New wood multi-fin fish

A tree fell in the front yard. A little sawzall action, some fine sanding and voila! My brother, Curt has been making a few of these. First one to name what type of fish this is wins.

Recycled Foam

These Two blanks were made from recycled foam. The Marko is epoxy and the Green foam is polyester made by US Blanks. Both companies collect cut offs, dust and whatever foam the find and remold it into new blanks. I had the Green Foam tinted yellow for fun.

I made Bluegills out of them, and sent them to be glassed. The epoxy blank will be glassed with surfer saped bio resin. The polyester blank will be polyestered. More later.

"Greener Surfboards"

This is a 9'6'' made out of I Foam from Marko Foam for Josh Rothman, Rasta. I need to learn more about the foam. I know it is 100% recyclable, but it was very hard to shape, like rubber. I guess people have them done on the computer. We ordered the blank with no stringer. Josh and I made a custom stringer out of a piece of balsa I had, and glued it in. I learned to do this working at Walker Foam off and on for many years. Once shaped, we wanted to try out some bio resins from Entropy, specifically the Super Sap natural oil based epoxy resin. The resin has a yellow tinge to it. Some may have an issue with that so you can put some color in it. We put a little white on this board.

We feel we made a pretty green board with some of the latest materials. The board was just finished and will keep you updated.

I have really enjoyed making alaias and hollow boards out of wood. The wood I use is grown like a crop and has many beneficial attributes, like creating oxygen and returning nutrition to the soil. Standard foam boards are not great for the environment, but that is what most people ride, so if we need to make foam boards, let's do it better. I will be working on this and will keep you updated on the successes and failures.

New boards for Icons of Surf

These are some boards I made for Icons of surf in San Clemente using the name of Chocolate Fish. We have come up with different functional designs, boards,colors and graphics. This is my Quadradamus Model with Chocolate fish colors. 6'4''

Ken, the owner of Icons, wanted to make some shorter single fins. The single fins I have ridden have usually been longer 6'6'' and up. So for inspiration I thought to my favorite movie clips, The Micheal Peterson footage in Hal Jepson's Super Session. In the sequence he is ripping cutbacks hitting the lip and getting deep tubes on waves just overhead. The session was so innovative for the time and I still have not seen anybody ride a single fin that well. I think the board he is riding looks something like this; Full outline, flat rocker, down rails. I also put some neat concaves in the bottom to keep the speed up.

Round pin Twin

My first twin fin was by Bob Stassi. It was a round pin. It was a real good board. I haven't seen many over the years. I made a stock one and put it in Central Coast Surfboards, CCS, Awhile ago. Recently James called me and told me he rode and loved his friends board that I made. It was the board out of CCS. He ordered a custom and here it is. 6'2''.

wood work

A couple items from today.

Jim's Gabezilla

9'9''. Jim asked for a copper tint job. We mixed a color and threw in some metal flake. Looks a little like copper.

Gabezilla and Bluegills Attack Malibu

Though you should not have to wear a full suit in late August, Gabe, Rasta, Mike and I had a lot of fun the other day. Bluegills work great at San O'fre. We had 6' to 8' and they all worked really good at trimming and gliding through all the sections and flat spots. Gabe rode a 9'8'' Gabezilla and nose rode. He also showed us how to do proper flying kick outs over the whitewash.

Skate or grow old

Brett, who does a lot of filming for these posts, and I went for a session on the perfect, glassy cement (the surf has not been good around my house since July 4th). I used to skate a lot, but not much lately. I slammed on my first drop in, hrrnnt. I struggled for speed while the kids were ripping. You must keep your skating in shape.