In the winter storm waves off North Hampton, a dozen black shapes dot the water. From shore it looks like a static scene: there is little movement among the surfers as massive swells roll underneath them, raising them up before lulling them deep into the troughs of the waves, out of sight from the rocky beach.

What from shore seems little more than rhythmic bobbing is in fact a constant state of flux. It takes continuous motion—scoping of the waves, quick bursts of paddling, re-evaluations of the terrain—only to remain in the same place. The surfers are all grouped together, close enough to touch, on a precarious, tiny piece of real estate. Between them and the rocky outcropping of Little Boar’s Head, waves taller than the tallest among them crest and break. The strong offshore wind blows the caps of the waves out to sea like beer foam, spraying the neoprene-clad lemmings. Just sitting there in the ocean, dropping precipitously into the trough of each swell, is exhilarating. The roar of crashing waves can be felt in the surfers’ stomachs as well as heard in stinging ears.

Surfing is a communion with the forces of nature, harnessing the power of waves to provide forward motion and using the unique shape of each wave like a blank canvas. More stereotypically practiced in warmer climes, surfing’s appeal grips enthusiasts with such force that even those trapped by geography would rather ride winter’s storm waves than go a month out of the water.

Like the surfers out in the turbulent waves, though, the surfing world is currently undergoing a dynamic change. In December, the California-based company that produced 90 percent of the core material for foam surfboards worldwide suddenly closed its doors. How that will affect local surfers and board makers remains to be seen.

from Hawaii to New Hampshire

Surfing originated, by all accounts, thousands of years ago in the Polynesian islands. By the time European explorers first chronicled it in writing in the 19th century, the art of riding waves on wooden boards or outrigger canoes existed in distinct locations around the globe: Western Africa, Peru and Hawaii. For hundreds of years, well into the 20th century, surfboards were made of solid pieces of wood whittled down from whole trees of ash or koa or balsam—whatever lightweight, buoyant wood could be found nearby. But in the 1910s and ’20s, surfing mounted a renaissance, largely on the wide shoulders of Hawaii’s Duke Kahanamoku, the world’s fastest swimmer and winner of three Olympic gold medals. As he traveled the world giving swimming exhibitions, he either brought along or made a new surfboard on site, introducing surfing to new audiences everywhere he went.

Surfing didn’t catch on quickly in New England. The cold Atlantic waters (especially north of Cape Cod) make anything more than a quick dip in the ocean pretty unpleasant—water temperatures along the New Hampshire and Maine coastlines barely reach into the 60s in the heat of August. It wasn’t until 1952, when Jack O’Neill sold the first neoprene wetsuit in Northern California, that the surfing possibilities opened up locally.

There’s not a lot to recommend here: in addition to cold water, northern New England surfers have to contend with rocky coastlines and fairly small waves. But during the Atlantic hurricane season, brief envelopes of storm surge are pushed onshore from passing offshore systems as they clear the Carolinas and generally track north-northeast out to sea. Though the water temperature drops back into the 40s in late October, a committed core of riders look forward to the big waves of  Nor’Easters and winter storms.

Like everywhere on the planet, the popularity of surfing in New England has exploded over the past decade. While it used to be a fringe sport with a strong cultural element, surfing has invaded American society. There are soft boards shaped and geared toward beginners, lessons, clinics and corporate team-building surf retreats. And while the last 10 years have seen the rise of a surfboard manufacturing industry with large-scale companies mass producing boards overseas, local board shapers are holding their place.

big business

Shane Smith Industries, or 2SI, sits in a small white building on U.S. Route 1 in Hampton, just about at sea level and across the marshy wetlands separating the mainland from the ocean break. In the front is a small surf shop/showroom, and in the back is a large, converted garage where 700-1,000 surfboards are crafted each year. 2SI is big business in New England surfing terms. Started in 1994, it has been the largest producer of surfboards in New England—the next biggest producer makes only about 50 boards annually.

To the naked eye, surfboards are simple creations. In fact, the first surfboards were simply modified tree trunks. For centuries they were fashioned from a single, solid piece of wood. The finished product could be up to 20 feet long and weigh nearly 200 pounds. There were no skegs or fins on the bottom to provide tracking or direction, and early surfers slid on waves without much ability to control their boards. In the 1920s and ’30s, innovators like Tom Blake began to experiment with hollow wooden surfboards once a glue existed that would hold the fir, cedar and redwood veneers to a system of transverse braces, blocks and side rails. Fins were added in the 1930s and became widespread within a decade.

The modern surfboard, with a polyurethane (PU) foam core and a thin strip of wood, called a stringer, down the middle, all wrapped in fiberglass fabric and polyester resin, was born in the 1950s and is still the construction used for nearly all surfboards today.

I caught up with Shane Smith of 2SI during his last week of production before packing up shop and moving the business to Florida. Several inches of slushy snow covered the unplowed parking lot. The heat was off in the shop as he unlocked the door and led me inside. “It’s hard to work here. It’s cold. It’s hard to find enough good shapers,” he says in response to why he’s moving to Florida. “I’ve struggled to stay here for a decade.” Standing upright in racks along the wall are a handful of various sized blanks, the PU foam blocks that eventually will be shaped into surfboard cores. Ahead is a 20-foot long CNC shaping machine: a $75,000 device that Smith says cuts a week worth of hand shaping into a day.

Other than this high-tech shaper, he is making boards the traditional way, hand-wrapping them with fiberglass fabric, coating them with goopy resin, sanding them smooth, applying decals and designs, and adding multiple layers of clear coat to small batches of boards. The finished product fetches $400-$600.

In Florida, Smith will rent space in an existing factory shared by several other companies, put his CNC machine to work full-time, and concentrate on making surfboards, not doing all the other things he has had to do to keep his enterprise running in New England. He will be able to work year round and have better control over the raw materials.

Unlike snowboards and skis and bicycles, American surfing companies have resisted the urge to move manufacturing overseas. Though manufacturing costs in the United States are very high and the overseas business prospects are financially attractive—lots of boards are now manufactured in China and Thailand—this is an industry that prides itself on individuality of product. A surfer can walk into nearly any U.S. board manufacturer and get a model customized for no extra cost. As a result, losing control of even part of the production process would change entirely the culture of the custom surfboard industry.

Hurricane Clark

A big part of what has held the surfing industry in its present model for so long has been Clark Foam. Hobie Alter and Gordon “Grubby” Clark created the first foam blanks in 1958, and in 1961 Clark started Clark Foam. Creating an estimated 1,000 blanks a day, Clark Foam has produced 90 percent of the worldwide stock of PU cores for surfboards for decades.

On Dec. 5, 2005, Clark closed his doors with no prior notice, smashed his molds, sent 1,000 employees home and ceased production. In a seven-page fax sent to surfboard companies on the day he closed, he cited Environmental Protection Agency mandates over the use of carcinogenic toluene diisocyanate, or TDI. There are a lot of questions surrounding Clark Foam’s closing. The changes that the EPA wanted the company to make would have cost in the neighborhood of $500,000 for a business that by all accounts made $20 million a year for the past few decades.

Clark is an idiosyncratic figure in the surfing world. His ironclad grip on the surf blank industry in America was a result of his creating a superior product, lowering prices to drive competitors out of the market and strong-arming clients. He reportedly told his customers that if he ever found out that anyone had bought blanks from another supplier, he would cut them off—forever—and Clark made examples of a few people to prove his point. For decades, it was easy for American surf companies, big and small alike, to get all of their blanks from Clark Foam. They were less than half the price of a Chinese or Brazilian blank (roughly $40 vs. $95), and American made.

With Clark Foam out of business, there has been a crisis in the industry. In January, Australian blank manufactures banded together and pledged not to sell their products to the United States, taking a further chunk of blanks out of reach for American shapers. The closing has sent out industry-wide tremors, at least in the short term. “If it had happened a week earlier I would have been out,” says Smith of his supply of Clark blanks. Smith is currently working with several other companies to find a non-traditional source of PU foam that will be more secure and controllable.

epoxy, EPS and other possibilities

Unlike nearly all other segments of sporting goods, application of high-tech materials has been minor in surfboards. The main choice to replace PU foam is extruded polystyrene, or EPS foam, which is the same stuff used to make Styrofoam cups.

For anyone who has been building surfboards from PU, EPS presents several challenges. EPS requires a different type of resin, since the resin commonly used with PU foam will melt EPS. A more environmentally friendly, but harder to control, water-based epoxy must also be used. And, at least until now, there has been no company offering pre-made blanks, 4-by-4-by-8-foot billets of the foam, adding a few steps to the board building process that Clark Foam has been providing for half a century.

Shane Smith makes three models of his boards, or about 10 percent, in EPS.

“It works well for really thin longboards and expanded shortboards,” says Smith, but in general, he doesn’t think that it feels the same as a PU board. EPS boards are also more expensive to manufacture, which brings them out of the $400-$600 price range that is 2SI’s bread and butter.

going back to old school

One way to get around the current PU crisis is to build boards without any foam. Surfboards were built out of solid wood for centuries and hollow wood in the 1920s-1950s until PU foam and fiberglass revolutionized the industry in the ’60s.

Grain Surfboards in York Beach, which sprang to life out of a brainstorm by Mike LaVecchia and Rich Blundell, draws upon the time-honored craft of wooden boatbuilding to produce hollow wooden surfboards that both hearken back to a bygone era and look to the future.

The coast of New Hampshire and Maine became a hotbed of wooden shipbuilding the moment Europeans started calling it home. In 1690, the British government contracted with the Colonies to construct the first warship to be built in North America. The 637-ton, 54-gun frigate HMS Falkland, was built in Portsmouth Harbor, and in 1800 the islands at the mouth of the Piscataqua River would become the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, the first naval shipyard for the fledgling United States.

LaVecchia answers the door wearing jeans covered in sawdust, a dust mask hanging from his neck. He invites me into his living room, into the worldwide headquarters of Grain Surfboards on Nubble Road. He is boisterous and affable, and he seems thrilled to be doing what he recently began to do for a living: building wooden surfboards in his basement with friend, roommate and business partner Blundell.

LaVecchia and Blundell are boatbuilders who surf. They ended up in York Beach because they got tired of driving there from their home in Burlington, Vt., to get their surfing fix. They were working for York boatbuilder Paul Rollins last spring when they decided that there was a market for them to build surfboards the same way they build boats.

LaVecchia leads me down the narrow stairs into the low-ceilinged basement of their rented house, where Blundell is checking on a hand-fashioned wood boiler—a 10-foot long, 4-inch diameter capped PVC pipe being filled with steam from a boiling pot sitting under one end of the pipe. Mike’s brother Nick pops his head down into the basement to warn Mike and Rich that his girlfriend will kill them if she finds out they are using her good pots to steam their wood.

“It’s just a prototype. If it works, we’ll get our own pots.”

Everything in the basement seems to be a working prototype. Handmade wooden stands hold up the skeletons of several boards in various phases of construction. A layer of sawdust coats the floor. Low-slung ductwork blocks head space. Plastic sheeting hangs from the ceiling, separating the shop from the rest of the basement. Every few minutes a motor whirs to life for a few seconds. “That’s the sump pump,” LaVecchia explains. An 8-foot-long frame, the backbone of a board-to-be, sits on a stand, circular holes drilled out of its keel and frames. Laying on top of another board is a full-sized computer printout of its shape.

“We’re not doing anything drastic,” says LaVecchia. “We’re traditionalists.” Generally, they find an existing foam surfboard they like and reverse engineer it into a hollow wooden version. Compared to a foam board, the ride characteristics are very similar. “With wood, you get more feedback. It’s livelier, slicker,” says Blundell. “(A wood board has) a little more weight. Once they get going, they really slide and glide.”

Grain Surfboards has eight to 10 completed boards out in the surf, another five or six currently in production, and orders for as many more, at prices from $1,000 to $1,400. LaVecchia and Blundell are still trying to streamline the process. They are searching for a way to get their cedar frames pre-manufactured, and they haven’t finalized the shape, rocker and concave designs for their five existing models of shortboards, longboards and fish.

What they lack in production at this early stage, they make up for in self-promotion. From Maine to Honolulu to Cincinnati, articles about Grain Surfboards are popping up everywhere. Their product is filling a niche that it seems surfers have desperately wanted to be filled, and in a timely way. Their boards are beautiful, glossy, natural works of art. They use Western Red Cedar, White Pine and Northern White Cedar and select individual boards to add to the aesthetic value. They show me “Eve,” their first wooden creation, hanging in the garage alongside a handful of foam surfboards, relics from their pre-Grain days. Eve is a longboard behemoth, and it takes both of them to take her down from her rack where she hangs from the ceiling. Big brass screws affix her planks to her frame and thick, black lines of filler complete the gaps between the boards—two clunky aspects that have been eliminated from their production models.

When I ask why they wanted to make wooden surfboards, LaVecchia tells me “they are beautiful and different. All of the ingredients float. If you take any of the materials that we are using to build these boards and throw them in the ocean, it’ll all float.” There is also an environmental aspect to their business. They are trying to find a sustainable source for their wood, such as Vermont Family Forests. They are also sending out with every surfboard seeds of the trees they use, so that a surfer can regrow the wood used for their board. If you buy a Grain Surfboard in California, they’ll send you Western Red Cedar seeds. If you buy one down south, you’ll get Atlantic White Cedar seeds.

DIY

Locally, there are a handful of surfers who have eschewed the retail routine of buying new surfboards, opting to create their own from scratch. Nate Greeley is one such person. He has a small boat building shop along the railroad tracks behind the Button Factory Studios in Portsmouth. Inside, a small wooden boat sports a fresh coat of enamel paint. On a rack next to it lays a new 20-footer with half its planking attached to its ribs. There is an assortment of wood planks stored above in the rafters, and sitting on a rack high up on the wall is a Clark blank for a 10-foot longboard that he managed to wrangle from Shane Smith. On the concrete floor, amid the sawdust, you can see drips of polyester resin from an old surfboard glassing session.

Greeley has been surfing for seven years or so, and for the last five years he’s been building himself foam and fiberglass surfboards at the leisurely rate of one a year.

“It’s a logical extension from building boats,” Greeley says when asked why he builds his own surfboards. For the most part, building a surfboard uses simple tools that he already uses to build boats. “It’s pretty cheap. All the materials cost about $200.” Not bad, as long as you know how to do it and have the time.

Greeley seems especially proud of his latest creation, a 6-foot, two-finned fish shape board with a black outline added to the rails. Greeley generally tries to match an existing design that he knows he’ll like, making small alterations to the concave or rocker. “The great thing is that no matter what you end up with, for the most part it will work in the water.”

the final forecast

Already in the two months since the Clark closing, the crazed feeling of apocalypse has mellowed into acceptance. By all accounts, there will be a glut of PU foam blanks by the time summer comes and surf shorts and bikinis see the light of day. Some will undoubtedly be of good quality, but much of the material will probably be of a much lower quality than shapers are used to using. EPS will probably increase its presence in the market, Grain Surfboards will undoubtedly be selling as many boards as they can build, and within a year, the surf industry will be a stronger, healthier community overall. Just in time for waves from the winter storms to roll into favorite surf spots all along the New England coast.