the weekend. I promise not to paddle out at Bobo with my dog perched on the deck. I also give my word that I will not attempt any ding repairs, as I have proven to suck at this, and instead I assure that I will bring my freshly damaged board straight to an industry professional."
The comp band is to prove that he's full of it when he claims a cheater five.

The Perfect Sandwich

Start with one newly-polished slice of coke-bottle tinted longboard deck.
Slowly add (might want to ask the kids to leave the room at this point) Neil Diamond's 1973 Hot August Nights album cover. It won a Grammy, so you know it's good.
Do not substitute other celebrated 1973 albums, such as Carly Simon's No Secrets or David Cassidy's ironically titled, Rock Me Baby.
In a pinch, The Who's Quadraphenia or Stevie Wonder's Innervisions will do.
Top with another slice of coke-bottle longboard deck from a different angle, this one highlighting what appears to be a dirty tailblock. I don't know what's on the floor of Fatty's shop, but I suggest wearing shoes.