Three more days and aloha 2008! Time flies when you’re having fun….

It’s been a year to remember, aside from being an election year here in the states, the media and powers that be talking so loud about the big financial melt down, you’d have to say the surf industry is seeing a slow down.

I think one of the best things that’s happened in the surf industry at least in California this year is the blank market has seemed to settle in. We’ve got a few good blank companies now that have worked through most of the idiosyncrasies of surf board foam and the people that buy it.

For me… it’s been good. I’ve got my Perimeter Stringer Long board Quad… the PSQ, which I started selling the first of this year after several months of testing in 07. I am now offering the Stubbie Quad which I will be doing some refinements on in the coming year as well as a couple new traditional long boards I’m planning to work on and offer in the new year and, of course all my other models. My lam shop is in its second year and hopefully we’ll see at least business sustain itself through the coming year. We may even have a booth at the Sacred Craft Expo in May at the Ventura County Fair Grounds.

As the new year comes to us we look back and reflect and look forward to what can be. I look back and am thankful for all the people that have bought my boards and brought lam work our way. I look forward to the work I’ve got now and how I will continue to refine my trade and make a better surfboard.

Stoked and waiting for surf.

Happy New Year!

D.R.

My Wife and I and all the grandkids, Christmas eve ‘08

What does a surfer do when the surf goes dead flat and stays that way for days on end?

The short answer… you go crazy.

If you’re still able… skate board.

Take time to patch dings on your boards.

When the dings are patched strip wax and clean your boards.

Clean the sand out of you car.

Put your wetsuits through the gentle cycle in the washing machine.

Watch surf movies.

Get depressed after watching surf movies because there’s no surf.

Go visit relatives all along not feeling like your missing something… like surf, and you aren’t missing anything because there is no surf…. you keep telling yourself.

Hang with your surf buddies.

Pic from the 1970’s courtesy of Doug Galati.

This house is right on the beach and take notice , the three guys are looking at the camera and the guy on the right ( Mike ) is looking out at the surf. Does he have the look on his face like ‘ is it flat or what’ ? Actually I don’t know if there was surf that day or not, just guessing.

The surf here is pretty much dead flat and has been for a week now. I could say it’s a good thing because Christmas is just a few days away and I don’t have a conflict with needing to do Christmas stuff and surfing at the same time.

Yeah, spent the last couple days shopping with my wife, and amazingly wasn’t conflicted at all. We went downtown Ventura yesterday and went to Carpinteria today.

Happy Holidays!

D.R.

Surfing a hull is different than surfing a multi-fin board. Contemporary foiled multi-finned boards are generally surfed off the tail, with the fins and hard edged bottoms they will hold a high line. Not so with a hull…

No, hulls won’t hold a high line. Saying that will bring questions to most like: Why would I want a board that won’t hold a high line.. that’s where the speed is? That’s a good question but to surf a hull it’s best to understand how a hull works.

There is a method to riding a hull that depends on your ability to maintain control of weighting your board in the right places down the wave face. Taking off you will slide down the wave face and weight into a turn at the bottom. After banking your board over on its rail and weighting into the turn you will drive your board down the line and because you stood up into your turn… weighted…. The board will climb up the wave face. As you come to the top of the wave you must un-weight the board so #1. it will stay with the wave and #2. if you’re on a lined up wall you won’t slip or spin out.

That first set of moves… take off, setting your edge, turn and climb give you a load of speed and once you’ve returned to the top of the wave you are ready to repeat the slide down the wave face setting your edge and climbing back up the wave face and gaining more speed.

There are many variations of where and how you will work your way along a wave face gaining speed, turning back, slowing down, riding in under and through white water but all the moves are dependent on maintaining control of weighting the board.

1. Sliding to the bottom of the wave.

2. Setting your edge for the drive back to the top.

3. Flying across the top.

4. Un-weighting to the bottom.

5. Setting your edge again.

The video clip shows the basic rhythm to weighting down the line and gaining speed along the way. You can see the momentum after Travis pulls out and still slides some distance from the speed generated from surfing a hull.

D.R.

There have always been conscientious craftsman in the surfboard industry but I think for the most part they are usually over looked and as surfboard lengths shortened over time the way we made boards changed as well.

During the seventies as surfboards continued to evolve there was a fair amount of attention to making boards that not only rode well but also looked appealing too. If you find any vintage boards from that decade you see color and line work all done with resin that by 1980 had become all but forgotten. Not that color was absent but the color changed from resin work to air brush paint work.

Air brush color is quick. Take a shaped blank, spray some color on it, let it dry for a couple hours and then go laminate it. You can do fades, panels, rail bands, stripes or even killer graphic art work via air brush. That’s all fine but the interest was to simplify the fabrication process so it didn’t take as long to make a surfboard. By the nineties color was not as much a component of the process. When fin systems took hold and we didn’t have to do glass on fins… making a surfboard was simplified even more. Sanding a board with out fins was the best thing to come to surfboard production sense foam blanks.

With out glass on fins the surfboard became much easier to make and with the ease came the hack job, get it done, get it quick, get it cheap kind of surfboard. “Yeah man, clear free lap sand only to 120… your board is ready.” Short board, long board it didn’t matter. What was important was getting the board done and for as little dollars as possible. Go surf the thing and when it’s lost that fresh feel toss it and get another.

The poorly crafted board at first glance may not look any different than a very well crafted board. Can you tell by looking at the tail of your new board if there is good glass coverage around the corners? Probably not. Can you tell what glass schedule your board has on it by feel or look? No.

If you don’t know that your board was made by a top drawer board crafter you generally won’t know how well your boards are made until after you’ve surfed them.

D.R.

The compound color lam.