Urban Legend

PitBoss for local shredder, climber, surf instructor, paramedic, public intellectual, and twelve-pack ab muscle enthusiast, Urban.

Urban's glassing order card said, "Earth tones. Glasser's choice," and this is what the fine folks at Almar Surf Works came up with.
Urban picked up a new board and declared his love to a long-time lady friend around the same time. It was a big week for the guy.

The PitBoss is not meant for small waves.
Or medium waves, really.
Any surfboard with more than one leash plug should give one pause.

This one's seven feet long, and features all the goods that one needs for Waves of Increased Consequence on the Northcoast: a little extra foam under the chest for our ridiculous paddle-outs when there's a jump in the buoys. Foam forward also gives the board a nice momentum when driving down the line--almost a 'pulling' feeling with the right bottom contour. Finally, it's nice to be able, while paddling out, to raise your chest up a little higher so that you can scan the foggy horizon for dark lines marching toward your suddenly tiny, suddenly cold, suddenly lonely body, floating at sea, hoping for a gift from the surf gods that could suddenly change everything.

On the Road Again

The Baja leg of the annual HeadHighGlassy Family Summer Tour Palooza went off without a glitch. Waves were shredded with impunity, borders were crossed tactically, Tecates were consumed with abandon.
Perhaps more important than time spent with family and friends, or the thrill of intracontinental travel, or widening my childrens' worldviews to include cultures other than our own, is the true spirit of surf trips: subjecting new designs to a rigorous eight-step sciency feedback process.
As any considerate, rational, detail-oriented, kinda nitpicky, borderline pain-in-the-ass, OCD, self-absorbed, narcissistic shaper will testify, there is absolutely no replacing personal feedback in the water. Shapers should be their best team riders (team models, no. Have you seen my calves lately? Christ).

2013 HHG Family Baja Quiver

This year's quiver featured a wide swath of waveriding vehicles, including a couple perennial favorites and a new model (!) in two different lengths and fin setups for maximum geeking potential.

Bottoms up

The results?
Mrs. HHG is firmly attached to her 8' Broadsword, as per usual. She's also very pretty and nice.

The 5'6 MiniSimmons was my go-to board last year, and it was hard as hell to stay off it this year, but I had work to do: 6'3 and 7'0 Clovers (two middle boards in above pictures).
The Clover is a souped-up egg/hull mashup and features a hull entry to a kicked tail rocker with a hard edge and concaves through the fins. I rode the 6'3 as both a quad and a thruster in waist high to well overhead surf and was stoked out of my mind with both fin setups. I rarely say, 'stoked out of my mind,' just so you know.
The 7'0 was crazy fun as a 2+1 with a flexie center fin and really lit up in juicier surf. It's not a longboard alternative, and shreds with aplomb.
My arms were noodled out one afternoon, and the surf was still clean and pumping, so I put my hull fin in it and rode it as a single and it was as good as it gets.

Fins

I'll post the sleds up later when we're back from the (hot. Humid. Claustrophobic) East Coast leg of our Summer Tour.
Onward!

Shady

Jason, who's getting dangerously close to a full sandwich card, wanted a replacement for his beloved 7'2 step up for OBSF that buckled during a now-infamous run of swell this past winter.
Since it was shaped in a different decade on another continent, I felt no moral trepidation about lifting the template, which was pretty heavily Parrish influenced.

Rocker, foil, fins are all no-nonsense OB.

Triple pinlines to give him something to look at while he's walking fifteen blocks back up The Beach to find his car.

Next to the Original

Jason's a marine biology nerd, and like nerds the world 'round, wanted to incorporate some sort of nerdiness into his board aesthetic.
This one mimics the concept of counter shading, a form of camouflage in which an animal's pigmentation is darker on the top than on the bottom. Hence the lovely blue steel 'reverse wrap' resin tiny by Tony Mikus.
Counter-shaded marine dwellers are hard to spot from above, as they blend in with the darker ocean floor, and hard to spot from below, as they blend with the lighter surface.
This penguin diagram nicely illustrates the principle.

 Counter shading didn't work out so well for these anchovies.

Of Thrusters, Mini-Simmons, and Questionable Single-Parenting Practices

Fresh foam for Northcoast shredders M and K, whose boards managed to be shaped and glassed during a particularly unhinged chapter in my life that was the product of the lovely Mrs. HHG frolicking in London for two weeks with her mom.
It's not that single parenting is hard the way that coal mining or dairy farming or building a railroad is hard, but here’s the deal: it comes at the expense of every other thing in your life.
Free time? Nope.
Food? Hope you like shoving a cold hotdog-covered-in-applesauce into your mouth while you hover over the sink.
Culture? Only if your idea of culture is falling asleep on the couch four minutes into an old Arrested Development episode, then waking up two hours later because your laptop is burning into your chest with the heat of a thousand suns. And you're drooling.

Let's say your life is a balloon ride, and all your wonderful non-parenting pursuits (surfing, making surfboards, gardening, scanning ebay for an exact replica of a shirt an old girlfriend gave you that you wore until it was shredded, enjoying the occasional dram of Ardbeg Uigeadail you’ve managed to hide from your peers for the last month) are sandbags hanging over the rail of the balloon basket. There will come a moment—usually within the first twenty-four hours of single parenting—when first one, then suddenly all of those sandbags must be cut free. 

K's 6'0.

The remnants of your former life drop unceremoniously to the ground so that the balloon may stay aloft. You don’t really have any control of where you’re going (though, at some point, you’ll probably end up at the pony rides at Howarth Park), but you have momentum and you’re all aboard and as long as you have some instant Mac&Cheese and popsicles you should make it just fine.

Also, for some reason, there's a lot more nudity when your significant other is out of town. You get out of the shower, almost put on pants, then think, nah.  I know what you're thinking: doesn’t you walking around the house naked look like a sad, hairy snowman?
To which I reply, no, thank you very much. Snowmen wear ties. 

M's 5'7

Maybe a bit of an overshare for a surfblog, but I’m on allergy meds and my head feels like it’s filled with something soft.

Let’s check back in with the surfboards.

From my incomplete family to M and K’s newly completed one: his and her shred sleds in matching green hues with deep, dark, chocolaty cedar stringers.

K’s is pure thruster bliss with top-and-bottom resin abstract by Tony Mikus at Almar Glass Works.

M’s 5’7 mini-Simmons features a green resin wrap with Braztafarian resin pinlines.

M and K are our surfy Northcoast version of Sonny and Cher, only with more dreadlocks and natural-fibered clothing. 

An Egg is an Egg is an Egg is an Egg

The Problem of Universals is an ageless philosophical dilemma. It asks, quite innocently, do universals exist?

This simple question is peppered with brain-busting convolutions, and all the mathematical and philosophical heavies have weighed in on the dilemma since Plato first proposed it two-and-a-half thousand years ago.

Basically, it points out that in order to have a universal, there must be an ideal, and the closer you examine the ideal, the further from the ideal you get.

Example: we all have an image of a triangle that pops into our heads when someone says triangle. What does it look like? For some it’s an isosceles (at least two sides equal), for some a scalene (no two sides equal), and others an equilateral (all sides equal). Three very different triangles, so an ideal triangle would have to be all three, which is impossible.

Dan's new 6'5 Egg

Most things in the world confuse me, and I try to make sense of them through surfboards. So let’s use surfboard design—specifically, the Egg shape—to explore The Problem of Universals.

First, we need an ideal egg surfboard. Without opening up the argument about who first designed the egg, let’s just say, for efficiency’s sake, the ideal is a 7’0” Skip Frye.

What, then, does the ideal look like besides being seven feet long? Round tail. Roundish bottom, single fin, flat rocker, 50/50 ‘egg’ rails all the way around. The ideal egg.

Right?

Let’s look closely. What if one of the rails were a fraction of a millimeter thicker than the other? Would it still be an ideal? Is symmetry part of the ideal egg surfboard? I assume that it is, but we all know the more closely we inspect a surfboard, the further from symmetrical it becomes. So can an ideal be flawed?

If so, what about other ‘flaws’? What if it were a 7’1” instead of a 7’0”, can we no longer consider it an egg? What about adding another fin? Or two? Three? Four? What if we shrunk it and increased the nose rocker? What if we lengthened it and flattened the tail rocker, narrowed the widepoint and moved it aft? Squared the tail? Put a pointy nose on? Made asymetrical?

If we open the door to variation, then all variations must be eggs, and, therefore, everything could be considered an egg. The term Egg, itself, would become meaningless.

Nose isn't quite as shovel-y in real life

How about another one: a fish, according so a certain sect of surfers and surfboard designers, must be in accordance with Steve Lis’ ideal—the 5’6 twin fin, deep swallow tail, flat, thick, wide, downrailed, beaknosed, glassed-on fins with no cant and no toe and foiled from marine plywood.

Cool, but a lot has happened in the forty years since the ‘ideal’ was born, including major adjustments in volume, width, outline, rocker, rails, foil, and number and placement of fins.

Every single design aspect has changed, and all refinements are currently being enjoyed by Lis’ current customers.

So if he created the ideal, then changed it, do we still have an ideal? If an ideal is fluid, how can we use it as a foundation?

When surfboards begin to confuse me I turn to poetry. Poets tend to stick their fingers deep into the swirling masses of gray area that upset mathematicians and philosophers and make me feel better about being a dimwit.

Thruster. Thumby-dummy tail.

In her 1913 poem Sacred Emily, Gertrude Stein wrote, “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” A wonderfully elegant entry into the Problem of Universals discussion.

Stein repeats “rose” with the existence-confirming preposition, “is.” This suggests that a rose “is” many things. Many roses exist, and there is no single ideal. A rose is a red flower. A rose is a yellow flower. A white flower. A rose symbolizes life. A rose symbolizes death. It can symbolize both change and constancy, life and death, nature and man.

And then, finally, it becomes just a mindless syllable that means absolutely nothing but a reminder that words themselves are just rough tools—that by meaning one thing, and its opposite, they can mean nothing.

Whee!

This is why surfboards are such fascinating objects—they are most certainly a thing. Plastic. Round, flat, and sharp. And they are most certainly not things—ideas, concepts, promises, hopes. Art.

A surfboard is a surfboard is a surfboard is a surfboard.

Or in the case of this post, an egg is an egg is an egg is an egg. This is Dan’s Salmon Egg, which is different than a Pleasure Point Egg, or Swami’s Egg, San Juanico Egg. Nauset Egg. Nobadeer Egg. Matunick, Ogunquit, Tofino, Maunganui, Vanuatu, Yallingup, Kewalos.

Foiled tail and cedar stringer.

Dan ordered this board and had a baby boy on the same day, so the dude clearly goes huge. 

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.

The Semi-Conductor

Shaping boards for smaller waves is groovy. The ouija-board dance of wave, wavecraft, and rider is vast, and projecting what lines the surfer will take is an exercise in limitlessness—over the wave, under the wave, on top of, through, around, out, in, whatever.
It’s a different experience in the shaping room with a bigger-wave board on the racks. The lines a surfer takes on gun or semi-gun are more prescribed, the choices fewer. The drop. The turn. The race for the shoulder. The paddle back to the peak.
Rather than possibility, the bigger-wave board is about the experience itself. The fierce, watery thing of it. It’s about size, and about the fingernails-into-the-palms grip of fear and adrenaline and pure marine energy.
This 7’5 for MendoShredder BigL isn’t meant for the biggest our coast can handle, but rather for long paddles through coves thick with urchin-encrusted rocks and kelp. For thick, riotous masses of salwater pumping onto rock reefs that are about 600,000 years shy of perfect. And the cold of the Northcoast--not just the fog or the wind or the rain, but the cold of not knowing when the next cleanup set is coming through or how long you’re going to float, legs dangling, in water as dark as iodine for the right wave to come.
And, of course, the warmth: the joy and relief of putting the head down and feeling the unmistakable surge of water pushing surfboard. The moment when everything is crisp and decided, and the head only chants, quietly now, “go, go, go.”

Father and Son

For a short time in third grade a secret admirer left celery in my locker. The individual sticks were neatly trimmed and placed in small sandwich bags. The first few offerings were anonymous, but later featured notes written in a girlie script.
Then my vegetable devotee began to get creative. Once, there were a few scratch-n-sniff stickers included. Another time a slender packet of ranch dressing accompanied the celery. A note read, “celery and ranch is cool!”
And for a brief time in the third grade, it was cool.
Until I learned that it was not Rachel Stein leaving me the celery, as I had hoped, but my sister. My mom made her do it out of fear that I wasn’t eating enough leafy greens.
What does this have to do with this 5’8 double-wing quad fish for Northcoast surf enthusiast David? Not a lot, other than to point out that it’s nice to have family looking out for us once in a while.
Accompanying David’s order was this 5'10, 80's inspired resinwork grom fish for his son.
Much cooler gift than a sweater.
Speaking of Father and Son, Cat Stevens penned a song under that title, converted to Islam, changed his name to Yusef Islam, ditched his music career, gave a sizable chunk of his fortune to humanitarian causes, sort of called for the death of Salmon Rushdie, then performed on The Colbert Report. In that order.
Just in case you’re keeping tabs.

There Will be Blood-Red Tint

Sometimes I gets to keep one.

Fin possibilities

Hard to get a good indoor pic if a blood tint.

Shine on you crazy round tail.