Patagonia

I suppose that's one of the more unique aspects of what you guys do. There's not a lot of operations that really work across surfing disciplines the way you guys do. Has that been key to keeping it interesting over time?

Definitely. It's a long, sad summer in Ventura, and without kitesurfing, winging, foiling, noseriding mals... like, you’ve got to do it all or you're just going to be one of those sad bastards who does the exact same thing every day. You can see it on his face; he's miserable at the beach. Surfers can be pretty close-minded in that regard. I don't understand it. For such supposedly free-spirited, happy, ocean-going folk, we get really set in our ways. Guys don't branch out into other genres of surfing, and there's so much energy to be ridden out there. You can harness that energy in whatever way. Now with downwind foiling, you're riding whitecap energy. There are so many different ways to harness ocean energy, and we’re just barely scratching the surface. There are enough options in surf craft now that there's very few days where you can't get in the water.

How do you split your time in the shaping bay between different styles of boards? Is it seasonal, or do you have to carve out time to work on stuff?

There's no real seasonality anymore. There are definitely peak moments where everybody wants their guns. But with places like Chile and Cloudbreak and wherever, there's always kind of a moment where you can switch gears and go from shaping mid-length eggs to 10'6” s. There's no seasonality anymore. It's not just like the North Shore's two months from going, and everybody needs their guns. It's all year now but it's fun and it keeps the mind working. I'd hate to have a whole season of just shaping fishes. I want to do it all.

Tell me about the step decks you’ve been working on recently.

It's been a fun project. I don't know... everything's been done already. It's not like I'm even the millionth guy to do step-decks, but it seems like guys are connecting with this version of them.

We’re a decade or so now into the whole big-wave paddle renaissance that a lot of your crew helped usher in. Where do you feel those boards are at now?

Oh, man, it's come a long way since I really started digging into it with Kohl [Christenson] around 2010. Everything's come a long way. Certainly, for me, back then everything was way too thin, and things just weren't refined. Everything was just set up to make a drop, and do a bottom turn, and hope you don't get blasted. Now all the rockers are really refined to the point where guys can do a midface turn and pull into a high pocket barrel on a 50-foot wave. The guns are just as refined as high performance shortboards now. It's pretty wild. I look at what we were building in the early 2000s, and it's just like, oh my God. I would never want to paddle that. It was just a little blade. And you can surf really big boards effectively now. The really big boards were kind of ridiculous before. They just bounced all over the place. Now you can catch a wave, but you can't also ride it.

Are your big-wave boards still the thing that really get you out of bed in the morning?

That stuff turns me on much more than every day mediocre wave boards – eggs or whatever. I don't necessarily need to be seen as a ‘big-wave board shaper guru’ or anything like that. It's just something I want to do at a high level, and if guys click with my guns, then great. But I'm not pushing it. [Laughs] It's a pretty small market. I'm not like, "I'm the gun guy." I want to be well-rounded. I don't want to be pigeonholed at all.

Obviously, there's long relationships there with Kohl and Ramon [Navarro]. How important have those guys been to the development of your boards?

Incredibly. Besides being really important to me as good friends who I've really connected with, they've been really instrumental with the boards. In the beginning, I was trying some pretty wonky ideas, and they were willing to throw themselves into some pretty awful places to prove or disprove some theories. I'm indebted to them for the trust. But it's been really cool working with them, and the results are there. They're able to ride our boards in giant waves, and it doesn't seem like it's holding them back at all, which is my goal.

As a shaper is there a benefit to shaping across different forms of surfing? Are there streams getting crossed that normally wouldn’t if you were just sitting there pumping out 5'10” shorties?

Yeah, for sure. There's a lot of intangible thought process stuff that has crossed over. It wouldn't really look that good on paper, but my kitesurfing boards definitely came from high performance shortboards, and the barrel riding step-up boards. It's tough to point out a lot of the examples, but it all moves together in a weird morass of surf craft theory. It's been extraordinarily helpful for my education to be trying to make all these different things work, and seeing what works, and what fails.

How did you go shaping the flax surfboard Dave rode in the Electric Acid project? Had you used flax before up to that point?

We had. We'd done a fair bit of lab testing with it back in the day. It's been maybe 10 years, but we've gotten a number of natural fibres and weaves over the years that we've run through the same gamut of tests that we do everything for our lay-ups. We wrote it off, simply because it was not the easiest thing to work with. You can't really sand it very well – it just gets all frizzy. I'm surprised it's resurfaced, because I didn't really see that much benefit to it. There are some flexibility benefits for sure, but it's not nearly as durable as fibreglass. That said, there's almost unlimited ways that you can take any fibre and weave it in different cloths and weights and washes, and who knows? It's stepping into a real new arena and it's unlimited.

You guys are still devoting a lot of time to new materials though – cloths and blanks and resins. How much focus is on that?

Well, not as much lately as I would like. We hit it really hard for a long time and put a lot of money and energy into it, and didn't really find that many mind-blowing benefits. There were a lot of things that came from aerospace that were just too expensive, too hard to work with, and limit you to molding technologies. And we just didn't want to get into that. We still wanted it to have hand-shaped craft. There are all kinds of thermoplastics, and stuff that would make an indestructible board, but it'd be wildly expensive, and you'd have to have a multi-million-dollar factory with giant molds and heat presses. I haven't really wanted to be that sort of factory. I like building boards, and I want to keep it small and imaginative, and molding is inherently the opposite of imagination. But we'll try anything. If somebody brings us samples, we're in. If I hear about anything in any sort of other area, I'll figure out if we can use it for surfboards. Right now, we're doing incremental changes when we find a better resin, or a better fibreglass weave, or a better way to do something, but mostly, we're just putting the correct amount of fibreglass on food-grade styrofoam and trying to find that sweet spot between durability and performance without going too far in either direction. Our main environmental benefit is just less boards in the landfill. I would really like to be more biodegradable, but I feel like that technology's not there yet. I'd like to be more bio-based, but I feel like the bio-based environmental benefit isn't there yet either. It's a bunch of bullshit greenwashing. So, right now, we're just trying to make high performance, durable boards.

Do you feel surfers generally are more conscious of a board’s footprint when they’re buying a board these days?

I'll be honest, it's not really much better than it was 10 years ago. I still hear people complaining about how epoxies chatter, and how they're stiff, and how they don't work right. Which, to me, is crazy. I feel like once guys get a good epoxy board and they realise how long they last; they can't go back. But the adoption rate really isn't that high. It's frustrating. Obviously, we're making plenty of boards to keep us busy, but I don't feel like the whole industry has really turned a corner, and everybody's super environmentally conscious. They're not going to sacrifice their way of life for a longer-lasting board.

Progress is still very incremental.

Yeah, I don't know. Blank manufacturers are replacing PU with more bio-based materials, which may be good, as long as they're not growing food crops to make surfboards with and all the diesel that's involved with that. That's crazy. Then if you're doing all that and you're still doing single four, or double four, and it snaps first session, then what's the point? Guys are trying, but they don't want to stick their neck out too far.

What's something you've seen in surfing the last couple of years – a wave, a session, a board, a surfer – that’s really changed the way you look at surfing?

Embarrassingly, I'm fully sold on mid-length twin-fins. It's completely changed my whole deal.

Maybe it's my age and just getting lazier, but I love that style of board, and not having to work super hard, having a lot of speed, making a lot of sections... it's just a pointbreak goer. I'm not having to try as hard as I was on my high performance shortboards on a day-to-day basis, and I'm probably surfing better. I'm an Average Joe surfer; I'm not really meant to light a high performance shortboard up. But I'm also a traitor in the fact that I foil more than I actually surf right now. I get so many days foiling, and I'm so foil-brained that that's probably the biggest thing that's changed in my surfing life. It just keeps getting more and more ‘surfy’ the more I do it. I'm doing the turns that I used to draw in my notebook in school. It's just that high-G leg-buckling turns that you could never do shortboarding. I'm doing big-wave turns in head-high waves. It's a feeling that’s turned me into a surfing grom again. People don't want to hear it, because it's pretty weird, but in a lot of ways it can be better than surfing.

This story features in the first print edition of Roaring Journals: order your copy here.