Grain Surfboards Heads West – Catching up in Socal

See our revised Tour Schedule Here.

Santa Cruz, Wetsand and Patagonia

After loading up on roadside avacados and making it back down Rincon Mountain, we set up at C Street in Ventura for our first demo. The waves were small and the tide was high at first, but little by little conditions peaked up. After an hour or so, we sent out a bunch of boards, including the 10’ to a father and the 5’10” to his son. We’ve seen our kits become a great father/son project with lots of teams tackling the project, so it was great to see the pair paddle out together, needless to say, they were pumped on the ride

We loaded up for the short drive over to the new Wetsand Store (opening soon) in downtown Ventura. Since we started working with Wetsand.com about a year ago, Chuck and the rest of the Wetsand family have been very supportive to us. We’re excited for their new shop which will be the only retail store carrying our boards as well as our kits. From Wetsand, we headed over to Patagonia and had some great meetings. We even had a chance to meet and show our boards off to Fletcher Chouinard and Chris Malloy.

We setup for our afternoon demo at Malibu and with just a few people getting on our boards, decided to get in the water ourselves. We surfed some peeling knee high waves that seemed to go on forever. We drove into Venice Beach and spent the night tucked into a vacant lot with the rest of homeless people.

Wednesday rang early as we woke with the sun and setup shop on the beach. Once again, we were surrounded by locals and quickly filled the waves with wood. There were a lot of colorful characters hanging around the beach, but one standout was a local named Blue. We set him up with a a bamboo t-shirt and are proud just knowing he’s supporting the cause day and night in Venice.

We also met up with one of our Home Grown kit customers named Ned. Ned had just finished building a 9’ Root, and we were really psyched to be present for the christening and he quickly looked right at home planted on the nose. Nice job Ned. After the demo, we spent the day touring Santa Monica and Venice. We visited ZJ’s Boarding House who’s been carrying our kits for the last year, as well the new Mollusk Shop. We were also happy to meet with the guys at Arbor and check out all their beautiful wood skateboards and snowboards, true works of art.

We hit the road and headed south in the afternoon. Greg is a huge Bing fan, so we decided to stop in at their factory where Matt Kalvani was nice enough to give us a full tour. The boards coming out of that shop are second to none. From Bing, we turned the guys at Thalia Street Surf Shop on to the benefits of wood and look forward to their new expanded shop. With no afternoon appointments scheduled, the four of us decided to take in the sunset at Crescent Bay in Laguna Beach. Not a great surf spot, but a world class wave for body surfing. Waves had picked up, and Matt decided to slip on the fins and beaver tail and head out. An experience body surfer, Matt was catching some beautiful head high waves that broke fast and furiously on the steep sand beach. Nevertheless, some sweet barrels were had and we knew that with the surprise swell, the following morning would be great.