Blake Pearson of the Surfrider Foundation handed out buckets and gloves to volunteers.

On Saturday, for the fourth year in a row, the Outside Lands Music Festival sponsored a beach cleanup at Ocean Beach the morning of the festival’s second day. And for the fourth year in a row, the turnout was modest.

The event was sponsored by several local businesses, most prominently San Franpsycho. Andy Olive of San Franpsycho said he was proud to associate his brand with the cleanup.

“We want to show solidarity with other organizations that support Outside Lands’ mission to maintain an environmentally friendly festival,” Olive said.

Outside Lands includes the annual cleanup on most of its promotional materials as a centerpiece of its commitment to minimizing its impact on the neighboring community. And while hundreds responded on Facebook to attend, the actual turnout was much more modest, at around 50 volunteers.

As Blake Pearson of the San Francisco chapter of the Surfrider Foundation put it, the amount of volunteers was “pretty average” for the beach cleanups the organization hosts three times a month.

The relatively small number of people at the cleanup compared to Outside Lands attendance — about 0.0008 percent of the 60,000 expected at the festival Saturday — raises the question of just how much impact the Outside Lands Music Festival actually has on Ocean Beach itself.

It would seem reasonable to expect that the influx of visitors to the western end of Golden Gate Park would inevitably trickle to the beach at night, and wreak havoc. And the Ocean Beach Bulletin’s Twitter stream was active all weekend with neighbors reporting that they could hear the festival and that parking was a nightmare. But at the beach itself, Saturday morning looked pretty normal: The small-dog walkers congregated in their usual spot, the surfers were peppered along the coast, the fog hung stubbornly overhead and the beach didn’t look any dirtier than usual.

It was, with the exception of the giant music festival less than a mile inland, a typical Saturday at the beach.

And while the turnout at the cleanup might be interpreted as disappointing in comparison to festival attendance, the enthusiasm of the volunteers was far from it. San Franpsycho gave T-shirts to all volunteers, Java Beach provided coffee, Devil’s Teeth Baking Company supplied cookies, and Noriega Produce pitched in with bananas. The people combing the sand for trash were excited to be taking care of their coastline and communing with their neighbors.

Andy Olive of San Franpsycho hands out t-shirts to volunteers.

“When people party, they don’t always think about the trash they create,” said Aleks Petrovich, owner of Aqua Surf Shop. “It’s nice that some of our neighbors turn out to keep our beaches clean.”

But as Surfrider’s Pearson pointed out, it didn’t even look like there had been that much partying spilling over from the festival. “It’s really foggy and cold, so that’s probably kept a lot of people off the beach,” Pearson explained. “We’ve definitely had regular sunny weekend cleanups with a lot more trash than this.”

Every person the Ocean Beach Bulletin spoke with at the cleanup turned out to be a neighborhood resident, and while most were attending the concert throughout the weekend, not all were.

“I live in the neighborhood and saw a flyer for the cleanup on Facebook,” explained Fritz Smith. “I was gonna head down here and surf anyway, so I figured I’d come clean up before I paddled out. I’m not even going to the festival this weekend.”

Which makes it even the more typical Saturday morning. Giant music festival or not, altruistic neighbors faced the chilly fog and cleaned Ocean Beach.

If you’ve ever read one of these columns and thought about writing one yourself, this is your chance to do it.

We met with Brandon Shipley back in January and checked out his boards, many of which he made himself.

We’ve connected with so many interesting surfers, from Lewis Samuels to Pete Reich to Stanton Otero, largely because they reached out to us about wanting to share their quiver. That, or else a friend did on their behalf. A big part of what has made the quiver profile successful has been the feedback and interaction with the surf community.

Wells Campbell was one of our first profiles, back in November, and he too makes his own boards.

Now I’m hoping to increase that involvement even further, to see if anyone is interested in helping to actually conduct the quiver profiles themselves. I’ll be away traveling through the second half of the summer, and we’d love to keep this column alive while I’m gone. We’re hoping that there is someone out there who would be interested in filling in during that time. All it takes is a camera, an audio recording device (like your smartphone), and a healthy dose of curiosity, and you’ll help to sustain a popular feature here at the Ocean Beach Bulletin. You don’t even have to know much about surfing. Of course, we’ll help get you familiar with the mechanics of everything, and will even help to put you in touch with potential profile subjects.

Another early profile was with Bryan Dickerson, who lets his kids decorate his surfboards.

If you’re interested, please send an email to submissions@oceanbeachbulletin.com with your contact information and some links to your writing if you have them, and we’ll be back in touch about getting you set up. Thanks a lot for considering, and for helping us to continue to provide interesting neighborhood coverage to San Francisco’s western edge.

That’s how my conversation with Kim Cogan started when we at his home in the Outer Richmond. It’s for good reason that Kim is sought out to talk about his art. He is an accomplished painter, and his work has hung in studios in cities including New York , Los Angeles, Philadelphia and San Francisco. He is mostly known for his dark, mysterious cityscapes, which he paints based on photographs that he shoots while haunting neighborhood streets.

But I met with Kim to talk about his surfboards. He learned to surf about 10 years ago, while he was living in the Haight-Ashbury and working as an illustrator for a video-game company. But he didn’t like his job, and the day he quit he decided to take up surfing. He borrowed a friend’s board and biked down to the beach, and hasn’t looked back since. He now devotes his time to his artistic pursuits as a painter and to the ocean. Sounds pretty good.

In the arts, Kim has tended to keep his passions for painting and surfing separate, but in recent months he has been combining the two. He recently painted an idealized beach scene on the bottom of a Danny Hess surfboard for the Board Art Benefit show. And he has an upcoming show in September at the Hespe Gallery in San Francisco that will feature paintings all about the ocean and the western edge of the city.

While most of our quiver profiles have featured surfers with expansive surfboard quivers, Kim’s quiver is modest and understated, much like the man himself. Well, modest and understated except for the bright neon graffiti he has spray-painted on the decks of the boards. He figured that since most surfboards are white, he might as well stencil them with spray paint. He has a skull motif in much of his work, with a half-dozen skull replicas in the studio that he keeps in his room. In fact, his Twitter avatar features him holding up a paintings of a skull in front of his face.

But otherwise his quiver is simple and minimalistic, at only five boards: a semi-gun, three high-performance boards and a fish. And the semi-gun is the board that he learned on.

I met with Kim to hear what he had to say about his minimalist surf quiver, in his own words. Here’s what he had to say:

7’0″ Unknown Shaper

This is the board I learned on. I don’t even know the shaper. If you have any idea who the shaper is, that’d be cool. My friends who taught me to surf are from Southern California, and the board has been passed down through three or four different guys, so that’s the most I know. It was actually a really good board to learn on, because it helped me figure out the basics of surfing.

One night I came home, and my landlord had assumed that the board was garbage and he threw it into this huge pile with a bunch of other crap, so it has a ton of cracks and dings on it. It sucked because I learned on it, moved to short boards, but then actually wanted to take this out on big days. And it’s really awesome, it’s like an ’80s-style board that’s a little flatter, with a pretty trippy stringer, but it’s gotten these dings. I had sort of given up on patching it up, but actually since you wanted to come over and talk about my boards, I actually have been cleaning it up in the interest of cleaning it up again.

I guess I could just buy a new board and replace it, but honestly do I really need one? I keep talking myself out of buying tons of boards. I’m not really sure why, I guess I just don’t have room for all of them.

When people ask me about boards, I tell them to get one good shortboard and surf the shit out of it, get it down, then get a fish for smaller days and a step-up board for bigger days.

The skull shortboards

I surf these three boards the most. They’re all pretty similar in their dimensions, and they’re the ones I actually spray-painted.

There’s the 6’2″, which I surfed pretty much all winter, it’s good for solid overhead days. This is my newest board, about a year old. It’s 6’2″, 19 1/4″, 2 1/2″. I was surfing a few boards in the 6’2″ range and I like it as a bit of a step-up board.

The other neon one is 5’9″ and same width and thickness. I actually got that board made for a trip to Bali, and got some really good barrels on it, sort of like the first barrels I’d actually claim. It’s got a wider nose and paddles really nice, and has a fish feeling to it, but because of the tail it still turns pretty nicely. The SF stickers on the top are just from a DJ I saw that I found out, and kind of like them.

The blue skull is a 5’7″, 19 3’8″, and it’s the first board I spray-painted. I saw the board down at Aqua and really liked it, but when I came back to buy it, the board had already been sold. So I just ordered pretty much the exact same thing, and they had a lot of good things to say about it. But now it’s become my go-to board. It’s got no rocker and so you can manuever around the flat spots of the wave, and again it’s epoxy. This blue skull board is actually my first epoxy board, and was shocked at how much spring they have to them. You can spend so much on a new board, up to $700, and then you can ding it so quickly, so it’s good to have something tough. I’ve got a few small dings, but other than that, it’s been great for me.

The whole paint thing, you know you actually don’t really see the designs much when you’re in the water. I just wanted to make the boards my own by designing them. And also I figure, if I get sucked out to sea, the Coast Guard will have no problem spotting me from afar, so the designs definitely serve two purposes.

The fish

I spent a long time just riding the fish, and I realized that my turns weren’t developing on the fish, so I needed to get back into the performance boards again. I still surf the fish, I mean I use all my boards, but I tend to focus most on my shortboards these days.

We are always on the hunt for interesting people who love interesting boards, so if you know of someone who might be a good fit for the next installment of “Show Us Your Quiver,” let us know by sending an email to submissions@oceanbeachbulletin.com

When Paul Cheatham was a high school kid in the East Bay, he used to wake up at 4 a.m. to get in his car, head to Ocean Beach for a surf starting at 5:30, and make it back to school for the first bell at 8. He even created a beach club, but found out that not too many other people were interested in getting up at 4 to go to the foggy, cold beach.

After a 10-year stint in Santa Cruz, which started for Paul as a college student and culminated with the creation of his own clothing line, No Enemy, he has finally moved within walking distance of Ocean Beach. He doesn’t have to be up at 4 a.m. to surf any more, and he is one of the guys who is out there almost every day of the year, regardless of the conditions. His diverse quiver is catered towards surfing every day, and at the same spot. He doesn’t own a car, so he just suits up, walks down the street, and that’s where he surf. “So many guys chase waves around, but I don’t even think about it. I just surf the beach every day. When you’re limited without a car, it changes your whole perspective.”

Paul started his clothing line No Enemy in his last year at school while studying sociology. “Brands are one of the most powerful influences on society, so I wanted to create a brand that had a meaning, and was more than just a word.” He deliberately leaves No Enemy’s message open to interpretation, but the heavy emphasis on fair trade, organic cotton and environmental stewardship makes it the type of clothing line that you can find at places like the Power to the Peaceful festival in Golden Gate Park. Paul designs the clothes to match his interest in cruising the coast and surfing, so it’s a lot of warm and comfortable wares, with a positive message of peace and connectivity.

Paul is thoughtful and soft-spoken, and tends to keep a low profile in the line-up. Although he admits that he’s seen his fair share of tension in the water, he always tries to bring the “No Enemy vibe” into the water with him. He’s a surfer who clearly hasn’t forgotten that first and foremost, surfing is something we do for fun.

We got the chance to meet up with Paul in his garage, and to look through the surfboards that were stacked behind boxes of No Enemy shirts and hoodies. He was kind enough to bring his boards down to Kelly’s Cove for photos with a friend on his own time. Here’s what he had to say about a few of his favorite boards, in his own words:

5’11″ Alaia

I got an alaia about a year ago, and the first wave I caught on it was out at the Lane. It is the fastest board you will ever ride. There are no fins, and nothing is holding it back from going. It always wants to go with the wave. I came up to the beach, and definitely felt like the board would work here. Because what does “work” really mean? It’s fast, and it holds a line. The sharp edge kind of acts as a fin, and I love it. It’s kind of like one of those boards that it can be your only board, if you want it to be. It can work in anything. It will slide across flat slow sections better than a 9-foot longboard, and it will go faster down the line than a single-fin, and if you pearl on it, it’ll just keep going. You can actually completely pearl the board, and be surfing the board under water, and then it’ll pop back up and you’ll keep going. It’s so thin, it slices through the water.

I like to say that a single-fin is like a knife through butter. A thruster is like a fork through butter. An alaia? That is the butter.

I got this from Jon Wegener, and surfed it from the end of June until around March, pretty much every day at the beach when I wasn’t taking out my 7’4″. If it was too small for that, I would take out this 5’11″ alaia. I bought it from Jon Wegener out of San Diego. It’s 5’11″ by 17″ by what, maybe half an inch or a quarter of an inch thick.

There’s no leash, and I love it. No leash at the beach is the best! It’s sand so you don’t have to worry about dinging your board. You might lose it for a while and have to chase it around, but it’s great. You gotta be careful with people on the inside, sure. In the same way that it won’t pearl, it follows you when you wipe out. It can stay with you. I have been hit by the board when I was eight feet under water, whereas a regular surfboard stays on the surface.

They duckdive really well, and it’s kind of like swimming. If you can swim out to the line-up, you can get your alaia out to the line-up. And if you can bodysurf into a wave, then you can ride your alaia on it. The thing about it is that they are so slidey and slippery that when you’re dropping in, even if it’s a one-foot, mushy wave, it requires a focus beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. It requires you to be so focused in on every little thing that you’re doing, which is that feeling that we love when we’re surfing in the first place.

7’4 Danny Hess

What can I say. Hess is the man. I got this about a year ago, last summer, and didn’t have any days for a while. … I was like, 7’4″ gun in the middle of the summer, but it’s insane. It catches waves really, really easy. I’ve had some amazing waves on point breaks with big pumps, drawn out turns. … I don’t know what to say about it. I love it.

I mostly have glassed-in or no fins on all my boards. Hess said he really enjoys the connection of the fins to the board, and these are custom-made fins that he got out of some reclaimed redwood.

I’ll take this on the biggest swells of the year at Swift Street, and I rode it every day when it was macking this year. I guess we didn’t have a lot of huge, macking swells, but it was a consistent winter.

This one guy saw me in the line-up and said that he saw the lip land right in the middle of the board, and he could not believe that the board wasn’t broken. He paddled over to me, and was like, “What just happened? How is your board not broken? What are you riding?”

5’9″ Tomo Twin Fin

This is really unique. It’s got these massive fins, which are way wider, and thicker, and maybe even a little bit taller than your average fin, and it’s got these really technical channels. It’s short and light. It’s kind of like a fish that’s more drivey and more stable. You just feel so confident with these huge fins. I was really curious about high-performance twin-fins, and Brandon Shipley recommended that I check out Daniel Thompson’s Tomo boards. I was imaging a twin-fin would be kinda squirrely, but this board is actually really stable and can do big turns. But it’s still short and narrow enough to get funky.

It’s my newest board, and I think you want some decent waves in order to let it shine. This might replace the alaia a little bit next fall.

Haut Single-Fin

This is the first surfboard I ever owned. It’s a 1981 single-fin Haut. He called it the high-pressure expansion tail design. I got it at Live Water Surf Shop for $150 when I was 11 years old. It needs some major repairs right now, and maybe I’ll get it all fixed up. I surfed it up until 2004, so I had a good 15-plus years on it, but maybe some day it’ll come back. This is the board I learned to surf on, at Ocean Beach and anywhere else I could surf before school.

Haut’s so cool. He has been surfing Santa Cruz since 1957. He’s a living legend. He’s still shaping, and is still stoked.

We are always on the hunt for interesting people who love interesting boards, so if you know of someone who might be a good fit for the next installment of “Show Us Your Quiver,” let us know by sending an email to submissions@oceanbeachbulletin.com

Kevin Baryza moved from Boston to San Francisco when he was 17, primarily for cooking and skateboarding. He had been doing both most of his life, and he knew of San Francisco’s reputation as a haven for food and skateboards. He threw himself fully into both pursuits, skating every known spot in the city (and also creating a bunch of his own secret spots) and working his way through fine-dining establishments. All of that was prep work for what he’s doing now: He and his friend Dave Ashin are the masterminds behind The Pizza Place on Noriega Street, a staple for food and gathering in the Outer Sunset, where his wife, Cindy, runs the front of the house.

Kevin continues to skate as much as he can. Although he surfed a bit as a kid on the Massachusetts coast, he was mostly into skating. We met in his sunny backyard along the Great Highway, where he used to have a home-made pool for skating. He had to tear it up, but he still has a little half-pipe in his garage that he calls the Dead Whale, “because it stinks and no one wants to come here and skate it.” He loves to build skate spots almost as much as he loves skating them, and is handy enough with concrete to convert streetcorners into skate ramps overnight.

He got much more into surfing soon after moving to San Francisco, and paddles out whenever it’s clean. Given Ocean Beach’s fickle nature, Kevin skates more than he surfs, but he still tries to get waves as regularly as he can, whether right across from his house,  along the California coast or throughout the world.

I met with Kevin while Cindy was working in the garden (“I had to tear up the pool because of my landlord, and it took me a while to get over it, but now we have a garden so it works out,” he said) and learned all about The Pizza Place, skateboarding in San Francisco, and most of all, his quiver. Here’s what he had to say about a few of his favorite boards, in his own words:

8’0″ Marc Andreini

This is an 8-foot Andreini, but I’m not actually sure of the dimensions. I got them printed out somewhere, but Marc didn’t write them on the board. It’s actually an adaptation of a Gerry Lopez Pipe template, that he got in Hawaii. He’s tweaked it, and it’s kind of specifically for outer-bar Ocean Beach. Single fin, and his theory is that the single fin has the potential for unlimited speed. There’s only one point that’s breaking the water, so they can go way faster than boards with multiple fins, and don’t get any fin chatter. It’s kind of like a Cadillac, and is a really smooth ride. I love it.

When this thing is maxed out, I’m at my limit anyway. I’ve had this for four years now, and I pretty much only ride it when the beach is big. I generally surf out front of my house, usually there’s a decent bar within a couple blocks.

The board is amazing. The confidence I can get from having the right board for bigger days makes a really big difference.

It’s not that tough to duckdive, but on those bigger days it’s tough to effectively duckdive anyway. When it’s big and offshore, I really think it helps to have more board.

5’6″ Pacheco by Danny Hess

I think I got this one in 2007. It’s a twin-fin, and I really like the little twinnies, but I wanted something that would be a little more conventional than a standard fish. I wanted something that could turn a little more. Basically, I was looking for a skateboard, but that I could ride on waves.

And Danny nailed it. It’s super fun. He was really excited to build it. Around that time, Dan Malloy was on the cover of The Surfers Journal riding a Hess board, and Danny was getting a lot of calls for the board that Dan was riding, so he was psyched to do something that was a little outside the mold. He’s a really fun guy to talk to about board design.

The proof is in the pudding. I ride this board more than any other board, and look at it. It’s in amazing condition. It’s been to Indo, Mexico, South Pacific, all over California — and there isn’t a single ding on the deck. The only way you can tell it’s been ridden is because of a little discoloration in the wax. Every time I take this thing places, people trip out on it. This one old Aussie guy stopped me at Uluwatu [in Bali] and was like, “Oh mate, that’s the future of surfing.”

I’ve ridden in it waves that are a little overhead, but I generally ride it in smaller waves. Danny really nailed this one.

The fin evolution was interesting. I toyed around a lot, started riding with really traditional fins. Then I switched to Joel Tudor fins, and then Danny actually made me a pair of fiberglass fins, and now these ones are bamboo.

Special Little Skate Spot Building Tool

Nobody makes tools to build skate parks. None of the companies do. None of them are bent, so you have to bend them yourself. What I did was make a radius, and traced it onto a piece of wood, cut it, and you get the curve. That’s your radius. It’s like a 5-and-a-half-foot transition, and it’s basically fiberglass over wood. This is for mid-stage, when you’re finishing concrete, and using fiberglass, you’re actually kind of massaging the aggregate into the cream. I use this for the spots I build. We do whatever we can. No one is gonna build the skate spots for you, you know?

Skateboard

This is pretty much my go-to skateboard, the one I take out the most. I got the deck down at Aqua. I’ve been riding it only for a couple weeks, though. I just set it up recently. The trucks and the wheels are actually from a guy on the East Coast. I went back home to visit my folks, and a bunch of us were skating this ramp, and all these guys were skating and a few of them took off. Everyone was slowly leaving, and then it was just me and Cindy left, and I’m looking around for my board and can’t find it anywhere. But this other guy named Pete, his board is sitting on the deck. And I’m thinking, “I think Pete just took off with my board!” We were leaving the next day, so I was like, “Well, I guess I got Pete’s set-up.” The funny thing is that my trucks on that set-up were totally ground down, halfway through the axle, and his trucks weren’t, so I got the better end of the trade. I put those trucks and wheels on this deck.

Handplane and Fins

I use Da Fins, and I love them. I’ve got kind of flat and wide feet, so these are definitely the most comfortable. The handplanes are awesome. They help a ton. They make bodysurfing a lot more fun. It’s crazy how much that planing surface can really affect the ride. I got this handplane from Danny maybe four years ago or so? I had broken my foot, and was doing rehab and swimming a lot, and was ready to get back in the ocean, and he and Lyle were making handplanes. I actually think Lyle made this one.

It’s got channels on the base, and I have another one upstairs that is a pintail. This one is basically like a fish. It’s weird, but the difference actually does feel different. I think a little bit of that is our imagination, “Oh yeah, I totally feel the difference with the pintail!” It’s more like, “Sure you can,” but whatever. You can’t argue with results. I’m a firm believer in that.

We are always on the hunt for interesting people who love interesting boards, so if you know of someone who might be a good fit for the next installment of “Show Us Your Quiver,” let us know by sending an email to submissions@oceanbeachbulletin.com

When you google “Lewis Samuels,” the most consistent description that comes up for the guy is that you either love him or you hate him. That’s because Lewis is a distinctive, controversial voice in the otherwise bland world of surf journalism, a guy who is not afraid to speak his mind in an industry that tends to do little more than smile and nod coolly.

Lewis is a Bolinas native and was rabidly addicted to surfing growing up. He surfed daily as a teen, and devoured every copy of Surfer Magazine when it came in the mail. He was a fan of the sport and a student of the culture, but rode waves far from the epicenters of the surf world in Southern California and the North Shore of Oahu. Regardless, he made his name as a writer with his Power Rankings on Surfline.com. He approached surf writing as an outsider, a guy who surfed on his own time and watched the pros from a far, unlike most other surf writers, who wedge themselves on the inside. As he put it, “The sarcastic, irreverent tone that was becoming common in all other sports writing hadn’t trickled down into surfing per se.”

The Power Rankings were hugely popular — “people took it more seriously than I did” — but he ultimately left Surfline, and not exactly on pleasant terms. He then set off to create PostSurf.com, a haven for discontent with modern surf culture. The experiment lasted about nine months, and makes for some great reading.

Lewis continues to write for Surfer Magazine but he mostly busies himself at work, conducting useability research for webpages. That, and he still surfs as much as he can. He is always on the hunt for a good barrel. He is just as amped on surfing as he was in his teens, and has dozens of boards in his garage, along with about eight wetsuits and even a huge stack of broken boards, an homage to his passion.

Given his history of going his own way, it should come as no surprise that Lewis had his own vision for his quiver profile. He has too many boards to focus in on just three, so he instead picked three unifying themes to best encapsulate his quiver. We met him in the Outer Richmond home where he has lived for the past 10 years, and here’s what he had to say about his boards, in his own words.

The High Performance Shortboards

These are all Matt Biolos shapes. I guess the thing that ties them all together is that they redistribute the volume in a shorter, wider package, to still be maneuverable. So compared to what I was riding five years ago, which would have been 5’10″ or 6’0″, and maybe 18″ wide and 2″ thick, these are shorter. I have two that are 5’9″s. One of them is asymmetrical, but the other is 18.63″ x 2.2″. And that’s a step-up board for me. On smaller waves I’ll ride this 5’7″.

I’m just happier with a tighter turning radius, especially not being a tall guy. I’ve finally gotten to the point where I’ve realized that all surfboards are a compromise between drive and maneuverability. If a board has a ton of drive and inherent glide to it, usually it’s not gonna be that maneuverable. That’s like the longboard end of the spectrum. But you have a potato chip on the other end that is very maneuverable and doesn’t create its own speed.

For right now, these boards are the happy medium. I’ve got a 5’5″ that I love riding in smaller waves with a really shorter turning radius.

These boards are all pretty recent additions, maybe the oldest is three years old. We’re trying to experiment on some stuff, like that one asymmetrical board with a five-fin set-up. I mostly rode it as a quad, and I got some of my best barrels of my life on it. It has the stringers down the rails, and then a carbon-fiber reinforcement down the middle where there’s no stringer. So there are different flex patterns. It’s just about trying to do something different and see what works, and this one has worked in the barrel.

One of the only things I’m doing that I don’t see anyone else do purposefully is put a larger fin on the side rail, for your toe rail when you are frontside surfing. This gives you drive off the bottom, and a twin fin feel to it. And then I put a small trailer fin, so it has a fishy feel and releases more. And then there’s a normal, Vector fin on the heel rail, so you can slide it out the lip a lot easier than if you had the same-sized twin fin. It’s just easier to release out of the lip and do tail slides, and stuff like that.

The Guns

These are all my guns, ranging from a 6’8″ to a full-blown big-wave gun for Mavericks. First off is a 6’8″ that has the same volume of a 7’6″ that I broke this year. I’m doing the same thing with the 6’8″ that I’m doing with my shortboards, which is take the same amount of volume, and squeeze it down into a thicker, shorter board. The tail, in terms of the exit rocker and bottom concaves, are similar to what you’d see on a bigger board.

Compared to a big-guy board, it’s a lot narrower, and the exit rocker suits my size and the way I surf. It’s the first time I’ve been able to get the feel of a short gun that works. And it’s a quad, so I rode it that way, and it was almost too fast, and hard to slow down for barrels, which is pretty cool. I was able to clear huge sections at will. I think I’m going this way on all my guns, totally changing up my theory on it. I want them all to be effectively 8 inches shorter than what I used to ride. I’m trying to commit to it next winter.

For example, the one next to it is a 7’0″, but it’s got a lot less volume than the 6’8″. It’s from a Hawaiian shaper, and it’s a great board, but it’s more traditional and has a lot less volume.

The blue board is from my friend Andrew Kleinberg, who lives and shapes up in Bolinas and shapes his own boards. He’s an amazing Mavs surfer and other places, and he let me try that board this winter. I had a great session on it, got a bunch of good barrels, and after the session he just said, “take it, take it home, it’s yours.” I tried to pay him for it, and he wouldn’t even let me. He said, “Nope, I just want you to have it.” I owe him a favor.

It’s really ’70s-influenced, with super-hard rails up front. In some ways, now that I think about it, it’s not that different than this new theory I’m toying around with, and has all the volume carried up into the beak. It even has a beak, just like most ’70s boards. There is a ton of volume right under it, where you are paddling. It gets into waves really well. I also have the small trailer fin set-up, like the way you’d have it with a fish. It makes the board a lot looser. If I didn’t do that, the board would probably be too stiff for me. But it turns really well, and I can just step back on a tail and turn it around really well.

Then I have my Mavs board, which is a 9’4″, which for Mavs is not that big, with once again the same kind of theory. I wanted a little shorter board so I could go left there. I have surfed the left before, but I have not gotten any waves on this board yet. I was out there this winter on that one insane day, but I was looking over the edge, and kept pulling back, saying, “Nope, I don’t want to die. Nope, I have a family at home. Nope, not doing that.”

Hats off to the guys who do it out there. I’m not one of the guys who go on anything out there. I’m scared of that place. I think the people who are not scared of that place don’t have a good understanding of what can and can’t kill you in the world.

I don’t take my Mavs board at OB. I prefer to have a board that I can duckdive, so when I’m caught inside, it makes it a lot easier to get back out. I feel like some of the guys who ride really big boards at Ocean Beach, they get caught inside, and their sessions end with one mistake. For me, I’m in it for the long haul on the few good days, so I’ll try to stay out for six hours, and so much of it is about being able to get back out after a ride.

The Old Boards

Some of these are old boards that have sentimental meaning to me, and then some of them are collectibles. I try to ride all of them every now and then, but probably the one I center in on the most is this Caster, 5’10″, four-channel rounded pin. It was the third surfboard I ever had. It was custom shaped for a local surfer where I grew up in Bolinas. Bill Caster was one of the best shapers in California, he was on track to be like Al Merrick, but he died young of cancer. For that reason, his boards are pretty coveted.

The four channels that don’t go all the way out to the tail is a pretty unique thing. It’s a little bit trippy. Honestly this theory I keep bringing up and what I’m riding now has kind of come full circle. I bought this used in a shop, I was the shop rat, sweeping up and washing wetsuits, and the boards I’m riding now aren’t that dissimilar to the Caster. This board is insane. It still works amazing. To this day it works as good as any board I’ve ever had, especially in medium-sized summer surf. It really makes you wonder, because boards that guys were riding in the ’90s were nowhere near as good as this. The good boards made in the ’80s were amazing. The shapers didn’t have the same technical ability to get everything right, they had to do a lot by sight, so there’s a lot of dogs, but when you get a good one, you hold onto it. The board was in front of my house for years, so it’s gotten pretty sunburnt.

I think this red board is an authentic Gerry Lopez board. I gotta call him up to see, and I’ll just ask him. There’s a signature that says Lopez, with a lightning bolt, so I think it’s real. One of my roommates left this board here. He got it at a garage sale in the Mission, and just left it here when he left. Hopefully he doesn’t read the Ocean Beach Bulletin.

I surfed it in big middle of the beach once. It’s not that big of a board. I had it in my mind that it’s a giant board, since it’s a single fin, but it’s maybe like a 6’2″ or something. But it worked, it drew a good line, I got some really fun waves, but I was using the original leash, and it broke. So I had to swim in, and that was it. It was my only session on the Lopez. Look at this leash, the color combination is pretty awesome.

And then the rest of these are all collectibles that I love. In fact, I still have my first board that I ever owned in here somewhere. Oh, there it is.

[The opening picture is of Lewis with his first surfboard.]

We are always on the hunt for interesting people who love interesting boards, so if you know of someone who might be a good fit for the next installment of “Show Us Your Quiver,” let us know by sending an email to submissions@oceanbeachbulletin.com

Pete Reich has been living in the same apartment on the Great Highway for the past 20 years. Originally from Pasadena and an avid lacrosse player, Pete is a big dude who likes big surfboards. Even when the surf is double overhead, Pete will take out one of his trusty longboards, preferring the floatation and paddle speed, along with the immense challenge of punching a board that big through the inside shorebreak. He quiver is full of dozens of boards, from the commemorative to the functional, and they are spread throughout his backyard, in his laundry room and decoratively hanging from his ceiling on driftwood racks that Pete has made.

Pete works for the Environmental Protection Agency as an oil-spill prevention program inspector and is responsible for the Pacific Southwest, a region that includes Hawaii and Guam, so he has mastered the art of the surf business trip. In addition to his work with the EPA, for the past seven years Pete has served on the board of directors for Save The Waves, a local environmental nonprofit organization that focuses on water quality and wave access.

When I told some friends I was featuring Pete Reich for a quiver profile, the response was universal: “You know he used to have a stripper pole in his apartment, right?” Pete’s a bit sheepish about it now, but his gorgeously decorated place use to be the home of some memorable parties, which were in fact complemented by a stripper pole. But that’s all changed, now that he and his newly married wife Michelle are expecting their first baby any week. The stripper pole is gone, replaced with a crib and strollers. Granted, Pete and Michelle will certainly be up all night in the coming days — but for different reasons entirely.

We talked to Pete about some of his favorite boards, new and old, and here’s what he had to say about them, in his words:

10’0″ Stickman

This is basically been my go-to board for this past season. It’s been a great revival story. It was sitting back here, and I cracked another board that I loved, so I pulled this thing out, cleaned it up and put it back into use, and have just been scoring great surf at Ocean Beach throughout this season. It’s a 10-foot single fin, pretty thick so it’s tough to carry up and down the beach when there’s a lot of current, but I guess that’s part of the deal. But it paddles great and I love it, so it’s been a good recovery story.

It’s going to break when it breaks. There are stress marks, a lot of them, but I’m just happy that it’s given me so much pleasure.

I like surfing single fins, with the more traditional carving lines. There’s a stability for a heavy guy like myself that I really like. But I also like tri-fins too.

The shaper is Vic Otten from Stickman Surfboards, who is good friends with Mark Massara. He shared the board with Mark in hopes of finding someone who might buy it, and I saw it and wanted it.

9’4″ by Lyle Carlson

My newest big board for surfing big winter swell is this board by Lyle Carlson, who lived at Ocean Beach for a long time and is on the north shore of Oahu now. He custom shaped this for me, and it’s 9’4″, 23″ wide, and 4″ thick, which is a huge board.

It works great. It took me a while to figure out the buoyancy and the paddling, and where to grip it in order to duckdive it and just maneuver it, but once I got that sorted out it paddles fantastic and catches waves really smoothly. It’s a tri-fin set-up and it works really great.

This is my first season with the board, and I’ve absolutely loved it. This is my first board from Lyle, but I’ve got another big giant longboard on order with him. He’s a huge, giant guy like myself, so he knows how to build heavy-duty, thick boards that will paddle well. He has under-studied with Dick Brewer for many years, which has been great for his professional growth and skill, and I really like what he made.

9’1″ original Gordie

This board is an original Gordie, probably circa 1965, when I was born. A friend of mine from UCSB sold it to me for $100, because he had a whole collection of longboards as a great surfer from Malibu. When I first arrived here in Ocean Beach I surfed it a bunch, and continued to beat it up and ding it, and got it full of water, and then finally realized that it would be better off repaired and on a wall somewhere.

It’s a fun board, and it’s a classic, and it’s got some antique value, and honestly it’s just beautiful. I put a little hole into the fin in order to put a leash on there, which probably wasn’t the best idea. I had surfed it without a leash for some time at Ocean Beach, but it’s not exactly ideal to surf out there without a leash.

We are always on the hunt for interesting people who love interesting boards, so if you know of someone who might be a good fit for the next installment of “Show Us Your Quiver,” let us know by sending an email to submissions@oceanbeachbulletin.com

With a high surf advisory in effect for Ocean Beach and nearby beaches until 5 a.m. Monday morning, the surging water has washed up considerable clusters of jellyfish on the sand at Ocean Beach.

It’s hard to determine the exact species of the jellyfish, since most of the remains are small chunks, rather than intact specimens.

While the jellyfish are nowhere near as large or as numerous as the highly-publicized arrival of moon jellyfish in November 2010, the clumps are certainly noticeable, especially around the high-tide line.

The jellyfish that do remain intact are about the size of a baseball. The jellyfish are most prominent in the middle of Ocean Beach, especially around Rivera and Pacheco streets.

In the wake of the arrival of tens of thousands of jellyfish in 2010, the Bulletin spoke with Gary Williams of the California Academy of Sciences, who indicated that jellyfish often cluster in blooms offshore. Given the right conditions, these blooms sometimes wash ashore, which seems to be the case again now.

The jellyfish are not dangerous and don’t sting. But it’s worth keeping your eyes on the ground if you go for a beach walk this weekend, not only to witness one of nature’s more bizarre phenomena, but to make sure you don’t slip.

Stanton Otero and his 4-year-old daughter Oona are regular readers of the “Show Us Your Quiver” column, and Oona once asked her dad, “Daddy, where are their skateboards? Don’t surfers ride skateboards? You do, and you have a lot of boards.”

Stanton does, in fact, have a lot of skateboards. Dozens of them, and from across all eras of the sport’s history, especially from the 1960s and ’70s. He has found his boards at garage sales and movie sets, and even assembles them himself after patiently gathering the original parts online. He decorates the decks with skate stickers that he’s kept from when he was a kid. While he acknowledges that some of is boards are so rare that they belong in a museum, he doesn’t relate to the mentality in skating. “When you turn skateboarding into a collectors-only club, it ruins the inclusivity of it. Skateboarding is so great because anyone can do it — girls, boys, kids, adults, anyone.”

Stanton grew up in a rough neighborhood in Hawaii, and turned to surfing and skating at age 7 instead of joining some of his friends in going to pick on tourists in Waikiki. “Skateboarding is a positive thing I can do with friends, or on my own. I can let off a lot of steam, and keep myself in shape.”

He moved to the mainland when he joined the Army, and then made his way to Seattle for college and grad school. A social worker by trade, Stanton now stays home to watch Oona while his wife works. Skateboarding is truly a family affair for them: Stanton’s wife is a former sponsored skater, and Oona already has her own board. The family moved to the Outer Sunset about 16 months ago, which has allowed Stanton to get back into surfing, but his heart will always be with skating. He often heads to the parks in Pacifica and Portrero Hill, and is glad to live on a fairly flat street so that Oona can learn to skate, too. “As a father, I’m so happy to have something to share with my daughter to make her what I believe will be a better person. Skating will help her to be healthy and happy, both physically and emotionally. And it’s so creative that it will bring that out in her, and even develop her analytical side.”

As soon as Stanton finished saying this, Oona reached up to her dad, squeezed his nose and started laughing.

The Ocean Beach Bulletin met with Stanton in his driveway, and while he showed us his surfboards, we were mostly interested in hearing about his favorite skateboards. Here’s what he had to say, in his own words:

Crescent Down Works skateboard from Seattle

This board has been through almost everything. I got this board in the mid ’90s, and it’s been through three sets of trucks, and two sets of wheels, and the board still rides. It’s been with me through Seattle, Portland, Canada, the Midwest, the Dakotas. … It’s probably skated the most places. It’s a very well-traveled board.

It’s got these old first-generation Venture trucks. This is a pair of generic wheels. It’s fun downhill, street skating, but it’s kind of wonky doing vert because it’s asymmetrical. But it’s been a great board. I’ve wiped out on it some pretty good ones, but I’ve also pulled off some really nice maneuvers. I was able to do cool kick flips without killing myself. It’s a great board to do bonelesses with, which I know is an old ’80s trick, but it’s still awesome.

It’s a generic, local, small skateboard-shop board, and I haven’t busted it. It’s really held out.

Original Rincon Skateboards

This is an old Rincon Skateboards, which used to be a shop out of Anaheim, California. This is probably the only board I have that I won’t ride. It’s an old fiberglass skateboard, which were popular in the ’70s. It’s got a diamond tail. The trucks screw in directly into the board, so there’s no bolt on them. The trucks are first-generation Chicago trucks. The wheels are Metaflex Surfer wheels. It’s as if someone picked it up in 1973 and hasn’t changed, the wheels still spin perfectly.

I believe that if you have a board, you need to ride it. This it the one board where I make the exception. It should be in a museum. These fiberglass boards were so awesome when I was a kid, and I was kind of like, “I can get one as an adult.”

I got this board off eBay, but it was only $40. The person selling it had no idea how valuable it is. I’ve seen a similar board from this company, in much worse condition, and I saw it sell for over $200. It’s a very hard-to-find skateboard.

Original Bahne, compiled by Stanton

If anything, this is my mid-life-crisis skateboard. I always wanted this as a kid, and never had it. The deck itself is a re-issue Bahne, but over time I’ve been able to collect as much original stuff as possible. The trucks are first-generation Tracker trucks, half-tracks with first-generation coping, with Powerflex 5 wheels. I met Richy Carrrasco at a skate clinic this summer, and he was a sponsored skater in the ’70s, and he saw this board and was flipping out about the original parts. The Power Pivots are from the ’70s as well.

All the stickers except the Da Fins sticker are from the ’70s. I went with Poweflex, Banhe. I’m going to take this out for the first time at the park this weekend.

My wife was so happy that I didn’t want a Porsche for mid-life, and just a skateboard. It’s a really fun board. It’s a great cruiser. It’s not a board for kickflips, but it definitely books. The size of the wheels really makes a difference. It’s a good hill bomber.

Custom-made Lonnie Toft copy

Lonnie Toft was a skateboarder in the ’70s, and he and his brother skated for Sims, and he made a lot of innovations to skateboarding in the ’70s and even into the ’80s. One of the more bizarre inventions he and his brother came up with was this eight-wheeled board. I don’t know what inspired it.  There’s some cool footage online of him riding this type of board.

Mine is a custom re-make. All the stickers are original, just like on my other boards.

Riding it is a challenge. I haven’t taken it on vert yet, so it’s all flatland, but you really have to be mindful of how it works. You kind of have to let the board take you, because if you try to adjust while the board is going one way, you’re gonna get hurt. You have to remember to walk along each rail to get it to turn. It’s sort of like a surfing longboard, but a really wide longboard.

It’s hard to get the trucks loosened up correctly so that it rides well. It’s yet another board I was curious about as a kid, and since they don’t make them anymore, you have to ask someone to make them for you.

Garage sale original style board

This is my favorite of my old-school styles. I got this at a garage sale back in Hawaii, and the guy said his son made it in the early ’60s. The trucks and wheels are unreal, so old-school.

It’s got a second set of wheels on the back, but they serve no function! When you place the board down, the small red wheels barely touch the ground! The wheels are clay wheels, so they don’t ride very smoothly, but the aesthetics of riding a board like this are unreal. I try to only ride it on really smooth cement. The trucks still sound pretty good on it. But the aesthetics of it are hard to beat. It’s the same type of board that I learned to ride on, although the one I rode was smaller.

We are always on the hunt for interesting people who love interesting boards, so if you know of someone who might be a good fit for the next installment of “Show Us Your Quiver,” let us know by sending an email to submissions@oceanbeachbulletin.com

Aleks Petrovich is such a creative, outside-the-box thinker that it’s almost like the box doesn’t even exist for him. He’s a man of many talents — co-owner of Aqua Surf Shop, filmmaker of hilarious surf horror movies, award-winning illustrator and poised surfer in the water. He split his childhood between Hawaii and California, and has spent most of his life pursuing his passions of riding waves and drawing. He made his first illustrated children’s book for his friends when he was only 7 years old, and has since illustrated for the National Park Service and alongside environmentalist David Brower.

His most recent drawing project is also his most ambitious: Aleks launched a digital publishing company called Gnomie to release interactive children’s books for devices such as the iPad and Android phones. His first digital book, Gnomie’s Farmland Adventure, was entirely illustrated by Aleks. It features original songs, and the capability of recording parents’ voices while they read the story, for playback later.

When he’s not busy illustrating, or running Aqua Surf Shop, Aleks is a memorable surfer in the line-up, even though he keeps a pretty mellow and noncompetitive attitude. He does things that few others would do, such as tackling double-overhead bombs on a 6’2″ without batting an eye, and surfing in a sleeveless wetsuit when everyone else is shivering in the wind.

We got the chance to talk to Aleks about his surfboards, and he picked out a few of his favorites to share with us. Here’s what he had to say, in his words:

5’9″ Epoxy Vernor Rocco

Dave Vernor made me my go-to short board that works amazing in small-to-overhead surf. The Rocco is Dave’s appropriation of a Lost “Rocket,” which is shaped by Noah Budroe.

This board has continuous rocker down the rail, yet a huge single concave runs through the entire bottom of the board, which allows the board to paddle like a fat, rockerless ’80s thruster. So the Rocco is a wave-catching machine that planes over the flat sections of a wave easily, yet is very snappy in the pocket. I love it because it is a very capable short board, which is perfect for the beach.

7’6″ Epoxy Stretch Bat Tail quad gun

Epoxy with a poly blank — I wanted this board to be strong, but not too light or overly buoyant. If a board is too floaty in bigger waves I feel like I’m just skipping down the face. I’ve had this board for six seasons, which is the longest I’ve had a gun survive. When the beach is really solid I know I can trust this board to work well, and it gives me the confidence to go on borderline scary days.

On the long journey out, this board paddles and duck-dives well. Outside, it chases down and gets into waves easily. The quad setup holds great and can make mid-face adjustments on the drop. So for a bigger board it still feels like it is right under my feet and easy to control. I’m really happy that it has lasted this long.

5’7″ Hobie Twin Fin shaped by Terry Martin

Terry Martin is one of my personal heroes — his surfboards are functional art. If you don’t know about him, look him up and read. That’s your homework for tonight! Everyone who surf needs to know about Terry Martin and his contribution to shaping.

I take this out when I need a fresh approach, when my surfing is feeling stale. This board creates a really fun line down a wave’s face and is amazingly versatile. I’ve taken it out on some double [overhead] days just for the heck of it, and this twin fin has really surprised me with how well it handles.

5’10″ epoxy Surf Prescriptions NDR

A 5.10 quad that is really flat and wide under the chest. The width, volume, and flatter rocker allow this board to paddle like a much bigger board, yet the quad fins allow it to hold and handle large steep surf.  We were lucky to have a bunch of larger, hollow days this year, and this board could get in them and was way more fun to try and ride the barrel than a longer, stiffer gun. I had a great time this year on this board and the early arrival of spring brings only sadness. Luckily it goes great in mushy, wind-capped crap, too.

6’4″ Bill Hickey 2 + 1

Bill Hickey is a local shaping pioneer and legend. Another guy like Terry Martin, where you need to know about him. [Editor's Note: Read an appreciation of Bill Hickey that Aleks wrote for the Aqua blog here.]

Bill is a master craftsman that, like Hobie’s Terry Martin, makes boards that represent the pinnacle of craftsmanship in form and function. This is the only board that lives with me in my bedroom. I originally asked Bill to make this board for me when I was out with a injury. Early one season I landed an air drop too flatly and I snapped most of the ligaments at the top of my right ankle, putting me out of the water for a year. During that downtime I had Bill make me this board to keep me inspired to heal and surf. Exactly 11 and a half months after the injury I took this board for my first surf on a trip to mainland Mexico. The board is classic and and surfs so smoothly, the stabilizer fins gave it a little more pivot power in the pocket.