IndyFoil

   My first time picking up fins from Korey Nolan’s home and workshop in Hampton, New Hampshire was in late March of 2020. It was about a week or so after the WHO declared COVID19 a global pandemic and precisely when friends and neighbors were envisioning their imminent realities of woodland bunkers, rationed canned goods, militia warfare, and widespread decimation. Those few weeks were exceptionally grim and surreal. The drive up from Rhode Island felt straight out of a David Lynch sequence—about one car every 5 to 10 minutes heading southbound on I95. Six lanes of motorway all to myself, a thin film of snow on the pine crown, the radio clamoring about death and my mind teasing out all the vicious plotting these people must have been doing while not on the road. In spite of all this eerie distraction and uncertainty, my fixation was still stubbornly set on two 6.5” Smith/Parrish-esque single fins for a freshly-finished Duo. Korey left the package on his front steps. I grabbed the fins wearing latex gloves and gave Korey and family a conflicted wave through the glass. I think my mother’s voice in the back of my head even inspired me to wipe them down with Lysol.

   Perhaps the pickup only brings into question my suspect priorities at the time. Although, more importantly, I think it serves as an indication for the magnetic pull of Hydrophile fins. When holding your freshly-foiled 6.5” SP-esque custom curve cut from a black and pink panel it starts pulsating with this inscrutable vibrance and life. A sticker falls out of the package that’s been signed with a smiley face and a thank you from one of Korey’s two toddlers. There’s a signature and a number on the fin box edge. Color lurches out of each layer of meticulous foil. Immediately, you take on a relationship with the object that goes beyond pure transaction. It’s clear that many other surf craft enthusiasts in the northeast and now, the world over, are in pursuit of this feeling. Although similar outlines and foils are available at much lower price points through big fin companies, Korey’s custom order queue is always overflowing. As a function of quality, performance, and the intangible pull of the handmade—his supply simply cannot reach the demand. And in an otherwise grim reality of surf-good consumerism, Hydrophile’s burgeoning cult following offers up a great deal of faith.

   Korey Nolan went to school for mechanical engineering and later found a career in design. He worked for a number of years as a graphic designer and later in the footwear industry. Even while working office jobs, Korey’s focus always seemed to revert back to building in his home shop. Over the past half decade, Korey has been pressing custom snowboards in his garage. In his spare time, he’s managed to build two 1of1 surfboards now made famous for their ingenuity and symbolism. A mini simmons made purely out of foraged Dunkin’ Donuts trash and an egg shaped from a lobster buoy blank. When Korey left his graphic design job at the precipice of Covid, all of his enduring devotions to engineering, craftsmanship, design, and a stubbornly DIY ethic culminated in the start of Hydrophile Surf Craft as a full-time practice. In the five years since, Korey has designed, cut, and foiled thousands of fins to customers and select shops throughout the country and abroad. Last week, Korey and I chatted about the genesis of Hydrophile, its place in New England, the anxieties of charting your own course, the influence of underground music, and ideas for the future.

GN: Korey, it’s a real pleasure having the fins around the shop. They always seem to bring in compelling characters. Not long ago a fellow came all the way from the Great Lakes to see some Hydrophiles in person.

KN: I remember you telling me that. That sort of stuff floors me. I have a hard time keeping up with it or comprehending it or really feeling worthy of that. It’s awesome and I appreciate it so much.

GN: The success of Hydrophile seems to be an equal testament to the quality of your work and the strength of surfing’s general taste. Of course, there’s mounting doubt about the public’s appreciation for the handmade, with outsourced saturation and all. Hydrophile and its success give us all hope.

KN: Yeah, I mean, not even my mom really knows what I do. What it means to be a surf crafter. What it means to lift the veil on what surfing is. What exists as part of making a living as a craftsperson or artist.

GN: How many years have you been making fins now?

KN: I just passed five years of doing it full time. I lost my job in 2021. I was a graphic designer at a sign shop, and there was a change of ownership. They let me go after a six-month trial period. By then I'd already been making fins for about three or four years during any free time I had. Fin making was all I wanted to do, and the demand was already there. When you have somebody in your life who's supportive enough to say, "Okay," especially when you have two kids depending on it, that's a lot to ask. I'm so grateful for that opportunity, and for the support I got then and continue to get.

GN: What was that immediate transition like? I suspect there would have been some uncertainty or anxiety at play, especially seeing as you were charting new waters in terms of fin making in the Northeast.

KN: I am three or four thousand miles from California, way out of the epicenter of surfing. People who shape boards around here tend to fight a bit harder for it because you can’t get surfboards easily and you can’t convince someone in California to buy a board from New Hampshire. The fact that I am able to throw fins in a padded envelope and get them anywhere in the world at a reasonable cost has been very beneficial to the logistics of this as a business.

When I lost my job, I had a backlog of people waiting that was probably six or eight weeks long. I was doing it part time, and suddenly I had all this time to work on it. I took those first couple of days and weeks to get into that and formulate a plan to build out my workshop and be more functional. That’s kind of an ongoing thing. I’ve worked from my house for the past five years, but I’m sort of at the limit of my capacity as far as what I can produce. But I haven’t reached the capacity of the demand that’s there. Which is telling me that it’s time to keep pushing and grow further. Which is exciting and intimidating at the same time.

GN: What does growing further look like for you? I imagine it’s a delicate task, seeing as the personal attention and care in each fin is so crucial to the Hydrophile ethic.

KN: It’s interesting because, to me, this pursuit is different from what you see when fin brands pop up here and there. A lot of the time, someone will develop an image and product and outsource all of the work. Which is a viable model for creating products that fit in line with the specifics or aesthetics of surfing.

But for me, since I was a kid, the important aspect is the making of it—the incorporation of creative expression and functionality. More importantly, functionality. Growth for me would never involve outsourcing; I would never really consider that as an option.

We own a house here in New Hampshire and we have a little over three acres of land that I would love to put a shop on, but there’s a lot of red tape in this town about whether or not that’s possible. Either that or finding an industrial space where I can do it. There are certain aspects of what I do that a CNC machine could help execute. A machine could cut the template off of a panel and I would still be able to foil the fins, but that’s something that’s sort of against my ethos. I am doing this stuff by hand, so where is the dividing line of when the machine is taking over for me or taking away from the handmade aspect of what I do?

GN: I understand it’s a delicate balance, but it does seem like there’s a world wherein machinery could curiously help propagate the intentions of Hydrophile, assuming those are ones of refinement and creative development. Less time on the band saw allowing more time on the drawing board?

KN: That’s just one option. There are several eager individuals in this area and in the surf space who are interested in learning how to do what I do. I don’t need to employ a $1,000 machine to cut an outline when there’s someone who’s eager and who I could compensate. Working from home, I wouldn’t feel comfortable introducing something like that into my home with my kids.

So the first step in all of that is really to have a proper shop. There was a boom of handcrafted surfboards during the pandemic; that has somewhat waned, but it’s starting to fill back in. The people who withstood the slowdown in that sort of demand are still around and still doing great things, so I’m hopeful that the community can continue to push.

GN: I can only think of a very short list of independent fin makers on the East Coast, and two of them happen to be next-door neighbors in southern New Hampshire—you and Ian of Drab. Is that a coincidence, or is there something more going on there?

KN: Ian is great. He’s created this product that is formed from the product of his family’s business, which is producing high-performance rowing shells and paddles using carbon and heated molds. It’s incredible, and the products are unbelievable. Completely different from what I do as far as procedure goes, but still making fins.

He’s really looking to get back into fins a lot more. I hope he does. They’re great, and it’s a great thing to have in this area.

GN: It seems like there’s a great deal of anxiety and competition in the world of handmade surf craft. Your stance seems like a much more reasonable one, and cognizant of the pattern that more local small businesses won’t take away from the others, but instead increase the general awareness and appreciation for sourcing goods in a local context.

KN: Right, well Captain Fin Co. just vanished—either you didn’t hear about it and it didn’t matter, or you did hear about it and it didn’t matter. It didn’t affect the flow or demand of people like myself.

It was a large space in surfing, selling imported fins at incredibly low prices. They did really well and they had big names involved in their projects. People really loved them, and they were getting artists to do limited-edition fins, and it really tied well into the surf craft world. But when they were gone, it was not this vacancy that was really felt—everyone just kept doing what they were doing.

If you’re somebody like me who’s maybe producing 12 fins a week, if I’m lucky, I’m just grateful that I can continue to do that. If I’m able to grow, I don’t think that the quantities I’m able to yield are ever going to be up to that level of “big fin.” It’s a different animal.

GN: Of course, the worlds of surfboard and surf fin making are so steeped in the master-to-apprentice tradition. You’ve started your own independent business in New Hampshire, 3,000 miles away from the American nucleus of those methods. I suspect that not being a product of the factory setting would offer up an equal amount of exciting and liberating possibilities as it would inherent challenges.

KN: I am fortunate to be able to have a telescope on that whole industry of Southern California. I am so far out of it that I can operate independently. And, of course, I am doing this standing on the shoulders of so many who have done it before me.

I am self-taught but constantly learning, thanks to blogs and YouTube and internet scouring, in a similar way to if I was in a factory sweeping up floors. I don’t have that opportunity, and I am 39—I wasn’t young when I started doing this and I had a family. I had to do it in my own way, and I am able to be removed in a positive way from all the industry politics. I can operate on my own terms.

Going to California gives me an appreciation for what our scene is here. It does make me yearn for that level of industry—driving around and seeing the amount of people with boards on their cars and the amount of people not riding the same three brands of pop-outs that we see in New Hampshire. It’s nice to be reminded of the true scope of the industry, and it’s hard to get a sense of that in our isolated bubble here in New Hampshire.

GN: How would you classify your experience overall in the surfing subcultures of New England? Welcoming? Any pushback from the old guard?

KN: It’s a very core group of individuals. We have 17 miles of coastline in New Hampshire—it’s minuscule. As far as New England states are concerned, New Hampshire was the hardest nut to crack in terms of people. And maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up surfing here—I am from away.

But now it’s great. There are people I know every time I surf, and usually they have a few of my fins. Everyone is supportive of what I’m doing.

Early in this whole pursuit I gained a lot of traction from making a few surfboards out of trash for competitions that Vissla was running a few years ago. Those projects, like the Dunkin’ Donuts surfboard and the lobster buoy surfboard, got a lot of attention. People like TJ Thran of Cvrrent really grabbed on and started supporting right away. From there I started making fins for people, particularly in Rhode Island. Then up in Maine, when Maine Surfer’s Union started putting some of my early fins in the shop.

It took people who were already in surfing and saw that I had potential to foist me up and keep me going.