Sculptors in Surfing Are Chairmen of the Boards

In the back of his Ventura Surf Shop, Stan Fujii stepped away from the foam plank he had been sculpting and eyed the shadows that a row of fluorescent lights were casting on the long, white slab.

He already had shaved off several inches of polyurethane with an electric plane, a grinding motion that left his bare arms and legs coated in a fine powder. The deeper cuts he made had sent large chips spewing to the floor, where they collected like mounds of shredded coconut.

But as Fujii peered out over a surgical mask, his gaze was set on what remained: the emerging lines of a new surfboard, one that the 36-year-old craftsman hoped would ride atop local waves with the same artistry that he had lent to thousands of boards before it.

“There are a lot of shapers who can shape surfboards, but there are very few who can put the soul in it,” said Fujii, a shaper since 1970. “It’s like a love situation. There’s nothing tangible or quantitative. All the things just come together in a combination that’s magical to you.”

About a dozen others like Fujii, in small workshops along the Ventura County coast, are keeping alive this handcrafted art of transforming foam boards into the stuff of California’s most romanticized sport.

Like builders of fine musical instruments, their products are almost always customized to the needs of their customers, so much that a shaper will want to know a surfer’s height, weight, surfing style and the kind of waves he is most likely to seek.

But unlike a symphony-caliber violin, a good board can be had for about $300, a price that allows even fledgling surfers to tote around a custom-made, expertly designed model.

“Surfboard shapers are the gurus of the sport,” said Sam George, senior editor of the San Clemente-based Surfing Magazine. “They are the most influential and indispensable people. Good shapers in an area take on almost mythical proportions.”

Take Allen Main, a 35-year-old Ventura shaper, who has been sculpting boards for nearly 20 years, most recently under the “Breezin” label. His devoted following includes Davey Miller, who at 27 is the highest-ranking professional surfer ever to hail from Ventura County.

“I’ve never ridden boards that are magic the way his are,” said Miller, who lives in Ventura but spends half the year hunting Hawaii’s largest waves. “His boards can do no wrong. When I ride them, they’re a part of me.”

Or there’s Steve Huerta, 37, of Oxnard, who has been shaping for about 12 years and has his own “Huerta” label. One of his best surfers, Don Solomon, a top amateur competitor in the state, said he wouldn’t ride anything else.

“They’re really positive and flowing,” said the 18-year-old Solomon, a high school senior in Thousand Oaks. “I like the way they feel when I take off on a wave. They let me be really fluid and do radical maneuvers.”

And Fujii, who tends to specialize in older designs for the area’s veteran surfers, can claim followers like Mike Smith, 40, who has been riding the shaper’s boards for more than 15 years.

“We surf together. He knows me,” said Smith, president of Smith Oil Co. in Ventura. “I don’t have to even go in the shop. He just says, ‘I know what you need.’ ”

The making of a surfboard, a process that can range from 10 days to several weeks, begins with the polyurethane-based slabs known to shapers as “blanks.” Purchased almost exclusively from the South Laguna firm of Clark Foam Products, the blanks come in about 50 styles and lengths intended to approximate the dimensions of the finished board.

Each shaper, however, has his own ideas about how much foam should be shaved off and where. While most use templates to help them consistently produce some standard design features, the final cuts are always judgment calls that only the eye and the heart can guide.

Those decisions may affect the lengthwise arc of the board’s belly, or “rocker,” the degree of angle, or “V-depth,” found sideways along the bottom or the sharpness of the board’s edges, or “rails.”

Translated into the realities of surf and swell, such factors will give a board the looseness it needs to skate across the small, fast waves of Silverstrand, the stability to hold its own on a big, sloping wave near Surfer’s Point or the edge to carve back and forth across any swell’s face.

Once shaped, most of the boards are sent to be finished by a specialist, who adds a coat of fiberglass and hard, clear resin.

“You’re looking for every measurement to be in harmony with everything,” said Fujii. “But you cannot put down measurements and say, ‘That’s going to be a magic board.’ It’s a very momentary thing. It’s an XYZ factor.”

By contrast, the predecessors of today’s boards were as simple as ABC. Carved from giant redwood slabs in the 1950s, surfing’s dinosaurs sometimes measured as long as 12 feet and weighed in at 80 pounds.

Although the board had shrunk to a more manageable 9 feet during the sport’s first burst of popularity in the 1960s, finesse was still in short supply. Surfers showed their stuff by how long they stood up.

It wasn’t until 1970, when the so-called “short-board revolution” took hold, that surfers began to see the advantages of smaller, more maneuverable rigs. While shapers have continued to hone the design over the last decade, 6-foot boards, known today as “squash-tail thrusters,” are the most commonly sighted on local waves.

As the size of the boards has shrunk, the concept of fine board-making has grown.

In a sport that demands confidence and daring, it’s not surprising that most shapers like to think they achieve true art a bit more frequently than their competitors.

“The trick is to get a surfboard that fits with the wave,” said Main, who owns Breezin Surf & Sport. “I can translate that better into a shaped piece of foam. My interpretation is better.”

Others, such as Malcolm Campbell, an Oxnard shaper who 15 years ago shook up the craft by introducing a short, three-finned board with a concave bottom, see themselves almost purely as innovators.

“We’re constantly trying to stay on the edge of creativity,” Campbell said in a telephone interview this week from Hawaii, where he was introducing a newfangled, five-finned board to some local surfers. “We’ve really just wanted to contribute to the evolution of the surfboard.”

But a few cynics contend that most differences between shapers are negligible. The more commercially successful among them, they say, are usually propelled to fame simply because a top surfer rides their boards.

“A lot of it is hype,” said Jeff Bushman, a 33-year-old Ventura shaper. “A good surfer could rip on an ironing board.”

Almost all shapers agree, however, that they try to make a board that best fits their customers’ needs, whether that means leaving a little extra thickness to help keep a novice surfer afloat or enhancing a crucial angle to give a world-class competitor an extra edge.

Always, they say, they try to inject that intangible element that makes the board so much greater than just the sum of its parts, that extra something that causes an inanimate slab to come alive when it meets the ocean.

“I have a goal to someday build the Stradivarius of surfboards,” Huerta said. “You couldn’t replace it. It would be ideal. . . . It would do everything the person would need it to do.”