La Mango Lady Sans Merci

This lovely, full-board Mango Lady is for sale. Never ridden, waxed, or had popsicle dripped onto it by  four and six year-olds while using the deck as a Barbie Beach Party venue.
*update. SOLD to JD from ML, bicycle enthusiast, repeat customer, and proud shredder of the BOB*

Why is it for sale? Well, my friends, it's complicated. Delicate. Thorny.
You see, sometimes a wild hare (rarely. Unjudiciously) lends me its soft, downy ear. Often, this hare indulges in a dram of scotch. Often, it requests another.
In this particular instance,  Kilchoman's amazing Machir Bay expression proved the persuasive element.

In my lusty single malt rapture--nay, my pure Islay-inspired exaltation--this surfboard presented itself to me as a singular vision. Unseen hands guided me to the Blank Storage Area (staircase to the upstairs bedrooms).  A chock of raw foam urged itself into my hands (first one I saw), and led me to my shaping bay. The hour was late. Family members slept. For some reason my dog was invited into the proceedings, happily plunked in a pile of foam dust. Tongue out. Enthralled.

What happened next I cannot be sure. Much like the narrator from Keats' La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1819), I entered a liminal state, a diaphanous, filmy, place that ethnographer Arnold van Gennep would qualify as betwixt and between--neither of this world nor of another. Much like Keats' narrator I, too, emerged in the half dawn with only a fleeting series of images from the experience--planer on foam, plane on wood, ecstatic dog licking my leg as I moved from nose to tail and back again.
Suffice to say, fresh life--gasping, trembling, joyous--was coaxed into form during a gauzy, limitless session that lasted well into the wee hours (things get a little hazy at this point). Then, I emerged. Swaddled in foam dust, iPod drained (and, apparently, stuck on Chapter 27 of Nicholas Nickelby by Charles Dickens for reasons that have yet to reveal themselves to me). The resultant form was the Mango Lady Sans Merci.

Actually, it was more like a white lady, but I don't think I can call it that in a blog post.
Onto the specs!
La Mango Lady Sans Merci stands at 7'4, and is 22" wide and 2 7/8" thick. She features my Lady rocker, a gentle, sexy curve that prioritizes swoop-and-glide over rip-and-shred. Bottom contour is a dollop of belly under the nose to the front foot, then a panel vee off the tail. Rails are medium round and sharp in the rear 1/3rd. Cedar stringer. She can be ridden as a single or as a 2+1, and comes with fiberglass sidebites and a fiberglass center fin (TK Flex by Rainbow Fin Co.). You should consider the Mango Lady if you're looking for something to ride when the waves are waist-to-huge, like accelerating out of turns, and want to know what it feels like to be a hot knife slicing through a cool stick of butter.
Full board tint by the nice guys at Almar Surf Works, sanded finish (faster! Less slippery under the hands!), strong-and-lively glass job that's built to last.
First $580 takes it (plus tax, I'm legit). That's cheap, but whatever.
If you act presently, I will include a free mountaineering-grade through-the-box leash loop for your leggie. The only way this thing could fail is if someone were to take a hacksaw to it. Even then, it should still hold up to a good tombstone or two.
Email me at HeadHighGlassy@gmail.com if interested.
Swell in the water. Just saying.

The Sun, the Moon, the Sea

Just flew back from the Sea of Cortez...
and boy are my arms tired!
It looked like this:

One of these gently rested its mouth on my hand while I tried to take its picture:

It was hot and dry and I slathered on more sunscreen every morning than an entire Arizona waterpark sees during a homeschooler convention.
Not sure if that little gem of figurative language works or not, but I can't be trifled with such things at the moment. Board orders have piled up and swim lessons have started and now, suddenly, I sneeze when I go outside.
But he Baja desert has a way of putting things into perspective: Sun, moon, water (and, if you're lucky, Negro Modelo, fresh mango, chilled pinot grigio). The agents of life.
Sun, moon, water--the things that make us who we are--also give us waves. And waves give us surfboards, like this 6'8 egg (Lil' Pill) for Jon:

The bottom looks like this:

It has a shitload of fin options, a spiral vee bottom, a bamboo quad set by Rainbow Fin Company, and lovely in-the-lamination pigment layup by Tony Mikus at Almar Surfworks.

Jon and his lovely wife, Jen, aren't getting much sleep these days. But perhaps when they're up in the wee hours feeding their baby, one of them will peek out through the curtains and spy a full moon over Mt. Tam.
The same moon that makes the raccoons in my neighborhood suddenly, intensely interested in my compost bin. The same moon that inspires a breeding event among nudibranchs off the southern coast of Baja, Mexico, or a fiddler crab to set off and find a special friend for the evening, or the sea to drain off a reef in Sri Lanka long enough for a surfer to slot himself into a dry barrel in the silvery half light of evening.
Happy Spring.

Propositions for Prepositions

I call this composition, Off to the Glasser!
Or maybe, On To the Glasser!

Or just, To the Glasser!
Either way, hope Tony's got some green pigment in stock.

Down to the glasser!

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.

Of Curtis, the Lady, the Flu

Good Lord, the flu sucks. We’ve been passing it around my house these last few weeks like a skinny J on prom night.

Or maybe like musical chairs, only instead of prize for winning ‘it,’ you get diarrhea.

Guess how many kids shat the bed in my house during the last three weeks?

Answer: none. That could have been a parenting dealbreaker.

But waves continue to tickle our delicate shores, and humans continue wanting to ride on them, so surfboards must be made!

Here’s the first one I got to carve our after a week in bed. It’s a 7’4 Lady for Curtis, who called and left the following message:

“I need a midlength for _ _ _ _ _ I _ _   _ _ _.”

That was pretty much it. Curtis isn’t one for conversation, so I took a stab at 7’4.

The Lady is a trim machine: round on the bottom, round on the top, round on the corners.

Single with a flex fin, or 2+1 with a flex fin. Slingshots off the bottom!

I'm going back to bed now.

New England Dispatch: Winter Edition

Good lord, I've gotten soft. I grew up surfing New England winters with a cardboard-stiff third-hand wetsuit and no booties. I've hacked my way up numerous frozen waterfalls in the Rockies, picked ice chunks the size of playing cards out of my beard at 18,000ft in Mexico, got blown off Mt. Adams in February by an 80mph gust of wind that froze my jacket thermometer at -20.
What I'm saying is this: cold and I have spent some time together, and it's been pretty rad.
But now it isn't.
Which is why I'm huddled next to a space heater at my in-laws in Connecticut. Bitching.
But 'hardship' makes us thankful, and here's what I'm thankful for as we stare down the line of another new year.
Surfboards. All of them, really, no matter who shaped them. This one's for local shredster Jon, and is off to the glasser this week.

6'8. Egg. 4+1

Electric Blankets. I used to think electricity and sleeping didn't really mix. Not anymore.

This is what happens when you Google Image 'Electric  Blanket'

Barbie Dream House. I shit you not. We didn't encourage our girls to join the Barbie Army, but avoiding it is as impossible as avoiding pictures of that one Kardashian's ass . For the last five days they've been going to town on the Barbie Dream House like it's their job. 40+hrs, only two fights (both elevator related). Them's good numbers.

Isle of Skye 8yr old blended scotch whisky. A little bit of something for every scotch lover in a single bottle. Don't 'upgrade' to the 12yr--less peat, more money.

Coming home to this:

Happy New Year!

Plug

Kelly is a Renaissance man—surfer, artist, designer, entrepreneur, musician, dude with a mustache. He’s also a builder with of epic vision. How do we know it’s epic? because it’s in the name: Epic Design Build.

The EDB bros are scientists of building efficiency. They also like riding bikes, shredding Northcoast waves, and drinking beers at the Toad.

Kelly is at the forefront of a movement to transform Santa Rosa’s Railroad Square from a place of occasional dining and hobo watching to a model of the contemporary urban ideal: small local businesses, artists, intellectuals, musicians, surfboard shapers with an alarming amount of gray finding its way into their beard this winter, purveyors of local-made (and brewed!) goods intermingling with community-minded homeowners and their offspring. Sounds nice, eh?

So what does a man-of-our-times order when he wants to shred?

6’ Sparkplug.

Like the name implies, the Sparkplug is the necessary ingredient for heavy duty shredding. Plenty of foam for Northcoast paddling with a rocker to match our steep beachbreak offerings.

Quad for extra spark.

Because he's also a gigantic design nerd, Kelly created his own custom Sparkplug lam just in case, in the middle of a sess, he forgets why his board shreds so hard.

California born, start to finish.