Stripes and Stripes Forever

9'2 Bronson for my old buddy, Mark.

Mark and I met in 1985 and, like most kids, we explored the poles of the teenage experience to define our own identities--we were skaters, slackers, authority challengers, artists. We were writers, scholars, philosophers, dudes who flirted with each others' sisters. We were off-the-gridders, dirt bags, pretty boys, climbers, surfers, journalists, lady-crazed Jewbags, monks, walkers, bikers, boaters, shut-ins, fly fishermen, mountain towners, club kids, river guides, musicians.
Interestingly, the middle ground we've reached thirty years later, each on our separate corners of the continent, looks a lot like the suburbs.
Go figure.

True friends teach us about ourselves. Mark showed me, in seventh grade, the difference between creating and being creative. Anybody can make something, but it takes something truly special to live in the world between stuff that exists and stuff that could exist.
I've learned to visit this space, but Mark has always inhabited it.
You can check out his design/build studio HERE.

If you shred Maine waters, be on the lookout for Mark and his new sled, with not-quite-black and white, not-quite horizontal (by design!) lamination striping by Tony Mikus, a creative force of his own in Santa Cruz.

Recommended Pairing: this Bronson pairs best with a lukewarm Heineken in a can, poached from your folk's fridge on a warm summer night. Best when split between two underage drinkers in a tree fort.

Redwood Tramps

Things were simpler back then, when hobos ruled the earth. There weren’t as many pressures to appear ‘clean’ or ‘hygienic’ or ‘nonthreatening to children’; Whiskers were encouraged, explored for crumbs, made pointy. Food fell into two categories: stew and whiskey. Often the stews featured whiskey.

And people looked you in the eye. Unless, of course, they were missing an eye and the other tended to wander. There was a lot of that. Perhaps because of the whiskey stew, which was really room-temperature turpentine in a metal bucket.

Anyway, surf transportation was better then, too. No namby-pamby googaws like 'wheels,' or 'a roof,' and the combination of a plein air handcar, turpentine poisoning, and scabies made for a refreshing trip to the coast.

And the waves!

The waves were at least 100 times better then!

Or maybe they were 100 times worse.

It's tough to say, really, as the hobos wrote their histories in charcoal on the insides of their lambswool vests, then either traded their vests for berserker tonics or ate them outright. Oh well.

Although these days the redwood hobos are almost extinct, a few still survive. The most notorious are the Northcoast’s AppleJack Gang. Neither handsome nor in possession of a remarkable mental acumen, the AppleJack Gang is known more for shredding single fin logs with oldschool style, flagrantly experimenting with midlengths, and mercilessly schralping teeny fishes and eggs, mostly while under the influence of their self-distilled namesake thirst quencher (pictured bolted to car).

A rare sighting indeed: the entirety of the AppleJack Gang (From left to right). Boxcar Brent Bafflegab, the Soup Slurper. Dogballs Dan Dogballs, the Man With the Cat-Like Testicles. Linty Jay McStinky, the Cotton Sock Enthusiast. Acrimonious Andy O'Feely, the Absquatulator (aka: Sir Francis Drank).

Of Sparkplugs, Sandbars, and Seasons Greetings

I love it when this:
Turns into this:
6' Sparkplug for bicoastal surf enthusiast/surfboard sketch artist Kevin, who's flying out from the East Coast, grabbing his new stick, celebrating X-Mas with the in-laws, then jetting to Mexico all in about a 12 hour period.
Five Futures finboxes of fun. The Sparkplug is packed full of curves and designed for maximum rippage in small to a-lot-larger-than-small sized surf. It works well as a three or four finner. Up north, e. shreds his gen 1 Sparkplug with a bonzer-inspired setup.
Speaking of the East Coast, Mrs. HHG, the little HHGitas and I just arrived here and you know what? It's freaking freezing and I've gotten no fewer than 10 emails in the last 12 hours informing me that my homebreak is totally snapping and everyone is getting so pitted and it's the best, cleanest surf of the winter and the agricultural runoff from the rain isn't that bad as long as you've had your hepatitis shots...etc.
Still, as I write this, stuffed into more fleece than in an entire REI catalog, parked in front of a space heater, sucking down hot tea as if it's the elixir of life itself and contemplating how soft I've gotten, I can still muster enough holiday spirit to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. And coming from a semi-frozen Jew, you know it's real.

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.

War Pony Chronicles: Cars and Stripes

Aloha amigos, much going on up here NoTB. For starters, the recent south swell seemed to offer many things to many surfers—from glassy peelers to dredging sphincter bombs, depending on where, when, and whether or not there were any eyewitnesses. The Gulf of Alaska is quietly waking up, eyeing the California coastline lying next to him in bed, and thinking, “Let's do this.”
It’s been many moons since we’ve seen ‘overhead++’ on Surfline’s Northern California forecast (though not so many moons, perhaps, since Surfline overcalled a swell), so our fingers are crossed, our minds already selecting boards, breaks, and tidal conditions.
As if this isn’t enough—the bounty of Fall is indeed colossal!—the fourth annual Great Handcar Regatta takes place this Sunday, September 26th, from 10am until 6pm in Santa Rosa’s historic Railroad Square. In case you’ve been stuck on the 101 for a year, the Handcar Regatta is like a shot of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade dropped into a hot glass of Burning Man, then chased with a nose-clearing dose of what would happen if Federico Fellini and Tom Waits made a baby. Handmade and handpowered rail cars, unwholesome costumes, belly dancers, freaks on stilts, outmoded facial hair combinations, nipples, and more ass cleavage than a whole season of NASCAR.
This year’s theme is Magical India, whatever the hell that means.
Here’s a sample :


This turning of the seasons also requires a tuning of the quiver, and Dr. J’s new War Pony will take him through all of Autumn’s graces—from doily, bubblegum and lace southswell playthings to, stomach-churning, sawed-off, deep water discharges.
Plus, it’s got stripes.

The Latest

Over here at HeadHighGlassy we like to keep things light—a quick shot of handcrafted boardporn, and perhaps a few musings on our shared experience as surfers in the 21st century. However, for the last seven or eight weeks, I’ve been sick. Comically at times, but mostly not. Mostly sick in the way that saw my wife and I using vocabulary normally heard in bad medical dramas. Sick in the way that that last week’s lab technician grimaced when she saw the constellation of blood-test punctures dotting my arms. Sick in the way that, over time, the radiologist running the cat-scanner and I learned each other’s work schedules, favorite books, children’s soccer achievements.
As I regain health, I’d love to pen a flip account of my last two months—ending with But Boards Must Go On!—were it not for the fact that I can recall, exactly, how terrifying it all was.
But it’s true, Boards Must Go On. The moon pushes and pulls, tides rise and fall. Pulses of energy gather into waves, hurl themselves at distant shores, reconstitute in different forms. For the briefest of interplanetary eye-blinks, some of us get to tap into that energy, and surfboards are a simple, ingenious way to do this. So while I’m humbled by many things lately—my wife and her infinite stores of patience and love, my mom’s homemade chicken pot pie, caregivers, viruses—I’m also thrilled to be harnessed by something larger than the self. To be a part of a community of weird, inspiring people who call or email or stop by to demand, in no uncertain terms, that their surfboard needs be met. Fortunately, they’re also patient, and this afternoon as I popped in the iBuds and stepped into the shaping bay for the first time in a month, I paused to feel this transference of energy. This live-wire scream of the planer, these grains of foam dust whirling through spider cracks of light, this unshakable throb of possibility. Health waxes, illness wanes. Boards are shaped. Handed over. Ridden. We are immersed, enslaved by joules and the law of conservation. Sometimes this doesn't work to our favor. Sometimes it does. And sometimes it just feels pretty fucking good.
Onto the boardporn!
Esteban's new double-wing quad stealth fish.
The stealth designation is given to any board that immediately goes into a board bag, is sneaked past any economically co-dependent members of the household, and is incorporated (with crossed fingers) into the existing quiver without mention or fanfare.
Although it's doubtful this one will escape notice, a man's gotta try.
As per usual, Leslie Anderson at Fatty Fiberglass makes the stuff pretty. All color, except the resin pinlines, done during the lamination. Badass.
I hope you are all well.

The Spitfire

On a warm summer’s day in 1940, Adolf Hitler commanded his air force, the Luftwaffe, to bomb the hell out of England.
The United Kingdom, with its trademark gusto, dispatched the Royal Air Force. The Battle of Britain, the first campaign ever fought entirely by aircraft, was officially underway.
The Luftwaffe had firepower, but the British had heart. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth refused to leave Buckingham Palace, inspiring the nation with their pluck. The Germans seemed indomitable with their Messerschmitt Bf 110s (nicknamed the Zerstorer or ‘Destroyer’), a fast twin-engine, long-range aircraft.
But the RAF had a feisty retort: the Spitfire.
Designed with clean lines for speed and elliptical wings for agility, the single-seater Spitfire immediately began kicking ass. It could accelerate faster than the Zerstorer, bank in tighter arcs, and fire more rounds.
The result: the RAF, powered by vigor and the Spitfire, handed the Nazis their first defeat and turned the war around. Not too shabby.
San Francisco shred enthusiast Giles is lucky enough to have a real-live war hero in his family. His stepfather served in the RAF during the Battle of Britain. Wanna know what he flew?
The Spitfire.
He was 19 years old.
Each of the color marking on a Spitfire conveys meaning--the yellow rail bands and black-and-white stripes communicated their allied association, while the British flag was represented by the red and blue circle (interesting fact: RAF and American fighter planes during WWII ditched the red part of the circle, as they could be mistaken for Japanese aircraft). The pilots put red tape over their guns to keep them from freezing, as seen in the pigment 'patches' in the nose of Giles' board.
Every color on this board is pigmented resin.
A mistress of understatement, when Leslie saw a drawing of the task before her, said only, "I'll need to order more tape."