For the writers who have been producing Show Us Your Quiver, one of the best parts has been talking with the people: Arne Jin An Wong, a native San Franciscan artist who started surfing Kelly’s Cove in the 1960s; Lewis Samuels, who shook up the world of surf journalism with his stark frankness about the industry’s foibles; Pete Reich, the mere mention of whom elicited grins from people who have attended his locally famous parties; or going all the way back to our first Show Us Your Quiver, local boy Andy Olive of San Franpsycho.

But we’re a very small neighborhood news organization and we can’t work on the Bulletin full-time, so we’re looking for two things. First, we need more Ocean Beach surfers and skaters to write about. Second, we need someone — or maybe a few people — to interview these surfers and write the column.

If you know someone who should be the subject of a Show Us Your Quiver interview, or if you’d like to try your hand at writing Show Us Your Quiver, please email us at submissions@oceanbeachbulletin.com or call us at (415) 742-1622. If you want to try an alternative way of producing Show Us Your Quiver — video? audio? cartoon? — we’re open to that, too.

— Tom Prete, publisher and editor

Regardless of the prospects for the morning, I decided to not set my alarm. It was going to be Saturday and I thought I’d let fate and tiredness from work determine when I got up. I usually got up with my internal clock anyway, as surfers tend to do, and on this occasion, I managed to get up early on my own without the crutch of an alarm.

Having stretched, and closed down all my computer’s windows, I looked at the windows outside.

The windows at work in SoMA revealed a man pushing a shopping cart that rattled as it went down the street. I could see the breath of the guy pushing it, probably mixed in cigarette smoke spoiling the crisp, now vacant December downtown air.

I got up and decided it was time to get out of here, out of the cold concrete, and onto the cold and open Ocean Beach. I gathered my stuff, racked up my surfboard on the motorcycle, and headed south for another December day at the beach.

When I got to the beach, the sun was out but the short winter days meant its appearance would be brief. I looked out into the waves in the distance, and I could see the pack already trading off rides on the outside.

The inner bar was folding, and there was a middle too, which clearly had to be negotiated in order to get out to the pack. It wouldn’t be easy getting out today. When I eventually made it to the outside I thought of how unrelenting, unforgiving, cold and daunting it was just to get to the nice bowl that was being lifted and formed on the set waves.

That’s when I saw her.

Elizabeth had been waiting her turn among the mostly male pack in their black neoprene hoods, and when a set wave came, the bowl was forming. No one else paddled for it from the pack.

It built and started to curl. She stood right on top of it and almost stalled on the lip, but then she put her front foot on the gas and dropped right into the still-building bowl, which was well overhead at this point.

The Ocean Beach Bulletin recently caught up with Elizabeth Henlein to talk about surfing, her boards and what it’s like to surf at Ocean Beach as a woman among the nearly all-male surfing population. Here’s what she had to say, in her own words.

OBB: What’s it like to be a woman surfer in San Francisco?

Elizabeth: That’s a very difficult question. … I don’t always view myself as a woman surfer, at first I view myself as a surfer. And usually I consider myself a woman surfer when I think about not having the upper strength to get out at Ocean Beach, or when I’m in the middle of the lineup and I’m the only girl there, or when I’m going shopping for a wetsuit and my choices are kind of smaller.

OBB: Do you find that you’re treated differently in the lineup?

Elizabeth: Absolutely I’d say I’m treated differently in the lineup. … There are certain people I’ve been surfing with around/with in the past decade and whom I know by now, and don’t treat me differently in the lineup. But generally speaking, more eyes are on you and a lot of people are shocked when you surf well, definitely more surprised, especially at Ocean Beach, when I do well. I find it’s more surprising [for them], and I’ve had multiple people say to me, “I always see you out here in the mornings all the time,” and I say back, “I see you out here in the mornings, you must be here too!” And in my head I’m like, “Why is it noteworthy that I’m out here, when it’s regular that you’re out here?”

OBB: When did you first start surfing?

Elizabeth: I guess I’ve been surfing about a decade now. I took about six months to work my way up to Ocean Beach. I didn’t start out there. I started out surfing easier breaks like Bolinas and Linda Mar and places like that, and then a good friend of mine who’s now in San Diego, who’s a very old-school surfer, deemed me ready and took me out to Ocean Beach. And I have to say, he’s pretty old-school and he told me about rips, he told me about the different people who surf there, and I accidently got my board and started to run out to Kelly’s because I saw people ripping out there. He caught up to me and said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Who do you think you are? You just don’t go paddle out at Kelly’s first time. No, we’re going north kinda up and front by Wise [surf shop].” And he gave me a lecture about respect. … I don’t know if people do that anymore.

OBB: What are the maximum conditions you surf at Ocean Beach?

Elizabeth: At Ocean Beach, eight feet. I don’t go over eight feet mostly because I feel I don’t have enough strength to do so, and also because I obsessively and compulsively surf 6’1” boards, and you need to step up. Actually, I was out last winter in the lineup — guys were on step-up boards and were like, “What are you doing?” and I was like, “But this is my board! This is the board I surf, it doesn’t matter if it’s eight feet or two feet [conditions]” There’s disadvantages to that. Usually five to eight feet … and that’s it. I just don’t have the power to get out, or if I get caught in a rip it’s serious business.

OBB: What’s your self-described style of surfing, what are you trying to accomplish?

Elizabeth: I feel like for a while I was trying to do floaters, hit the lip, but now I’d say I’m really more conscious of my form on the board and that’s the first thing I think of when I pop up. … I’m making sure I’m always looking down the line. I’ve been told I have what looks like a broken arm while I surf, so I’m not really conscious of a lot of things. I like stylistic surfing. I watch competitive surfing, not that I can do it, but I think it looks really cool. I wouldn’t say I’m someone who strives to do Mavericks or big waves or anything, I strive to do turns and the little things I can do.

Maurice Cole 6’5”

This is a sentimental board. I got this board in Sydney and it was the transitional board from a longboard to a shortboard. Anyone who’s ever done that knows how frustrating and trying of an experience it can be. So I don’t really surf it anymore, but I take it with me everywhere I go just to kind of remind me how far I’ve come.

OBB: What was happening during that process?

Elizabeth: At first it was pure pain. … I became very stubborn about it and I thought the only way to succeed was if I only surf this board, and I kind of learned this board. And I did. It’s one of those things which I find generally happens in surfing, it’s probably why it’s so addictive. … I’d get to a point and [I’d think], “I’ve got this down, this is great,” and I’d go out the next morning and kook it up, and be like, “Oh my gosh, I’m back to the beginning again.” It’s a little bigger, and it has more volume. … I remember the first time I took it out I got a ride. It was one of those things. … I remember I took it out and got a right, and thought, “This is doable,” but it was the only ride of the day.

6’1” Hess

My dad bought this for me for my birthday four years ago. He was reading an article on an airplane in Outside magazine about Danny Hess, and was like, “Do you want a board for your birthday?” And I said, “Of course I want a board for my birthday!” So I met with [Hess] and I got the board, and now it’s my travel board because it’s sturdy … and it catches anything. Also, I travel a lot … and everyone in San Francisco knows about Danny Hess, and I go to other countries and they trip out [when they see the board]. … It’s kind of a reality check that not everyone lives the kind of life we live here in San Francisco. … I can ride this as a thruster but I like to ride it as a quad. … I like the quad setup because this board rides slow and smooth … and I find for whatever reason the thruster moves around more quickly, but I don’t want to move around as quickly on this board. I kind of want to chill it out.

OBB: You say this is your travel board. Where have you gone with it?

Elizabeth: I’ve gone to South Africa … Portugal … Panama … Nicaragua. It was in South Africa and Portugal people tripped out. … People had never heard about it before, they couldn’t figure out what it was made of. … In my head, I thought everyone knew about Danny Hess. I don’t know, we’re really lucky here.

Lost Mayhem 6’2”

It’s the shark series. I always like when I talk to guys in the lineup, they’re like, “What kind of board are you on?” And I’m like, “The shark, and it eats fishes.” [Laughing.] …I used to have a Mark Richards board and this was its backup, but the Mark Richards board died in January so I’ve been riding this as I look for [something else]. … Even though I love this board, I was completely in tune with the [Mark Richards] board. This has volume. … Since I broke that board in January, it’s been out at OB in solid overhead conditions. … It works, it’s light, I can move it, I can get fancy. … This is the board I was riding when it was five to eight feet and I was next to a couple of guys who were on step-up boards, and they were like, “What are you riding?!” … It handles well. … It’s my everyday board.

OBB: Can you give me an anecdote of how surfing has helped you.

Elizabeth: I don’t know if I have a specific story, but over the years it’s helped build my confidence. Especially going out at Ocean Beach and getting a bunch of good waves. …I feel like I conquer the world. I feel like I can be the president of the United States. … I think surfing can give you so much inner power, that’s one thing I wish  —  that more people would do it, in one sense, because the confidence level is amazing.

OBB: As a woman do you think there’s a lack of that message for women?

Elizabeth: I would like to see [that message] conveyed to other women. The media for women surfers right now is really crap. It’s either like totally young, super cute girl rippers that definitely do rip, but I guess for boys, it’s cute boys doing really well. … And then you kind of have this other spectrum, and you have girls who go out and charge Mavericks, which is like the other end of the spectrum, and there’s not this middle ground like people who are like myself, who are out there almost every day, kind of surfing in all kinds of conditions, sometimes traveling, sometimes by myself and sometimes with other people. … I think it would be important for a lot of girls to see that: You don’t have to be super cute or like charge 20-foot waves, and that’s the only way you’re going to be recognized.

Affection, peace, compassion,mercy, teaching and sharing. That aloha spirit is the essence of Arne Jin An Wong.

However, Arne’s story is rich and remarkable, and inextricably intertwined with the history of surfing in San Francisco. It began when getting to his favorite after-school break required a hike down a rocky slope, before wastewater-pollution control plants were erected, before the advent of  the Internet and cell phones, and before wetsuits and high-performance shortboards.

Arne’s parents came to San Francisco from Toisan, China, but he was born and raised in the city and began surfing San Francisco’s frigid waters in the 1960s.

When classes at the Richmond District’s Washington High School let out, a rambunctious yet innocent Arne and his friends would dash away from the bustling city and head downward, toward the raw and open Ocean Beach. They would ultimately end up at Kelly’s Cove, right below the Cliff House, and “clock in.” There, Arne would help gather wood for a bonfire, catch up with friends and prepare himself to surf wearing nothing more than shorts.

Then, unlike now, San Francisco surfing was distinctly a group effort. It required friends to gather wood, friends to bring their lumbering boards, friends to watch over the hot fire, friends to help retrieve leashless, bobbing boards in the shoals, and friends to watch out for each other. There were no wetsuits, so it was essential that there was a fire prepared to keep the surfers warm when they managed to get themselves back on shore. Everyone took a turn. After someone caught their one wave and sometimes swam back in, it was time to share the board, and hand it off to the next guy waiting his turn, around the fire.

It was this kind of ritual, this group effort, that instilled Arne with a sense of sharing and community. No single man or woman could pull off surfing in this environment, with the equipment of the day, without the serious risk of hypothermia. It was the presence and warmth that the group brought that allowed them all to persevere, have fun as kids and be part of something bigger than themselves on the San Francisco’s western edge.

Today, Arne is married, has a daughter and lives his life in this spirit of sharing and community. An active artist, he’s a teacher at The Academy of Art and Expression Art College, where he instructs students in animation.

Arne is heavily involved in the BalikBayod project, which uses the allure of surfing as an incentive for kids in the Philippines to do well in school. He donates his skills as an artist to help raise money to fix up beat-up boards here, then ship them out to the Philippines. Youths enrolled in the program are loaned boards as long as they keep up their grades.

Arne is also the main organizer of the Kelly’s Cove reunion, a gathering of old-school Kelly’s Cove surfers that has become an annual tradition every fall at Ocean Beach.

Here’s what Arne had to say about some of his favorite surfboards, in his own words:

Morey-Pope shaped by John Peck, 1965

It’s a double stringer, and look at the tail. … It’s got that old classic tail. This was in the Pedro Point contest. … This board has been handed back and forth at this beach here because it’s a local board. It ended up in someone’s garage for a long time. … The guy who owned it didn’t want it anymore, and he said, “I’ll trade you for it,” so I gave him a soft-top for it, and he let me have this!

This one really is a knee-paddler. I took it out to Bolinas and I actually knee-paddled it. I hadn’t knee-paddled a board since the ’60s and it’s like a whole [different] world. We used to always knee-paddle before the shortboard. And those days, everyone knee-paddled, and that’s how we would go out without a wetsuit. You really didn’t get wet until you wiped out. So no matter what the weather was, if you knee-paddled, you’re out of the water, and you could catch the wave knee-paddling and then ride it, but once you wiped out, that’s it, it was over. And there’s no leash. … So if you washed up on the beach, you let the next guy have it and let the next guy have a chance. … Back then everyone borrowed boards.

That top there is Slip Check. … It didn’t work real well, and if you caught a wave and fell and it hit your face, it would sand off your skin, so we all kind of said that didn’t work.

OBB: How many guys were surfing in San Francisco at this time?

There wasn’t that many. When I was there as a grommet, there were about 10 or 15 of us grommets and a few older guys we used to follow that took us under their wing and tell us about surfing. Then there was another generation of 10 or 15 and then there was another generation that was less, and each generation older was less and less. And the older guys like Stan Ross, they were mat surfers, they didn’t even surf on surfboards. They surfed on mats. They had these giant air mattresses and they would go out on 20-foot days and drop in on them.

Modified Bill Hickey, 1975

This is a Bill Hickey. It was custom made in 1975 and it was originally about 6’10” and 22″ … and originally a swallowtail, and I cut it off for some reason and I made it a thumb. …

I drew that [dragon] on a tracing paper, and he just glassed it on. … Tracing paper becomes clear … and as long as you use water-based ink, it doesn’t mess with the resin. …

This is the oldest board I have. I’ve surfed this right here in Kelly’s Cove and I took it with me everywhere I went, except Hawaii. … All around Southern California. …

These were single-fin boards back then. This one is loose, it gives. That was before the tri-fin boards were coming in.

Guy Okazaki pintail

This has a pretty mild rocker and soft rails. … I gave [Guy Okazaki] the color plan. I had this board made in Venice Beach. I lived right on Venice Beach on 20th and Speedway. There was a break right out in front. It was the perfect Southern California surf pad. …

I ran my own company back then. I made TV commercials as an animator. … When I had my own studio, that’s when I would just surf whenever I wanted, and I had a shop, and there were people working in it. I’d just show up and came and went when I wanted, and I had my boards at my work, or at home. It was just like that back then. I’d say, “The surf’s up, see you in a couple of hours.”

Thomas Meyerhoffer

When I first started surfing, we had longboards, then we went long to short. And when we went long to short, it was an innovative time, it was an exciting time. … We were like cutting boards turning them into all kinds of shapes. … So board shapes were going through a lot of changes, and they mellowed out into something like that [ Here Arne points to an Al Merrick Channel Island thruster] … and they kind of stayed like that. …

When I saw this board, I said, “Now here’s an innovation,” and not a lot of people liked it. … It was a shortboard bottom with a longboard top. So [Wise Surfboards] had one for tryout and I took it out, and what was great was that I could paddle [like on a] longboard so I could get out easily, and I could take off way before shortboarders even started … and once I got up, I got the shortboard turning. … The problem is when you get to the middle, … you start to slow down … so you can only stand all the way at the top, or all the way at the back, and there’s no middle. That’s the drawback on that board.

People constantly stop me and ask me, “What is that,” but I was at Marin Surf Shop, and hanging on the wall is a 7’0″ version of this that was made in the ’70s. Somebody had thought of this back then, but it just never flew, and then I saw in Surfer Magazine a collection of boards from Dave Bellsey, an old shaper from the ’60s, he actually made a board like this, so Meyerhoffer isn’t the first guy.

Al Merrick Channel Island thruster

This board here is the Channel Islands board. This one belonged to a friend of mine, Mark Jones. He died of leukemia. He and I used to surf all the time at Malibu. When he died his wife gave me his wetsuit and his board. … It’s a special board, and I’m riding it for him. Whenever I go out with it, I always say to myself “Mark, I’m riding this for you.” He was so young, only 30-something. …

We met doing Tai Chi at a Tai Chi school in L.A. He came up to me and asked me, “Are you Arne Wong? the guy who did the cartoons?” because I made surf cartoons. … I’m infamous in the surf world because I made the first surf cartoon in 1969 that played in “The Natural Art.” …

I made a couple more surf cartoons … and after that no one wanted any more, so I stopped and went to L.A. to become an animator. … Everyone remembered the surf cartoons. … Laird Hamilton, on an interview with Oprah, he say,s “When I was about 8 years old, I saw this cartoon of this guy on this wave,” and he said, “I gotta do that!” … So the cartoon kind of inspired people.

OBB: When so many other guys have dropped out and are no longer surfing, why are you still doing it? What has kept you coming back?

For me, surfing is my religion. … My father is from China. When they came here, they just put us in the nearest church. They kept moving every four years. … What they didn’t know was that every church was different. … As I got to the fifth one, they were all using the same book, but telling different stories, so I never really got that. …

So as I got older, it was through surfing, this guy David Elfick who made “Morning of the Earth,” that surf film, … he gave me a book about Tao Te Ching, which is about the Chinese philosophy, the Tao. … And it was through that I got a sense that there is something to spirituality and the mysteries of life and it coordinated with surfing. …

After that, I got involved in some Native American stuff, and sweat lodges and vision quests, and again, it was all similar to surfing. … And after that, I realized that surfing really was my religion, and the church is in the tube and paddling and surfing is all about the prayer. … Passion and inspiration, that’s what keeps you alive, keeps you young, and when I jump in the water I’ve got this big smile, and it’s like I’m back to being 15 every time.

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All photos: Tom Prete / Ocean Beach Bulletin

Maybe there are a few captains listening in their boats far away, at the darkened helms of their vessels paying close attention to their surroundings at sea. But on land there are fewer still who are even awake, and none listening to this quiet concert with more intent and purpose than Mark Adams. Mark starts his day alone, standing in the cold and dark predawn fog where the only faint light is a weak amber cast from the continuously humming sodium street lights in a parking lot. There he prepares himself, listening to the waves funnel and turn, reveling in this nearly daily ritual, preparing for what is to come.

Having waxed up his board and suited up in the cold, Mark makes his way down to the water well before any other surfers have even arrived. He paddles out in the dark, with the sole intent of garnering the ocean’s first offerings to him and him alone.

There’s enough clean groundswell in the water to produce six- to nine-foot faces, but the waves are going top to bottom here, and this is exactly where Mark shines. He likes it critical, with a challenge, as if each wave he makes in these conditions is an affirmation of his long surfing past, the years spent earning the skill he uses here. Looking at the waves, it’s clear this is not for the faint at heart. On these waves, this day, it appears that most of the time you will airdrop, but Mark’s experience lends itself not only to safe landings, but also a ride into the coveted place all surfers aspire to touch and reach for: The Tube.

Some surfers are looking to make mincemeat out of their waves. They want to go top to bottom with major hacks, throwing a rooster tail at every possible moment, while others want to execute more finely executed shorter cutbacks and minor adjustments while setting up for the big payoff. That’s the kind of surfer Mark Adams is. He’s looking to make fine adjustments and really employ the performance boards he’s made so that he can stall, adjust, go rail to rail, and then pump and pounce on the tubes he has hunted. Simply put, he’s a barrel predator. He wants it, he waits for it  and then he goes for it, and the tools he has tuned and crafted over the years get him exactly the accurate kills he’s looking for. Mark’s creations, and some photos of the kind of surfing they allow, can be seen at his Greenroom Surfboards website.

Here are some of Mark’s thoughts about surfing and a few of his favorite boards, in his own words:

5’9″ Rasta Quad

This is the board I use the most. This is kind of a hybrid shape combining the old Mark Richards [board]. The shape of that (pointing to the Mark Richards) but the tail of this one (pointing to a nearby David Pu’u board). It’s taken a long time to find someone to make one of these boards for me the way I envisioned it, and a few people tried and most failed. I think the guy that got the closest was Randy Cone. He was an awesome surfer and shaper. Then I just decided to do it myself. A lot of trial and error. I have 80 boards under my belt now. It’s nice to be able to make a board when you want one.

That’s a double-bump swallowtail. It allows you make a board with a lot more volume and narrow the tail with the double bumps, and once you get it on the edge and on its tail, it turns very sharply. It’s kind of like two boards in one. You can have all your volume and beef up front, but it’s nice and narrow at the tail.

Josh: So I see these are glassed on fins. Do you prefer glassed on as opposed to boxes?
Mark: You know, if you’re going to travel, sure you need boxes. You know, I remember as a kid, all the boards you got, they were either awesome or they weren’t, and it seemed to have a lot less to do with fins and switching fins, because they were static and glassed on. I find that static fins have a lot more drive down the line, they’re fast, they’re more stable and they respond differently, and I think a board is meant to have glassed-on fins. I’ve kind of switched my approach from the versatility of switching out fins to the thought, “I’ll make a board to travel with, if that’s what I want to do,” and for staying at home, surfing the beach, I want glass-on fins.

I think [a quad setup] lends itself to more of a retro style, surfing rail to rail kind of surfing style, where you’re doing big turns, you’re not really surfing top to bottom. You’re not going way to the bottom of the wave to way to the top of the wave. It has a little bit more flow, and I rode quads in high school as a kid, and kind of fell in love with them, and stuck with my surfing style. I tried thrusters all the time, and really enjoy the difference, but I find myself always wanting to go back to the quad. I had a 7’2” gun that had glassed-on fins that I chopped off because I wanted to turn into a quad that I could travel with, and take it to Bali because I wanted a bigger board. Quads are a lot of fun. …

It depends on what kind of board you’re riding and what kind of tail you ride. But yes, there’s one extra fin there, you kind kind of side-slip the face. When it’s small and rippable, a quad is a nice thing to have.

6’7” pintail

6’7” 19 ⅝ x 2 ½. I made the 2 ½ kind of full, I made it a little thicker out to the rails, I didn’t give it a flat deck, but it’s not domed either. Decent amount of rocker, and a little bit of a kick in the tail, The thinned-out tail helps lay it out on the edge and turn a lot faster. As you can see even with a larger-wave board, and the thruster, I still go with my traditional bottom which is a V and a concave in the V as well with nice hard edges. This goes back to my surfing style, which is more rail to rail, a little retro … speed down the line kind of style, looking for the big sections, to do what you gotta do.

Josh: So you’re not looking for monster cutties off the lip?
Mark: Yeah for the most part, I’m a tube hound, yes, but when the opportunity presents itself cutties will be done. This is a new board, hasn’t been ridden yet. I’m looking forward to riding this on some big beach.

Josh: How do you fit into the OB community?
Mark: I’m not in need of a lot of community and friendship, really. I’m kind of a loner in that respect. I have a lot of tight friends, but I pretty much keep to myself. I fit into the community throughout the years by surfing a lot, and being seen around and when it’s good, I’m out there. I tend to let my surfing talk for me. There’s always going to be a crew in town that either like you or don’t, that comes with any territory you’re in, so yeah I have some interesting relationships with some people around town, but most of them are very good.

Josh: What drives you to OB and surfing?
Mark: It’s a special place to be, we’re all from the ocean. One of my favorite things to do is surf early, in the ocean and surf all by myself, because that’s when you’re alone and there’s no distractions. It’s just you and the waves and the ocean and hopefully some dolphins. It calms me down, because living in the city can be a little stressful sometimes, so it’s my therapy.

Josh: Are you married, do you want to talk about your family?
Mark: I have a lovely wife, Jessica, whom I’ve been with 21 years. We have two young daughters, Petra aged 3, Athena aged 7. We had kids later in life, and we enjoyed ourselves when we came to town. We didn’t get married and have kids right away.

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

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Editor’s Note: Josh Teitelbaum is an avid San Francisco surfer and cyclist.  He lives on 47th Avenue, breathes San Francisco fog, listens to the Melvins and pretends to be a writer.

All photos: Tom Prete / Ocean Beach Bulletin

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

It’s a passion he shares with the world as a founder of Sustainable Surf, a nonprofit organization dedicated to finding, creating and promoting environmentally responsible materials and methods for making surfboards. Sustainable Surf, which recently was featured in Forbes magazine, also has a certification program that lets buyers know just by looking at a stamp on a board that it was made with sustainable materials.

But as intense as Michael’s enthusiasm for more eco-friendly surfboards is, he says that the most environmentally responsible part of his quiver isn’t a board at all. It’s the car he drives to go surfing: a used Volkswagen TDI, powered by biodiesel.

The way he looks at it, there would be little point in using sustainable surfboards if he were driving to surf in a gas guzzler. And in his early days as a surfer, he said, there was a lot of driving. The son of a career Navy man, Michael grew up in Virginia Beach, Va., learning to surf in the area around Cape Hatteras, which meant having to search for surfable waves.

Michael first visited San Francisco in 1993, and it was an unexpected revelation to find good surf in the city. After years living on the foggy west side of the Presidio, he recently fulfilled a promise to his wife and moved to the warmer climes of Marin.

“I don’t feel like an Ocean Beach local,” he said, “but this is where I surf.”

On a recent Friday afternoon, Michael met with an Ocean Beach Bulletin reporter at the Sustainable Surf office in the Presidio. Standing in the sun, with the Golden Gate foghorns booming in the distance, Michael talked about some of his favorite boards. Here’s what he had to say, in his own words:

6’0″x19″x2.5″ Corran Addison

One of my most interesting and kind of experimental boards. It’s a asymetrical board, and it’s a quad-fin. It’s not just asymetrical in the shape of the tail. If you look at how the actual stringer comes up, it’s not even dead-center on the board. … The stringer’s actually off-center, so the line of each side of the board is designed to perform better on your heel side or your toe side. And even the actual fins, if you look at them, they’re staggered as well. When I first got this board from this company, I was kind of skeptical. … I mostly ride this at one of my favorite rock-ledgy breaks around here, and it works killer. It has a much snappier, tighter arc coming up on the heel-side turn and it gives a much nicer, drawn-out turn. … It doesn’t work so great on a place like Ocean Beach, where it’s bigger surf, it’s coming in and it’s more kind of a beach break. But yeah, super-fun board.

This is a recycled [expanded polystyrene] board. This has a bamboo stringer. It also has bamboo cloth. So fiberglass is not the only kind of wrapper for a board. And again, bamboo is way more sustainable than fiberglass. People will say, ‘Yeah, well, fiberglass is just sand.’ That’s true, except that in order to get that fiberglass to be flexible enough and soft and pliable enough to be used in surfboard manufacturing, they have to treat it with a shitload of really nasty chemicals.

This was actually shaped by a South African shaper named Corran Addison. He had a company that was making basically nothing but eco- high-performance shortboards. The label was called Imagine. He’s now actually sold that company and they’re mostly making SUP, you know, stand-up boards. So this is kind of a one-of-a-kind at this point.

5’6″ Ryan Harris

This is probably my shortest board. It’s a 5’6″.  This has been my go-to board in terms of riding fun, smaller waves. This looks great, killer shape. Recycled foam, epoxy bioresin, vacuum-bagged, bamboo stringer, and this one actually has basically, it’s not bamboo cloth, but it’s a very thin bamboo veneer. Maybe an eighth of an inch or something, maybe a sixteenth. It’s been basically laid over, and what it does is, it makes the board that much stronger and it doesn’t get full of heel dents. … I’ve been riding this board for two years, and it’s like it was brand new.

This is not a recycled-EVA tail patch, it’s actually a cork one. All these tail patches are by a company called On a Mission, and it’s their E.C.O. line.

It’s really stubby, like 5’6″, and it’s a little wider here in the middle, but in the tail it’s basically like one of these shortboards.

I actually designed this board with a shaper down in Los Angeles, his name is Ryan Harris and it’s his own brand called E-Tech. He worked with me on this and we called it the “cioppino” [after the seafood stew combining many different elements]. … I wanted something that was super small and kind of disc-y, high-performance rails. It’s a five-fin board so there’s lots of different options. I can ride this as a thruster, a quad, a five-fin, I can run it as a two-plus-one. …

What I was trying to do with this cioppino board was to give it a lot of volume, but I didn’t want a big, chunky board. It’s sometimes called a G-deck. … I specifically wanted more flotation right under the actual chest, to be able to get in and paddle in, but I didn’t want it up in the nose. … This is a high-performance shortboard rail where it’s actually digging in.

7’4″ egg

This I actually got for my wife so she could have an eco-board as well. It’s also an Imagine board, it’s from that same company. It’s recycled EPS foam, epoxy resin. And this one actually doesn’t have a bamboo stringer. It doesn’t have a stringer at all. It actually has two bamboo laminates on either side. They kind of act like opposing I-beams, so it gives the board a lot of strength.

I’ve talked so much trash about this board in its lifetime it’s not even funny. It’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s just my wife’s fun board.’ But I’ve taken this out more times than I like to account for, because it’s just a really fun, fast shape. This had a fin system I didn’t really like. … It was always to stiff and not really drive-y enough. The fins actually got knocked out, and I didn’t really care. I rode it because this board is something called XPS, extruded polystyrene. It means it’s basically waterproof. I rode this board just with duct tape covering up the holes from where the fin boxes were for over a year. I rode this board with just the last thruster fin duct-taped in way in the back, just as a joke, and I loved how it rode. …

I finally got the board fixed. I dropped in a thruster set of Future boxes so I could ride a set of these keel fins. They’re Sea Shepherd, so part of the proceeds of buying these fins are helping these guys to protect whales. But they’re also killer fins.

 Grain hand plane

This is my all-wood hand plane. … I had the dimensions at one point, but it’s basically 1’6″ or something like that. What’s cool about this board is it’s harkening back to the original, original foundation of surfing — back to wooden surfboards. I actually made and designed this handplane here at a class that was given by this company called Grain Surfboards.

For something that’s almost non-functional there’s way too much design work. It’s a double-bump moontail with a bonzer channel-like bottom built into it that fans out through all the bumps and come from the place in the board where you actually put your hand through. It works like a champ. … It has Super Sap bio-epoxy resin.

All photos: Tom Prete / Ocean Beach Bulletin

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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