Surfer

“High performance” is kind of a loaded term, no? When used to describe something, those two words are supposed to mean “this works better,” but over the course of my 31 years on this earth I’ve become conditioned to just read them as “this is a scam.

Style evolves because human beings are competitive. If you see that your buddy looks a little bit better than you, you’re going to try to outdo them, to look better than they do. It’s just how it is. Shapers used to be simple craftsmen who just wante

Sunny Garcia scares me. Always has. For one reason or another, when I was a young surfer in the early 1990s, I picked Sunny out of the constellation of hard-ass Hawaiians I could have feared to be the surfing boogeyman. Of course, I had nothing to fe

Surfboard design is shit science. Always has been. Sure, there are myriad ways a shaper can alter a blank to intentionally affect the way a finished board rides, but it’s a game of trial and error, eyeballing and improvising, infinite variables and b

Zack Flores shaped his first surfboard when he was 10 years old. Ten! Imagine even wanting to do a thing like that at that age. Most 10-year-old kids think surfboards just come from the surfboard store—if they think about where they come from at all.

It was lunchtime on a hot August day in Waikiki and I was surrounded by a group of young longboarders—about a dozen or so teenagers with sun-bleached hair—at a mercifully-air-conditioned, if not particularly noteworthy otherwise, California Pizza Kit

“This particular day was as big as I’ve ever seen at Desert Point—the type of day where there are far more surfers on land mind-surfing the wave than there are in the water actually surfing,” says Ryan “Chachi” Craig, who snapped this absolute gem at

A wave of anxiety washed over me as I boarded the plane and took in my surroundings. When I first learned how to get to the undisclosed wave I was en route to, I was told that as recently as last year, flights to the area had as few as 10 passengers.