theinertia-caster14
BIRD IS THE WORD. If you love surfboards and you haven’t been to Bird’s Surf Shed in San Diego – well, stop denying yourself. Located within the pleasing, functional shape of a 100’ x 40’ by 30’ tall Quonset hut, Bird’s Surf Shed is a surf shop plus: "It's a retail store that also showcases a large amount of my personal collection with many of these boards being available to ride," is how Bird describes the Surf Shed. You get dizzy craning your neck and spinning around to check out all the history because there is a lot up and all around, from the first decade of the 20th century to the second decade of the 21st. The Surf Shed is proving to be the in place to hold surf movies and other surf-related events. Check it out at 1091 W Morena Boulevard, a couple miles inland from the beach, just off the 5. This is Bird standing with his favorite of all 400 boards, a late-70s, 7'6" x 19 3/4" x 2 5/8" balsa single fin. Bill Caster started the board, hesitantly, with balsa that Bird hand-picked from a supply brought up from Ecuador. Caster didn't like mowing balsa and the board wasn't finished until the early 80s: "Bill Caster passed away in 1987 from cancer and suggested that his brother-in-law Hank Warner be the person to put the finishing touches on the shaped blank," Bird said. This is the pride of Bird's quiver. Photo: Lucia Griggi/Lensbaby.
Lucia Griggi’s Road Photos: Seattle to La Jolla, January to February, 2013.
365 Surfboards is a project commissioned by a publishing company in Minnesota. MVP Books are the same company that published The Surfboard: Art, Style, Stoke. That book sold well in hard cover and continues to sell in soft cover, and they believe 365 Surfboards will also do well.
The book is simple in concept: 365 surfboards laid out chronologically, with 200 to 300 word captions detailing the provenance of the board, but also linking all the boards together to narrate the arc of the surfboard from olo and alaia to Thrusters and carbon fiber.
But even a simple book is not so simple. The challenge with 365 Surfboards is to collect as many boards as possible from surfers, shapers and collectors and organize them so all the important, “Mount Rushmore” surfboards are represented. There aren’t 365 of those boards, so the gaps will be filled with historic, experimental, artistic, oddball and whatever surfboards we can dig up.
Writing books is a lot of work but Jack Nicholson taught us: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. So to start this book off right, we had a 365 Surfboards road trip!
Road trips are fun. The original Blues Brothers movie was all about a road trip, and that was a lot of fun.
ELWOOD: It’s 106 miles to Chicago. We got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark…and we’re wearing sunglasses.
On January 15th, Lucia Griggi flew into Seatac from Orange County, with about 10 metric tonnes of baggage that included her full photography kit of Canon D-Somethings with all the accoutrement. No sooner had she arrived then she was whisked away to the Queen Anne sector of Seattle, where she photographed the first of many portraits of surfers with their favorite surfboard(s) – this one was of Matt Warshaw, now living in Seattle.
Later that night, Cory Bluemling landed at Seatac on winter break, and feeling awfully glad to be away from the University of Delaware where he is working toward his Masters in Fine Arts, specializing in ceramics. Cory didn’t have a surfboard with him because the airline wanted some outrageous amount of money to ship it to California. But he did have two single-handed fly fish rods and all the accoutrement.
Cory was ready for a road trip. So was Lucia. We were on a mission from God – fish as many rivers as we could find from the Olympic Peninsula down to the stock tank at the J2. And for Lucia – photograph as many surfers, shapers and collectors as we could find – with the boards of their choice. For a book called 365 Surfboards.
Rental cars are cheap these days and we got a Chevy Malibu for almost three weeks for only $400 – such a deal. All that fishing and camera gear and accoutrements just barely fit and on the morning of January 16, that Chevy Malibu had a full tank of gas, my clothes reeked of cigarettes from staying at my mom’s, the sun was out, the sky was blue and Cory loaned me a pair of polarized sunglasses so we could see all those hog steelhead we were going to catch.
Led Zeppelin has a song for every human emotion and every facet of the human experience, and that morning, “Misty Mountain Hop” was the theme on the ferry from Edmonds to Kingston, with the snowy Olympic Mountains beckoning.
But enough of this yakkin’. To shorten a story that is 7,000+ digital images, 4,000-miles, three thousand dollars, two broken rods and zero steelhead long, the following photos and captions give some idea of how the trip went.
Learn more about this project and check out IndieGogo to make a donation and help it come to life!