Save the date! Coming up October 3rd from 3pm till the bonfire burns out, we’ll be having another Grain Surfboards Open House and Potluck. This year’s party will feature live music and the premiere of Andrew Kidman’s new movie Last Hope. Buy advanced tix online here
More info to come. Hope you can make it.
This Friday night Aug 21st. Portland, Maine. Corduroy Surf Boutique. 59 Market St.
For real, if your in the area you’d be crazy to miss it.
THIS JUST IN*** – We still have 3 spots available for our August Board Building class starting this Sunday Aug 23rd. If you haven’t noticed, this might not be a bad time to visit the coast of Maine. Sign up now!
For the past long while, our own Nick LaVecchia has been quietly out there, taking surfing photos all over the world. He’s been steadily gaining well-deserved recognition for the art and craft of what he does. And now, Nick’s been nominated by Surfer Magazine for one of the photos they printed in a rare photographic essay he did this year with fellow photog Brian Nevins.
The thing we love about Nick’s work isn’t just that it makes us look good (only the excellent photos on our site are his) but that he has a way of extracting and concentrating the absolutely unique sense of a place or a person or a thing (like Grain) in the way he makes images. They don’t just tell a story or record an event – though they often do that well too.
But there are those images of Nick’s that I like the most… they leave the story untold and inform little about the place – they purely give you the true sensation of being with the subject and feeling it all with immediacy. Mostly, they flat-out make you wish you were there. But sometimes, they make you glad you aren’t.
Case in point is the photo Nick’s been nominated for below. You can see it (number 16 of 27) in the slideshow of nominated pics at SurferMag.com, and you can vote for your favorite on this page.
Nick: thanks so much for gracing our site with the beauty of your images for so many years. We are very, very lucky.
Brad Anderson
Below is Part I of a series of great little time lapse videos from our friends in Portland, Oregon. Denis and Adam decided to film themselves building their Grain board, and at the same time having some fun with it. We’ll be releasing more episodes as they become available. Hope you enjoy this first segment on building a basic rocker table.
Another class wrapped up last week… as usual, we had a great mix of folks here from all walks of life. Some of these guys had extra time to get to know each other ’cause they were here for a full 12 days… staying long enough to glass their new boards.
We worked hard the whole time, but stayed a little longer than we should have at the table during breakfast and lunch telling stories and listening to the world according to Yan. Over breakfast one morning he described with his Quebecker/French accent a night-terror that woke him in his tent. Dreaming that he was somehow trapped inside a hollow wood surfboard – more than upsetting since “I am a little bit claustrophobe”, he woke from a sweaty sleep. The woody color of his tent, the confines of his sleeping bag, his new familiarity with the innards of wood surfboards, all worked together to convince him that he was doomed to be trapped inside the very board that had been his focus all week. He woke suddenly, flailing ’til he freed himself – right through the side of his newly shredded tent. The rest of the campers that were staying here at the farm reported hearing him hollering and jumping around in the dark until he finally woke enough to understand what they were all laughing about.
A nod goes to our new youngest-yet boardbuilder. Witness to what we thought might be new educational levels in salty talk and ripe stories, Spencer had to remind us that “I’m fourteen – I’m not an idiot”. Guess he’d heard it all before. When we wondered at our smallest student’s choice to build one of our largest boards, he schooled us: he’s planning to have it the rest of his life. Should’ve thought of that ourselves…
We were also lucky to get in a couple of nice sessions including a great evening go-out in surprise head-plus swell. Couldn’t have been a better week all-in-all.
