There's a very nice looking Dewey Weber Performer with a wooden hatchet fin hanging in the McDonalds on Ave. Pico. Just noticed it last night. I guess it's not a totally wierd place, It just struck me as odd.
As I recall a local surfshop owner in NJ found a black Da Cat model(extremely rare) in near mint condition in an attic in West Virginia. How and why it was there I have not a clue.
A friend of mine is a vintage board collector. He once got a call from a guy in Connecticut. The caller had a thick German accent. He said he’d just bought a house and there was an old wooden board in the garage. Someone gave him my friend’s number and told him he might be able to sell it to him. My pal drove down from the other end of New England to check it out. When he pulled in the driveway he saw the board up in the rafters. A Hobie balsa with 5 redwood stringers. Who the hell knows why and how it wound up in CT? I think The German sold it to him for about $400.
Same guy hit up a flea market one time, and scored a red “Da Cat” for $75. He gave it to his best friend as a wedding present, since he already had 5 Cats, himself.
The board in the rafters was probably bought for some rich kid for when they went once a summer to their beach house in RI, Cape Cod, or the jersey shore when surfing first became popular. I know enough CT kids who do just that.
My friends told me about a restaurant in Kaimuki that has 2 Sparky custom Longboards. Apparently Sparky used to have eat there all the time and gave the owner those boards. Both have never been wet, and were made when he was the man for longboards on Oahu.
For those who don’t know, Sparky is the legendary Inter-island shaper.
i love riding old surfboards from the 60’s and 70’s (especially 1969-1970) and most of my friends knew it. in early 2002, in my first year of university, one of my mates from class was working part-time for a tyre company and travelled around replacing truck tyres. he went to this old truck yard one day and spotted a couple of old surfboards under the ramp that rose into the shed for the trucks to enter on. he asked the guy about them and he said they had been there for years and gave them to my friend. my friend doesn’t surf and was asking on my behalf so he passed them on to me.
i was stoked and still am. one was a mid-60’s longboard and the other was a 1969 Grove surfboard from Brookvale in Sydney. it was a classic Tracker style board and a favourite of my brother and i.
the longboard had “Pipeline Bistro” spraypainted on the bottom and the Grove had “Kahuna” sprayed onto the deck. it came off easily.