Look around your house and count the number of handmade items you own. If you’re anything like me, they are few, far between and among your most prized possessions. But most surfers don’t put their favorite handmade items in the house.
They put them in the garage where they are lined up proudly like the works of art they are, or scattered on the floor, ready to spring into action on the next swell. Of course, I’m talking about custom, handmade surfboards.
When I began surfing in the early ’60s anything but a handmade surfboard was called a popout and frowned upon by most real surfers.
Surfing was booming and non-surfers were getting into the act. One popout that advertised itself as “Undingable” featured rubber bumpers to protect it from damage.
The board was considered indestructible and various LA variety shows offered prizes for anyone who could bust it up with a sledgehammer. To my knowledge, nobody ever did.
Regardless of their durability, those boards and the other bulky, brittle hunks of foam with fiberglass mat sealing them were the exclusive domain of the kook.
These discount store surfboards were forever unpopular with hardcore surfers until fairly recently when Hawaiian-based Jamie O’Brien and a handful other chargers proved that it’s not what you ride, but how you ride it.
Still, when the surf got real, real surfers picked up their hand-shaped boards and made their moves.
That too changed when molded board makers began hiring top designers to build their models.
The result is that machine-crafted surfboards now perform as well as hand-built ones.
I tried one of the more popular machine-manufactured surfboards recently after observing that the outline, foil, rail and rocker suited my specifications perfectly. After riding it twice I can report that the board handled better than expected.
All things, including price, being roughly equal, I came away with a favorable impression of that board. Stability, paddling and turning could all be put in the plus column.
In the minus column is my decades-long loyalty to the local board builders who have kept me afloat and stoked for over half a century. Also, the idea of one-size-fits-all conformity is disheartening in a sport that has forever prided itself on individuality. If molded surfboards prevail, and it seems they will, boards built strictly for the individual may one day be as rare as handmade Tiffany lampshades.
Still, no matter how good machine-made surfboards become, the one place custom boards will always excel is that they, by definition, are made for your particular style of surfing.
Your body type and approach to a wave is at least slightly different than anyone else’s. Taking the basic plan shape and adding a quarter inch of tail rocker, a half-inch to the outline, or increased thickness in the rail can only be achieved one surfboard at a time.
Now, these seemingly minor modifications might not mean much to most surfers, but to others they are crucial. That’s the reason top competitive surfers generally have their boards built by a trusted shaper.
In my opinion there there’s room for both handmade and machine-made surfboards. Weigh the options, get out there and ride.
