Bobbing and Sinking on Grand Street

Ryan Burch in Residence

By George Nickoll

On the morning of September 4th, 2024, sixty surfboard blanks spilled out from a nondescript box truck onto Grand street and into a sidewalk cellar door. The passage from truck to street to subterranean shaping bay incited a steady Doppler effect of equal parts confused, amused, and disturbed passersby. Ramblings of intrigue faded in and out of earshot. “What on earth is going on here?” A mother asked her stroller. “Oh yeah, Tim’s brother said he’s been getting into paddle boarding this summer. That’s what those are!—a man to his brunch bound crew. “There’s a surfing shop right here, do they make the boards?!” begged another two amblers. An elementary schooler in a hot pink soccer uniform delivered a long wordless stare and a frenzied commuter urged us to “get the fuck out of the way!”

  

Although none of the Williamsburg pedestrians quite hit the mark, their fascination was commensurate with the event. In a week’s time, Pilgrim Surf and Supply would welcome Ryan Burch—one of the finest contributors to modern surfboard building and riding. Ryan, along with his wife Luki and 14 month old son Bex would spend three weeks in residence tackling a batch of thirty custom orders. 

The Burch family came visiting from North County San Diego where they tend to a new home and operate the family board building business. As a new father and homeowner, Ryan’s pace of life is a veritable departure from the lifestyle he pursued over the past decade—traveling the world as a salaried free surfer and experimentalist. His surfing on self-made equipment has made an indelible impact on popular conceptions of design and its relationship to performance. His part in Ryan Thomas’s 2015 film Psychic  Migrations continues to spur the aspirations of young surfing, shaping, and traveling enthusiasts everywhere—myself included. While it’s easy to become either distracted or entranced by the idiosyncratic silhouettes of models like the Parallelogram or Pickle Fork, it’s important to remember that Ryan’s focus has always been surfing to the best of his ability. His practice harkens back to an original mode of surfing, when a surfer’s ability in the water depended on a proficiency in the shaping bay learned through constant practice and diligent apprenticeship. Ryan’s idol status is only an accidental consequence of his commitment to this traditional folk system of research, collaboration, and development. Among the many attempting to “make it” in surfing, it is often difficult to differentiate between those who want to ride waves or make boards well and those who want to revel in the viral applause that may follow. It’s obvious that Ryan has little interest in the latter. He loves surfing for its own vague and mysterious sake, and when watching him bounce on the boardwalk of Laurelton Ave, finger surfing slightly over-knuckle windslop after a lifetime of scoring pumping waves, I wondered if perhaps Ryan loves surfing more than anyone I’ve ever met. 

The Pilgrim shaper residency follows the intentions of any traditional artist residency–namely, bringing influential figures of the discipline into conversation with a local environment and its people. Ryan arrived in Brooklyn looking somewhat out of place. He first slunk into the shop during peak weekend browsing hours wearing a t-shirt, boardshorts, dusty sneakers, and a surf-branded backpack—his eagerness to learn and share unhampered by the impulse, typical in NYC, to prove substance through ostentatious behavior or dress. During his visit, Ryan invited a number of local emerging and established board builders like Paul Colbert, Chris Campbell, Joe Falcone, and Charles Mencel into the dungeon on Grand to chat theory and design. On his last day shaping in Brooklyn, Ryan invited Monmouth County’s Tommy George and Justin Perry for a studio visit, both of whom have committed their entire lives to an interpretation of Ryan’s build-surf-share-repeat template. Justin was the first to see the message and immediately whistled Tommy in from the water. The two scrambled to the ferry and boarded the boat to Wall Street with soggy shorts and seconds to spare. Just shy of two hours later they huffed into the shop sporting sandals and dead phones—sand scattered on the hardwood with each step. They walked down into the bay and watched in a trance as Ryan shaped a Pickle Fork over several hours—his passes interrupted only by anecdotes of memorable sessions and careful explanations of subtleties in technique. After our first sip of Guinness later that night, both Tommy and Justin admitted that not ten more pints would rival the lasting buzz of meeting their hero. The next time I saw Tommy he was racing down the line aboard a freshly-finished rendition of the Squit Fish. “It’s the fastest board I’ve ever ridden.” He said later in the lot. “I almost feel like I know what it’s like to surf like Ryan Burch.”

While Ryan was mowing away in the basement on Grand, a long-time neighborhood steward, Greg, passed by the open cellar doors.  With forty plus years of experience operating heavy machinery in shops and studios, Greg later told Ryan that he had never heard a planer travel with such a steady and even pitch - undulating back and forth without untimely pause or shift despite the changing curve of the medium and depth of the blade. The same description can be used to illustrate Ryan's surfing - up and down, back and forth with seamless coordination to the changing curve of the wave, free from forced pause, gyration, or shift.  After watching Ryan navigate through three weeks of life in Brooklyn it feels as though his entire approach resonates at one steady and even pitch -- his earnest and enduring obsession echoing uninterrupted through the world of surfing.

Ryan and I traced several laps through Domino park looking for a seat on one of September’s warmest afternoons. Picnickers yammered away, helicopters thundered overhead, ski-doo stuntmen splashed the breakwater, and dogs got busy within inches of our ankles as we conducted the following interview. 

GN: How has it been acclimating to the pace of New York City?

Ryan Burch: It was a little touch and go at the beginning. I’ve never spent a long enough time in a bustling city to feel like I didn't need to visit a bunch of attractions everyday. It was a bit of an adjustment to just chill. Luckily I had a lot of boards to shape here so I was able to just focus on work and use the city to exist like a normal person who may live here. I brought my family here with me so I had my wife and son expecting me home at a certain time. I think the more normal pace of life really helped me realize that just being here and existing is a really fulfilling experience that has changed my perspective on city life in general.

GN: How has your perspective on city life changed?

RB: Just existing around so many people all the time has been the biggest adjustment. I live in a populated area but my routine allows me to escape. Here, just being immersed in it all the time—no matter what. Even just thinking as you’re falling asleep that there’s people above you, people below you, people right next to you. All in such large quantities. It’s pretty wild.

GN: Do you think the city’s effect on your thinking has surfaced at all in your shaping?

RB: There were moments where I was really waiting for this epiphany to be influenced by the surroundings and it didn’t happen for a while. And then I started to study my footpaths around the board in a rectangular room and started tripping on the sharp angles and square geometric shapes of the room and of the city and how the human flow in between them is free and curvy. But thus far it’s been hard to really incorporate that thinking into the boards. Some of the logos that I’ve drawn have been influenced. It's speed art with surfboards, right? Especially doing thirty by hand while I am here. You're just rapid fire changing something but not really spending too much time on it like some masterpiece. So the drawings are just these quick little doodles. Some of them started to incorporate square shapes and hard angles. I usually have these flowing wavy lines, and lately I’ve been going with really crazy squiggly lines—like high frequency stuff cause it's noisy here and your head can be noisy. It’s just these squiggly little twitchy lines. Maybe I’ve been drinking too much coffee? They kinda naturally happen like that. With the squares there’s these funny lines that go up and down. There’s all these huge tall buildings around but somehow mankind has connected power up them and all the way down them and we’re all still tethered to the ground. There’s little subliminal indications of weird human flows in between these weird hard structures in the boards I’ve made here.

I’ve been trying to take it in and incorporate it a little bit, but with board design it’s a little hard to make a square board and say “here you go, thanks for leaving it up to me! I am feeling pretty square here.”

GN: Is that something you've thought much about in your practice at home?  How the geometry of a shaping bay is a bit incongruent with the lines conducive to a nice board.

RB: Yeah, for sure. You walk around the board in a circle so much in the bay that if you’re spending thirty hours a week in there you start to notice every little thing. Building my own bay at the start of this year at home got me thinking a lot about the space. I have dreams of attempting a round one so the flow of energy is just in this crazy beehive spiral. Although, it’s kinda hard to build a round room and it would be even harder to light the board properly to see the shadows. As I get faster at shaping I am relying on my eye more whereas before I would count every pass and didn’t really need to look at it as much. But now I really need the lights.

The tension between the geometry of a board and a bay is definitely something that I noticed. I find that messy shaping rooms are super distracting. If you have a small space where you’re gonna lock yourself away and work for a while, you tend to fill it with all the shit you're gonna need. Eventually, you start to encroach on the overall space of the room. You start to realize that getting rid of the corners and their excess storage space might be less distracting for your eye. That's another thing that I've been thinking about a lot here in the city—just how simple it can be. You come here and you can't afford this huge place with this giant yard to spread all your shit out, so you kind of have to streamline it, right? I am traveling with my tool set for the first time and I am appreciative that it is very simple to travel with everything I need to make a surfboard just as quickly as I can make it at home. It's like 12 things, right? 15 things. It's nothing.

There's no way you can't make an improvement on the way it is right now. I think a lot about a round bay with bending lights controlled with something like a foot pedal. Or a glassing bay built in a big circle or some sort of oval that could allow you to streamline work. Longer boards in the center, shorter boards to the side, maybe some sort of glass rack that spins around the whole room with board storage pressed up against the curve of a wall at the right radius. It would be space maximized. A lot of people just go into these fluorescent lit rooms and work there until they die, you know? Maybe it would just make your stress levels a little lower to be in a circular room. An oblong shape would be pretty fun. Obviously, asymmetrics are a point of interest so that would be fun too—and would change the way noise bounces off the surfaces of the room. I should start mocking up mini models. But I’ve been too busy running laps around people’s surfboards lately. Thankfully, they’re keeping me busy. It costs a lot of money to build anything wacky so you gotta start somewhere.

GN: Most of your orders in this run of thirty were for fishes and smaller-ranged asymmetric boards. Did this batch at all deviate from the trends you’ve come to expect at home?

RB: It’s pretty similar. I do a handful of logs still at home. And some gliders too. But my shaping fee just goes up by the foot, so those boards get pretty expensive. I feel like people wanting a sample of my work are like “well, I got a log that suits me and I have a mid length.” There’s so many options in those departments, as there are with fishes and shortboards, but that’s what’s been in the media a lot lately. People ripping on the asyms. And obviously videos that I’ve got on fishes in the past still seem to spark people’s interest. So it’s not too different from what I usually do at home.

I’ve been grateful for the fact that people are really trusting the asyms now because I feel like that’s where I really made my advancements in performance boards. So it's really rewarding for me to make those boards for people. I was stoked that it was mostly those.

GN: I am curious to hear more about your relationship with Bryce Young. The progression of rail surfing seems to have been on a steady plateau in recent generations—but what Bryce is doing on your designs seems like something altogether new. How did that all come about?

RB: Me and Bryce met in 2014 in Indo and he really trusted my boards immediately. I had got the asyms to the point where they were helping my surfing dramatically and that’s when he first saw them. Before that, everyone who was surrounding me when I was filtering through designs really quickly was like “oh that one’s wacky but it's fast.” Or, “Oh he’s turning really good on that one but it bogs when you try to go vertical.” There was always an X-factor, but it wasn’t a complete package. When I first met Bryce it was right after I had shaped myself 40 renditions of these short asymmetric boards. I had twelve of them with me and was surfing Indo which the boards are really suited for. Bryce saw me surfing them at Deserts and took it as though it was this done thing. Like “let’s make those!”—he really trusted me from day one. The first ones I made for him back at his house in Australia were really good boards because I was tuned in and had just shaped that huge batch for myself. He took it for what he saw they were capable of and continued to push the level on them. I am always super grateful for the way that he approached them. He never saw them as something weird, he saw them as something cutting edge that he could do his best surfing on. He would never talk shit on weird little features which I feel like otherwise is so intrinsic to a surfer’s mentality. “Yeah it’s cool.... but this is kinda weird”... That sort of thing.

Since then, our relationship has been pretty brotherly. We were in very similar situations with sponsorships—being able to travel the world and focus on our surfing. When we weren’t traveling we were able to hang out at one another’s home for extended periods of time and focus on creating boards and just enjoying ourselves. I learned a ton from staying with him and his family in Australia—they pretty much gave me a second home. This is the longest stint we’ve gone without hanging out—usually we’d be together for 2 to 3 times a year for a month at a time, and it’s been since the pandemic that we haven’t seen one another, so his quiver is getting pretty demolished. I am in a more production situation with my boards now so it’s been harder for me to keep up with tailoring stuff really specifically to his surfing. But I’ve been sure to throw one in every so often so he has a little snippet of where I am at during any given moment. He gets them in like a five pack—like an update: “here try these out!” And then there’s a bit of a back and forth between us about new stuff. He really adapted well to those boards and they were able to open up a whole new range in his surfing. I think the difference that you see with his surfing as opposed to some of the guys that have been interested in them lately is that he’s comfortable on them and adapts to such unique feelings on all sorts of boards—whether it be the Alaias he makes or his upbringing on longboards. He’s just a really adaptable surfer, so you see him really expecting and predicting the most out of them whereas a lot of people are surprised by elements of speed or their ability to access the very top portion of the lip and they seem to have a bit of restraint when they're flying through those sections. Whereas Bryce’s surfing is fully compressed to fully open. And his compression to full extension is huge! He’s such a tall guy, 6’2-6’3ish, an inch or two taller than me—depending on how long his hair is. (Ryan gets up out of his seat to mime Bryce’s approach) He can go from a tiny little ball all the way up to full scarecrow man. I think that’s an element that I don’t have—the compression and ability to feather all the way through. His wave riding is pretty wild—my dad would always tell me to surf a wave like a cat on acid and that’s kinda how Bryce surfs.

GN: As the son of Nat, surely he’s got the golden median stitched straight into his DNA.

RB: Totally, yeah. They really have an eye on performance in everything they’re doing. He’s a competitive tennis player, really good at golf, good at skating, good at snowboarding, good at guitar.

GN: What a bastard!

RB: I know, I just travel around the world getting shown up at everything. Hah.

GN: It seems like at a section where most would be limited to a top turn Bryce has the unique ability to push a carve. Is that purely to do with natural ability or are their explicit design features oriented towards that kind of maneuvering?

RB: Yeah, both. But definitely working on the basic shit like rocker with his boards has enabled him to really trust the arc. I think the speed that he gets there is what saves him a lot. It seems like a lot of times the jockier surfers power through that curve whereas Bryce lets the thing out and zips through it. I’ve definitely seen him do some tight radius stuff where you would normally be doing a snap but it’s perfectly under the lip and looped out. The craziest one I’ve ever seen him do was on a board that was bent like an absolute banana. You’d look at it and it’d tweak you out cause it was so kinked! It had a side cut but in the mid-section intersecting the side cut was really extreme rocker and then there was still about 18 inches of tail behind it. So your front foot is just on the start and your back foot is on the other side of the bend. He’s able to keep the thing rocking between his feet so quickly that it never hangs up or anything. It’s like he’s standing on a pottery wheel or something just spinning around.

GN: Yeah, Justin (Perry) who made that Parallelogram knockoff saw one of Bryce’s boards that had made its way down to Bocas, Panama. He said he was blown away by the rocker—as if someone had kicked the resin slow and dropped a cinder block in the middle.

RB: Was it one of the stringerless ones?

GN: Yeah

RB: Then that’s actually a very accurate description of how it was made. 

GN: Really?!

RB: Yeah, we’ve taken rocker quite literally and have made it using rocks. Hah. It’s a good way to do it because you naturally couldn’t produce that curve. And blanks limit you to what you can order. If you get a stringerless blank and weigh it down after you put the first coat of resin during lamination you can pretty much bend the rocker to whatever. The polyurethane only has a little bit of memory so you can leave them in the side of the shaping room for a month and get them to have a real natural curve that’s way more extreme than anything you could ever conceive of ordering into a stringer rocker from a blank company. That taught me a lot about curves. Definitely have pushed what we call the “Luke Skyrocker” model to its extremes. It’s a fun thing to mess around on. They paddle horribly and are really hard to surf so they're only good for certain people. I’ve definitely had a lot more success with the custom orders by relaxing the rocker way down and just focusing on the poppy speed elements of the board without slowing down the paddling and their ability to initially get going.

GN: Didn’t Shaun Thompson refine some of his Spider boards with a similar technique before proceeding to weave through endless tubes at backdoor?

RB: Yeah and they were all heckling him like “Shaun where you goin with that boooonana!”

I feel like with my fishes that was one of the first things I was curious about. From an outline perspective keeping it proportional to the early kneeboards, but if you were to get a side profile that’s where the real advancements were made. By bending out the area especially in-between your feet and incorporating a big concave so you're getting a flatter center line that the water can scoot through real fast. That’s been the basic special sauce to a lot of my little high performance boards—including fishes.

GN: You mentioned Bryce as someone who is reliably accepting of unique design. I am curious to hear more about how that all plays out at home. It seems like there is an enduring tension between an eagerness to experiment and a commitment to tradition in Encinitas. Where do you situate your approach on those axes? Were you ever heckled at home for defying the standard?

RB: I feel like the experimentation thing was already pretty widespread at home when I started getting into it. It was long after movies like the seedling and sprout showed guys like Rob Machado riding fishes. Joel Tudor has always been someone who had an eye on the past and is reluctant to give that up. So I felt like I was exposed to all sorts of different boards and would see different guys on them. But the crew I would always hang out with was very die hard shortboarder. And it was kind of strange for them to even think of me riding a log at Cardiff. It’s a perfect log wave and a terrible shortboard wave, which shows you that there was a bit of scrutiny on going to “the dark side” as you may call it. Starting to ride a longboard at a young age you’d get push back from the older generation because they’d get nervous that this frothing young kid on a longboard is just gonna swoop all the waves and they’re gonna be sitting there griping. Which isn’t entirely untrue. It’s easy to get carried away and with a big board—you have all this power, you know? It comes with great responsibility and I was told that on numerous occasions—out there on my 14ft glider with a shit eating grin taking every set wave that came in my direction. Next thing you know ole fricken crust doggy on his yellowed 6’6 elf shoe is like “fuck you!” I don’t know, there’s just always those traditionalists in surfing and I think one of the most retro boards in recent times has become a rockery chippy 6’6 thruster.

Experimentation is wide open with shaping. And I think in many cases, asymmetry can be a huge crutch. You can get away with not learning the fundamentals and just go, “I am shaping asym boards!” The reality of shaping an asym board is that it is a little easier because you’re not needing to balance and that’s a challenge I think is important to try to get right when you first start shaping. It’s kinda like the school of it all. I think back to when I was interested in shaping—I had a shaper growing up who was always very proud of his work and very proud of the number that he had hand shaped and proud of his ability to make a clean board by hand. Not wanting to upset him and the older shapers led me to really respect and honor the tools and the craft initially. So, even though I was making these boards with wacky outlines and stuff, I was focussing on the important elements of refining the rockers and the volumes and the contours and making everything flow really cleanly. When I picked it up I was scared shitless of the older shapers being like “You’re a barney!” I was trying to please all these old crusteez.

GN: Obviously, there’s such tremendous rigidity in the culture of surfing and board building—in large part with interest in honoring tradition. Sometimes that means unsavory salt dogs but it also seems like maybe ascribing to the structure can have a curiously liberating effect. If you’re first forced to master the guidelines that are prescribed, you might then have the technical wherewithal to go somewhere else entirely

RB: Totally. I think a unique thing that I got to do was that but without being confined to reproducing what had already been created. Because it can be really detrimental to progression to be stuck on assignment to make your first 1000 boards all perfectly symmetrical thrusters. You’ve seen who knows how many versions of that board and it’s the standard of performance. People were, of course, distracted by the wacky outlines but in the shaping bay I was focusing on the fundamentals.

GN: How do you think your career growing up as a more competitively oriented surfer has legitimized your later career in board building? What’s the relationship between those distinct approaches in your current practice?

RB: That’s an interesting one. The competitive thing was kind of over at 21 right when I started shaping. I didn’t look at shaping as my future job then, I just thought “wow, this keeps me so entertained and combines everything that I’ve learned thus far in life.” So I guess the competitive thing would be like high school and then the sponsored surfer was like college and now I am in my career—which is shaping. I planted the seed back then and let the tree grow and now I am sowing the fruit.

GN: Lots of the time you’ve been able to devote to board building has been afforded by a salaried contract from Volcom to be a professional surfer. Did the pressure to perform at a professional level ever intrude on your curiosities in the shaping bay?

RB: No, not really. I feel like if anything it fueled me to experiment once I realized that that’s what made me of interest. Later on when I would be in Hawaii, I knew what the ideal board for surfing pipeline was but I would think “well, I am of interest to people cause I ride this wacky shit so I gotta stick a pickle fork on it. Even if it's a classic semi- gun in disguise.” I never felt the pressure to perform in the water finding its way into the shaping bay, but it was certainly something that would affect how much I would be able to enjoy surfing—when you always have a camera on you. I am not hyper productive and never was in surfing. I was never filming every session because I was nailing so many big tricks. My successes more so came from knowing where I would perform the best and making sure that I would get there enough time in advance to get comfortable with the different situations and have a filmer come at the end of my trip when I was surfing relaxed and free. I wasn’t ever the most adaptable and wasn’t really suited for the normal mold of a pro surfer which is, you know: fly in, do backflips, go to the next spot.

GN: How do you take it that in the past half decade or so, the “alternative free surfer”— associated with a rebellious or non-conforming ethic—has become a fulcrum of commercialization in the surf industry?

RB: Yeah, it’s odd but I think it’s only natural that that’s the one avenue left for someone who doesn’t want to compete. It makes sense to me and it’s exciting surfing. It seems like the trend for a common surfer to become interested in those sorts of boards, so naturally they’re gonna be looking for content of people pushing that to new heights. So it’s totally logical that that’s where it’s at with being a free surfer—insty clips of you blowing tail on a twinny.

GN: And you’re excited by that?

RB: I am not really excited by it. But that’s just because I’ve seen Bryce surf in person for a decade. I’ve seen such crazy shit right in my face.

GN: Beyond a wrap from Bryce is there anything else in surfing that really excites you at the moment? How do you feel about the direction it’s heading?

RB: The mindset and the capabilities of the young people on tour, really. Traveling the world chasing points and they seem so level headed and stoked about it. I really like that mentality. I see a lot of hard working, talented people on tour and I applaud that approach. And the level is just going up and up and up. I have my favorite surfers who I never miss an opportunity to watch.

GN: Like for example?

RB: I mean I love watching Balaram (Stack) surf. He’s my favorite pipeline surfer and I’ve had the pleasure of traveling with him a bit. I love Noa Deane’s approach. He’s pretty psycho.

GN: Anything that frustrates you about the direction surfing has taken of late? 

RB: Not really, no.

GN: I feel like any conversation with a seasoned surfer often includes some obligatory griping—some mention of how surfing is blown-out or over saturated with newcomers. And yet, lots of lifelong board builders revel in the fact that the current moment is more accepting and encouraging of experimentation or diversity than any past. Surely there’s overlap there?

RB: Yeah, I’d say so. Experimentation being more widely accepted has made riding a single fin log common place which has made every average 1ft clean day 3-10 times more crowded around the world. That can be a frustrating thing for people. Just like I’ve had to grow accustomed to always seeing tons of people on the street in my daily routine here in New York you’ve had to mourn the loss of empty peeling 1ft days at your local break because everyone’s got a fricken glider! Hah. And they’re frothing to ride it and catch as many waves as they can, so there’s a bit of a change there.

Whereas when the shortboard was standard, breaks would thin out on the small days. In Europe they used to use the term star chasers because of Magic Seaweed’s star rating system. You’d have all these guys show up only on certain starred days. And granted some days just aren’t for certain people, you know? The old crusty shortboard guys are the ones up on the stairs complaining about how many longboarders there are when it’s knee high, but they’re not amongst it. They’re out there when it’s bombing, holding it down and hopefully showing people how it’s done. Who knows. It’s just one of those pastimes that’s becoming more popular and everyone has instant access to all sorts of resources to tell them when to go and what to do and how to do it better. So it's kinda monkey see monkey do nowadays.

GN: When you're shaping are you ever thinking about surfing, or are those two practices almost divorced from one another?

RB: There’s been times when I've been trying to come up with new stuff and have been thinking about where you're going to put pressure on the board. I think about that a lot with longboarding because you're trying to envision this perfect approach where the board's going to respond all the way nose to tail with your body pressure being in different areas. Whereas shortboards are pretty simple because you're in one big stance. When you're really trying to get the thing going, you kind of just stand in one spot. You make a new one and surf it the way you surfed your last one, then adjust according to how the board is responding to where you're putting your pressure and weight distribution and then you find the sweet spot on it and that's how you ride until you get another board. Of course, the two practices are always connected, but actually thinking about the act of surfing in the shaping bay—yes and no. If I'm shaping a gun I get butterflies in my stomach. I feel this power and I'm thinking, “oh shit! The intention with this is to be taken very seriously,” even if you're just freaking dreaming. The two are so connected that I'm almost expecting them to be even more related in my head. But in the shaping bay you’re kind of just walking in circles in a dusty cloud somewhere else. The physical act is so different from surfing.

GN: What gets you fired up these days? Beyond surfing and making surfboards.

RB: I guess family. Family’s got me fired up to be a stronger person—pushing myself outside my comfort zone and trying to do fun stuff. I am pretty wrapped up in surfboards at the moment. Giving it my all there—as a career and as something to provide for my family. I have so much new inspiration to do it professionally. I never really thought of it as a profession, and now I'm like, “Whoa! I have my dream job. Now all I have to do is focus on doing it really well.” So I am just trying to honor that. Beyond that, I am super interested in architecture. Trying to learn more and keep my brain able to retain new information. I am trying to push myself to think more broadly and learn from other people and teach other people. And, yeah, just trying to be a good, open human.

GN: Is there anything out there that you'd gladly sacrifice a day of cracking surf to do?

RB: Oh yeah for sure. The family thing is crazy. What a shift it is. I’d sacrifice a day of cracking surf for just a day at home when I am needed. And I'm super proud of that. Before I had a son that was never the case. Missing a day would be so upsetting, you know? Whereas now I don't feel like it would be like that. A day of cracking surf also comes in the form of a day filled with anxiety because you want to capitalize on the forecast that you've been reading for the last week and a half. It's kind of evil in its own way. Having a kid definitely put that into perspective. Fatherhood is just a waiting game in a similar way. You're waiting for him to come out for nine months. And then when he’s there you're just hanging around inside waiting for him to be ready for the world. This has kind of been my incubation period. I’ve been just hanging out at home a lot, trying to think broadly and being open and ready for wherever my family's interests start to go and be all into it. I am trying to resist being stubborn with my routine. And instead be like—“Oh! This is what we're doing in life now. Nice, yeah, nice.” It's been a really motivating period for me.

GN: The anxiety about striking while the iron is hot is something that plagues everyone who's addicted to surfing. Have you seen that subside or intensify now that you’re a dad?

RB: Oh, it's still so ingrained in me. When I set my sights to go to the beach to ride waves I want to do it at the right time and get the best conditions I can. I'm not totally blind to the element of trying to make the most out of your time, but also just trying to be happy with being in the moment and not feel so much pressure, even if I end up surfing average waves because of other responsibilities.

GN: On the topic of average—what do you think of our surf out in Long Beach the other day?

RB: That was a super memorable one. Getting to go out with you the other day and just jib along a couple little East Coast swells with my freaking Cali board. It was pretty sweet. I was super stoked and a little seasick out there and tripped out by how many different angles the waves come at the beach. I'm just such an ocean lover that it's just cool to even see it, let alone sit out there and be immersed in it. It's just a different thing. It's so good just to rinse off. I surf way less than I ever have in my life, and I enjoy it way more, regardless of the conditions.

GN: What’s next on the docket? Trips planned? Waves you want to surf, boards you want to make, things you want to build?

RB: Getting to travel with the whole family has definitely inspired me to push for more of this. Traveling and getting to know different people and just changing our surroundings. Spreading the joy of surfboard building and wave riding and experiencing different cultures and different places. Just being out there in the world and trying to see all sorts of different shit is really exciting for me. But I'm also excited to get home. The biggest project of my life is working on my house right now. It's really humbling and it's made me a much better worker in the surfboard world. I'm excited to get back to this love hate with this giant project I got at home—just one thing after another. With surfboards you can start and finish in the same day but the house demands a different approach. Trying to make our home base a great place for us and also a good place to share so that it's not just sitting there when we're going places. It would be great to rent it out which would promote us to stay on the road a little longer. I am super motivated to do that and do it right.

GN: And put in a circular shaping bay?

RB: Yeah, maybe the circular shaping bay will be there. But it might kind of be an eyesore at home, whereas somewhere real isolated could be really rad. In a place where you're not comparing it to all these Cali craftsman homes that are typical and uniform you’d think, “wow, what's this freaking ant hill doing in the back?” That would be a good project to do elsewhere. Somewhere remote. We’ll see. Lot’s to see.

                                                                        ...

Our sincerest thanks to Ryan, Luki, and Bex taking the time to hang out in Brooklyn and enliven our local scene. 

All thirty boards were made custom to order and were laminated by Angelo de Meulenaere, hotcoated and finned by Aaron Austin, and sanded by Drew Austin.