Foiled Again

Fish

 Is

Good

Your Title Here

I shaped a clear winged keel for a customer last month. He rode it the day he picked it up, which was about twenty minutes after it was polished.

Did he give a shit about recommended curing times?
No, he did not give a shit about recommended curing times.

He was very excited about the board after he surfed it, which made me very excited about the board, so I shaped another one.

Why? Because I like the shape, and I couldn't sleep due to an afternoon cup of coffee. The coffee was a bad choice.

Also, there was this blank in my shop. Just staring at me. Daring me.

And now it's daring you!

You see, it's for sale.

5'8x 21x 2 5/8. Single wing. Cedar stringer. Gloss and polish. Foiled. Fun beachbreak board for someone between 48 and 300lbs who enjoys surfing.

Lokbox boxes and CI keels (not pictured) for maximum shreddage.

Three Fin Twin Pin

Carl Ekstrom developed the first asymmetrical surfboard in 1965. He was twenty-four years old. Although the concept of asymmetry never really gained traction in the surfing mainstream, sailboards and snowboards have been capitalizing on the design idea for decades.
Re-inspired by fish designs of the last few years, Ekstrom again put planer to foam and has been coming up with some cool asymmetrical stuff. This board is inspired by Ekstrom, a low-rockered EPS blank that I’ve had lying around for years, and a demo fish that was returned to me with one keel fin missing. Not broken, just gone.
When I asked the borrower if the board looked at all off, he took a hard look, scratched his head, and said, “well, the color’s kinda girlie.”
So, what to do with an EPS fish blank and one keel fin?
This.
And this.
And this.
Resin pigment work by Leslie Anderson of Fatty Fiberglass. When I asked her what she thought of the board she said, "who cares? I'm in love."

The Undecider

Numbers scare the hell out of me. Want an example? 300. Terrifying number.
This is why I have a deep respect for Northcoast shredder and beard-growing enthusiast Chris, who chooses to remove numbers from his life entirely.
Chris wanted a board, but didn’t concern himself with the details. Our conversation went like this:
Me: What are you looking for?
Chris: Shaper’s choice.
Me: Glassing?
Chris: Have at it.
Me: (scrunching eyes with what-you-talkin’-‘bout-Willis-like suspicion) When do you need it?
Chris: Whenever.
With respect to Chris, I went for a shortish, wideish, thinnish little number that would like nothing more than a wave about yay-high--preferably with water temps hovering around just right.

Leslie's glassing is good.

Blue Monday

Blue Monday is when I display the blue board of the week, and open the HeadHighGlassy email account in attempt to answer your queries.
Today's board features the resin work of Leslie Anderson and her striking Hastings pigment coloration.

And today's first query comes from Primo, who writes:
Dear HeadHighGlassy,
I like looking at pictures of other peoples' surfboards on the Internet. My girlfriend doesn't approve, claiming that we have plenty of surfboards to look at right here in our apartment. How do I tell her that my looking at other surfboards doesn't at all detract from the ones available at home?
Your e-friend,
Primo

Hi Primo,
Healthy relationships are built on communication. Clearly, your relationship is not healthy, so I suggest waiting until your girlfriend is in the shower until you pursue your hobby. This might mean getting up early if she's a first-shifter. If that's a problem, you might want to get a new job where you are at home with a speedy wifi connection while she is at work, thinking sweet thoughts about you and your trustworthiness.
HHG
ps--Never forsake the 'clear history' feature on your browser.

Blue resin pinlines (top and bottom!), and a blue-tinted deck patch under the rear foot, as if a Blue Man had pressed his ass directly onto the tail of the board after an award-winning Las Vegas performance.
Next letter!
Dear HeadHighGlassy,
My name is Dave, but the guys in the parking lot want to attach an 'O.' What do you think of DaveO?

Aloha Dave,
Adult men should not append their name with an 'O.' This doesn't apply to Steve or John (but does apply to Jon), or Magnet. You should exercise particular caution if your name is Poley, Orie, Tont or the first questioner.

Leslie's patented HourGlass laps on the bottom of the board cap the Lokbox finboxes. Much strength, and enhanced fishy shape.
Last query!
Howdy HHG,
My wife recently balked when I suggested bringing a jambalaya to a Purim gathering. What's your take on this?
Sincerely,
Meshuggina in Morro Bay

Dear Meshug,
This is a particularly tricky one. Were it Simchat Torah or even Pesach I would say mazel-tov, but Purim is tough...oh what the hell, Haman would have hated it, so I say live a little and enjoy your Jambalaya!
HHG
ps--there are Jews in Morro Bay?

Shape

Births, deaths, tragedies, hangovers--these events have the power to remove us from ourselves, to provide a brief recess from the countless factors we're required to juggle at any moment.
Shaping grants me some of this same constricted focus, a break from the self-absorption that engulfs more than a few of us.
The word itself, shape, is onomatopoeic in the way it mimics a surform pass along the rail (ssshhhaaaaape!) or the slice of a finely-honed hand plane on a basswood stringer (ssshhhhaaaaape!), or the slash of fin through the thin lip of a cresting wave (ssshhhhhaaaaa) followed by the ping of water droplets (ppppeeee) on the flat water behind.

The Twin Keel Fish pushed me out of the water and into the shaping room ten years ago. Early on it was about the buzz: the joy of creation, the thrill of new tools, and the fear of screwing up perfectly good foam all provided a heady rush in the shaping bay.
Now, it's about the calm, the meditation, the quiet.
I was reminded of this transition--from frantic to tranquil--while shaping Rob's twin keel last week, as well as how shaping itself has altered my life.

Parenthood (you knew this was coming) grants us a similar opportunity. We are shaping a young life and, in turn, we are being shaped in the process.
California writer Gary Snyder's poem Axe Handles captures the moment where the speaker, when showing his son how to make an axe handle with an existing axe, realizes that in modeling a shape, he is also modeling his life to his son.
I love the simplicity of this idea. If we all keep in mind the notion that we, ourselves, are models for future generations, that we are axe handles or shapers, then maybe we will exercise better behaviors when a kid burns us in a crowded lineup, or a beginner ditches their board in front of us, or a stranger shows up at our favorite semi-secret spot.

We are shapers, every one of us. The foam of our futures is spotless, unlimited in its possibility.

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!

What's in a Name: Defending 'Big' in the Modern Age

Last summer the family relocated to some cliffs in Baja for a few weeks. One absolutely windless evening, as the sun began to whisper sweet nothings to the the horizon, my wife handed me the baby, shotgunned a Tecate, and paddled out. I was smitten.
So were the rest of the surfers, dug into their camps and well into their post-surf rituals. Their hoots echoed off the cliff walls as she paddled toward the empty peak in the silvery light, spun, and glided into the first wave that presented itself. She found a high trim line and stuck to it, swooping and gliding all the way to the channel. Hooting ensued. A fellow camper came over to chat.
"Your wife rips."
"Thanks."
"What's she riding?"
"Big Fish*."
"How big?"
"6'9"
My new friend scratched at his twelve-day beard. "That's not a fish," he said, squinting into the setting sun.
I could have sworn it was. I shaped it for her, and the order card read, "Big Fish."
"That's a twin-keel funboard," he said. I had never heard of anything so horrifying, and certainly didn't want to claim it when he asked who the shaper was, so I told him it was a Rusty.
He nodded and lit a cigarette. "Typical," he said, then walked back to his camp site.

*The above board is the 'fish' in question.
As teachers on spring break burned out on paper-grading and poorly-formed sandbars, my wife and I have the spent last four days sampling some of Northern California's excellent pointbreaks.
Waves have been scored.
The other day, while watching locals dismantle their gorgeous wave from a safe distance, my wife pointed out that they were all on big boards.
Not guns, mind you, but big boards. Longboards. And this spot is nothing to trifle with, even on an 'average' day. I had trifled with it earlier that day on a 5'11" disc, and I had become intimate with the reef in a way that could have gotten me investigated had the reef been an page and me a member of congress.
The next day we returned, but this time I was equipped with this big-ass 7 foot egg in all of her thick, low-rockered, wide-nosed-and-tailed, flexie-finned wonder:
I've blogged about this board before here. I know it's weird looking.
Long story short, I was enthused. Score another point for big boards.
And score again for das Frankenfish, the 7'9 mutant conceived by Brent, Lagunitas IPA, and standard case of DS squared (Daddy Sleep Deprivation Syndrome).
As per tradition, said surfer waived the glasser-suggested 'curing time' and got to work putting this big quad fish through its paces. But first he put his kid to work polishing her up. Them's resin pinlines, son!
Is it a fish? Who cares? What's in a name? Tell my wife, or passengers on the Frankenfish, or the locals we saw yesterday what defines them or their board, and they could tell you it's not important. They could tell you what is important is the swoop and the glide. The high trim line, the rail-burying bottom turn, the fall down the face, legs burning, heart flying.
But they probably wouldn't. They would most likely just paddle quietly back to the peak and grab another.
Or, if you were my wife, you might pause for a Tecate first.

A Coke-Bottle and a Smile

Happens every year: winter dips its icy toe into our north Pacific waters, stirs it around a bit, and nods its head--it's time.
Then, much like our beleaguered president, summer speaks up and claims itself "still relevant." We get a fun blast of late-season south swell, play like dolphins for days, then put away our summer boards, still wet, with smiles on our faces.
Some among us, however, refuse to believe that it's over. These nonbelievers carefully rinse out their 4/3 (or even 3/2!) wetsuits and hang them up to dry in the waning, anemic sunlight. They pretend it's not frost they're scraping off their windshields in the morning, just excrement from some summery bug inhabiting the tree above their parking space. That it's not woodsmoke pouring forth from their neighbors' chimneys at night, just an unfortunate draft from their backyard BBQ.
And they order fishes in November.
Nathan is one of these people. Delusional. He's been known to paddle his quad fish into some serious winter surf, and then carve some serious lines. So serious, in fact, that those watching will unconsciously wish they chose their sandals instead of their Uggs. They'll check their watches and believe, just for a moment, that it's not going to get dark until 9pm, and they still have plenty of time to stop by the store to pick up some shrimp for the grill...

It's Always Summer Somewhere...

Just added a couple of fishes to the queue up at the FattyShack. The traditional outline on top (5'8") is scheduled for a coke-bottle tint, while the biggun' underneath (6'9") will have some orange/mango flavoring.
They both look like they could fly, but this one actually has wings!

Red Shred Sled

Lil' Red is safely under the feet of a local Northbay ripper. It's hard to get this color right but, as per usual, Leslie nailed it. Matched the resin leash loop color as well.
Sorry for the quality of the pics--snapped these in full-blown cell phone excitement.
Four fins and a single bump fit nicely into steep faces, and, if you squint, you can make out the bottom lap line and butterfly patch.


Diamond-tipped pinline...

We're safely out of harm's way up here north of the Bridge, but our thoughts and prayers are with those down south who are in the midst of a disaster that boggles the mind. Good Luck.

Two Boards, Nine Fins

Is it possible to get skunked when the Bodega Bay Buoy reads 11.5 feet at 17 seconds and there's no wind to speak of?
It is when you live in Sonoma County!
Soupy, warbly, chest high close-out slop at a local beachbreak. Had to make a tough call between the EPS quad fish and the Campbell Brothers Bonzer inspired High Five (named for its ability to hold a high line and its plentitude of fins). Ended up with the five finner. Why? Well, at times I think my love for the quad fish is too great--an exclusive relationship bordering on the psychotic. It's good to get some distance every once in a while.
Turned out the High Five was the right call--fast and fun in some god-awful surf.

Powder blue full board tint with some fine double pinlines. Looks like prom, circa 1978.

Much like prom, I didn't score, came home early, and screwed around on the computer for a while.

Fish 'n Egg

An egg and a fish to get the ball rolling. The egg is a 6'0 quad with a coffee-'n-cream full board tint, and the 5'10" keel fin is a crazy Fatty concoction of foam stains, swirls, and pinlines. Both feature Lokbox finboxes. Bitchin.
The little round pin handles waves in the overhead range surprisingly well--not a mushbuster*
*Board is also an excellent mushbuster.