Sacred Craft Wrap Up

Thanks to Scott Bass for putting together the Sacred Craft surfboard expo. It was a real cross-section of surfboard manufacturers from every strata - from the eerily vacant Placebo booth (liked the SurfSkate), to the "Shapers of Tomorrow, Today" booth dedicated to surfboard innovators under 30 (like Kevin Cunningham, who is making a honeycomb board core from paper-backed veneer). Wood boards were everywhere. It was a real treat to see the beautiful work of Paul Jensen, Grain, Balsa Tribe, and Danny Hess.

I had a couple boards on display, down near the Guy Takayama, Fletcher Chouinard/Patagonia, and ...lost booths. What a fun mix. By far, I had the ugliest board stand at the show, and the crudest finish job on my boards. It's weird to think about how many people handled the boards. One guy was even pushing the thruster into the floor, trying to gauge it's flex. Hey buddy, I'm still working on float - quit trying to bend my board.

The feedback was almost all good. Many people seemed to take for granted that the boards would perform normally. Plenty of other people thought they were just novelties for display. Lots of people were surprised by how light the boards were. Maybe they were expecting something so different and visually complex to be heavy. The boards are not light, by conventional standards - they're a bit heavier than what you would expect from polyester or epoxy boards in those dimensions. But I'm bringing the weight down with each board. The show boards were the first to get only 10 oz. of glass all around. (Previous boards had 16 to 20 oz.) The eight foot board (inspired by a Robert August shape) weighs 13.4 lbs. and the six foot thruster (based on a ...lost board) weighs 6.85 lbs.

The thruster really demonstrates how far I have to go to approach the sophistication of modern shortboards. The tail was supposed to have squared-off hard rails, but they came out too round. The bottom concave didn't look nearly as perfect as on the board I was trying to replicate. For shortboards, I'm going to have to add some features to the core design to support finer detail in the tail.

All my time and energy went into those two boards for the two weeks before the show, and I hardly slept over the three days before the show. There were mini disasters and failed experiments in making the thruster fins, and my fiberglass rack fell on the core of the eight foot board, crushing the tail. (That's why that board has that lump near the tail. I wonder if anyone noticed.) Now that all that's over I can get back to some serious "testing", and reacquaint myself with sleeping.

The eight foot board rode phenomenally at Blackie's on Monday. Okay, that does sound like an exaggeration. Phenomenal things don't usually happen at Blackies. It was just a fun, clean waist-high day, and the board performed better than anything I've ridden in the last few years. I'm not used to a board feeling stable when coming down from turning off the top. In fact, I don't usually even try to turn off the top. But this board is short and light enough to make that easy.

I forgot to inspect the board for pin holes after the gloss coat. It had one near the nose, so it took on maybe an ounce of water. It's in the garage now with a hairdryer blowing hot air from one end to the other. Ventilation notches let all the cells breath into each other. Most of the airflow goes down the rails, but slowly all the cells get some air exchange and the board will dry out. I'd like to get the ventilation paths arranged so the dry out process can reliably be done in a day or two.

But, back to the show: It was great to commune with Paul Jensen, inspect the Grain internals, and marvel at some really classy longboards. I realize I was probably a creepy presence in a few booths as I squatted and leaned in close and cross-eyed to some of the boards, to inspect the glass jobs, and caress the rails. "You can pick that board up and look at it," they would say, but I was just interested in the rails, trying to see where the laps were cut, puzzling over internal beads of resin along the edge, looking for ideas and guidelines on how to improve the way I wrap my rails.

I noticed that the deadest booths seemed to be the ones with the most conventional shortboards. One booth looked like it was all six- to seven-foot white thrusters. It was so easy to pass over. Any surf shop has a bunch of white thrusters. At an event like this I'm expecting something special, something new. Two dozen white thrusters in a rack aren't going to pull me into a booth. Maybe those were the most advanced thrusters on the planet. I would want to know about that. Get a board out on a stand and sell it. Have a team rider there to draw in the kids and parents and explain why they need your boards. On the other end of things, I was lured into the soft top board booth by the sight of a monsterous standup paddle board. A salesman quickly started reeling me in, by bringing me up to speed on the advantages of his product, before I escaped by claiming I had no money, like at all, anywhere, really. But now I want one - a huge soft top board so I can dominate at the Newport pier. (Good thing there weren't any Gath salesmen.)