Sustainable surfboards… we often wonder if there will ever be one. Obviously, using non-renewable, non-recycled or even non-recyclable materials gets you nowhere near it – even our choice to use sustainably harvested local woods doesn’t get us there. But one step further forward is based on the work of Rey Banatao, a committed surfer/chemist/enviro-warrior – if you can believe a combo like that can live inside one guy. Rey and his team at Entropy Resins have busted their butts to figure out the first really practical and high quality resin based on organic material that they siphon off the waste streams of other industrial activities.

Entropy Resins is a company that we feel a great affinity with – they are rootsy, committed, and much smarter than we ever could hope to be. Rey’s been tireless in analyzing the performance of his resin, reacting to feedback, and continually making a better product. Because up to half of their resin content consists of organic waste, and because we’ve been working with this magic stuff for over a year, we are totally excited that Rey will be out here for Surf Re-Evolution to talk about their work, what motivates them, and of the challenges and victories of forging a new path in sustainable materials. Check the Surf Re-Evolution schedule for a 4:30 pm glassing demo that Rey will do for those attending the event on September 10… he’ll talk us through the best practices for glassing using Entropy resin, and show us all a thing or two about thinking out of the box.

A beauty glass-job with Entropy Resins by Eco-Boardworks.

You simply cannot love wooden surfboards without having heard about the nearly heroic efforts of the Wegener brothers to bring the ancient Hawaii’n Alaia back into the modern day spotlight. Since discovering these ancient sliding devices at the Bishop Museum, Jon and his brother Tom have all but dedicated their lives to convincing surfers today that our surfing predecessors had more skill, both in shaping and surfing, then we may have given them credit for.

Jon is coming all the way from California to show us New England surfers what he’s known for years, that fins are overrated. We even convinced Jon to come out early, so he’ll be teaching a class for the few days leading up to the event, and each student will take home their own hand-shaped Alaia. It’s not too late to sign up. Otherwise, we’ll see you on the 10th for Surf Re-Evolution.

In the weeks leading up to Surf Re-Evolution, we’re going to do a series of short blogs introducing some of the invited guests coming to the event. We hope you enjoy learning about some of these dedicated shapers, product engineers and creative talents, and we really hope it will inspire you to come out and be part of what we know will be an amazing day.

Ed Lewis was inspired when he and his friend Kipp Denslow started Enjoy Handplanes. Made completely from broken foam surfboards, offcuts from manufacturing processes, and old wetsuits, Enjoy Handplanes are as green as they are fun. Their mission is to keep broken boards and manufacturing waste from the landfills while creating products that are fun to use and environmentally responsible.

We’re honored to have Enjoy coming all the way out from Southern California to attend Surf Re-Evolution and we’re looking forward to showing them a good time and hopefully some good fall swell. Come on down and meet Ed and try out his planes. You’ll be buying a set of Churchills before you know it.

Enjoy The Ride from Ed Lewis.

Buy your tickets online now and save a few bucks. $12 online, $15 day of the event.

If you asked me back in May how the summer was shaping up, I would have said that our plates were pretty full. Along with a long list of custom boards and kits to get out the door, we had packed the summer months with weeklong classes, Board Blitzes, Fantasy camps, guest shaper classes, movie nights, events, demos and more. We knew the fall would be just as busy with our first ever West Coast class, put on with the support of Sustainable Surf and the San Francisco Chapter of Surfrider, plus Sacred Craft in Southern California.

We know we have a disorder though. We have a very hard time saying no to opportunites. It can be viewed as a real problem, however at the same time, I really think it’s a symptom of simply loving what we do and wanting to do more of it. Everyone says being busy is good, especially in this economy, so I guess this means the summer of 2011 will go down as the busiest and happiest on record.

About 6 weeks ago, we received a call from Discovery Communications. They were planning a special event for producers and were hoping to give a custom board to everyone attending the evening event. The reception was just three days before the premiere of Discovery Channel’s Shark Week and the perfect gift to celebrate the week. Sounds amazing I thought, but how many people were they expecting and when’s the event? Somewhere around 100 people and in about a month was the answer. Holy Crap. As soon as I hung up the phone I ran back into the shop and announced to the gang that we might have some serious work ahead of us. We gave it some thought and bounced around ideas, and concluded the only board that we could produce in those numbers and on that timeline was the Sea Sled, and even a modified version of that. Luckily for us, it was exactly the one they had in mind.

Within hours, we went about planning out the job, ordering more wood (and sharpening our saw blades), pulling in some good friends who are skilled in the ways of the spokeshave, and basically rallying the troops. While our custom boards are built one at a time by one builder who sees it through start to finish, we knew that this job would require a production line type process. Mill planks, glue up panel, sand, add side runners, cut outline, shape, and so on. We worked in batches of 10 each day, 30 per week; we were a well oiled machine.

All in all we made 125 Sleds for the Discovery Channel, each one from local cedar, hand glued, shaped, sanded and branded, in just over 7 weeks. And I couldn’t be happier or more thankful to our amazing crew here at the shop. That’s a job I think we’ll all be telling our grandkids about.