I was reading the website of one respected shaper and noticed something that kind of sums up the feeling of many about Hand building surfboards vs. having them made into popouts or mass produced for profit. In this write up the shaper stated that he began making his own surfboards because he liked to surf and wanted to ride his own designs. He believed that neither surfing nor the making of surfboards has anything to do with the material world and that getting rich was never the reason for continuing to shape. Making a surfboard like surfing in many ways seems to me to be a celebration of something vey personal. Something none of us can explain in words to those who don’t surf. Think of it; how do you explain to a non surfer the facination we all have with a piece of carved foam and some fibreglass? You cannot and even if you could they would probably think you nuts.
The thing we all call soul is nothing more than that unexplainable feeling we all get when we go surfing or buy a new surfboard. It’s that image that burns in our minds days and years after one memorable session. We think of our boards in many ways like we think of our pets. When we lose a magic one or it’s gone, we miss it and think about it years later. How does this carry into surfboard making vs. making money? When you have a surfboard made for you by a master or if you build it yourself, you are following in the tradition of the ancient hawaiians. You are fullfiling a ceremony. It is being made by a human being for a specific purpose and that purpose is something felt on a very personal level by those who have chosen to follow the waves. We are tuned into the earths pulse in this area more than your average human. We feel it. thats why we have sayings like, “only a surfer knows the feeling.” When you mix in the love of money or materialism into something like surfing, you are subtracting from the ceremony and turning it into the daily grind that many of us began surfing to escape. Surfing is not about materialism, profit, or political views, it’s about a celebration of life and escape from the material industrial world. Even if but for a moment in time.
The entire industry that we call, "The Surf Industry, " is built around the same greed, corruption, hassle, and competiton that the industrial business world is built around and has the same dark and heavy feeling that that world can bring with it. Capitalism is not a bad thing in and of itself, but it has no place in the act of surfing or the act of building a surfboard. Certainly for those to keep building boards a profit must be made, which is capitalism, but seeking riches from within surfing to me seems to go against the reason we were all drawn to the waves to begin with. It becomes competition instead of feeling.
Those that are trying to get rich from surfing are simply using the art like a parasite to follow their own personal goals and push their own vision on everyone else via advertising and hype. They are making surfing products not for surfers themselves but for those who do not surf or are easily impressed enough to overpay for their products to make them rich. Thus we have something now called, “The Surf Industry.” Which is supposed to represent something that is only really felt not something to be looked at or admired on a wall. What surfers used to do was go surfing, now what many want to do is talk surfing or look surfing. Entire generations have grown up thinking this way or that is how a surfer is supposed to LOOK or supposed to ACT.
The guys that built our boards for us in times past were given almost guru like status because they represented the ones who made our magic carpets to enjoy our celebration of the sea and life. Now many of them have taken a step down into the cauldron of ,“The deal.” Step right up ladies and gentlmen and see the new latest and greatest! Only one of a kind and you can have it today for the low low cost of…
Is this the future…or the past…?