Dave Thomas is my oldest surfing buddy. We grew up across the street from each other in sleepy Leucadia and used to trudge down the then country roads to learn to stand in the soup at places like Beacon's and Swami's. Dave and I both became lifetime surfers, the zap had been put in us both and we never quit. We now have 25 years of surfing experience. Surfing was our common bond but there was always a difference between us, Dave is a bit of a gear head.
Dave always liked motorcycles and dune buggies. He liked engines and tools and speed. I was pretty content to read comic books, surf magazines and obsess over Star Wars. As teenagers Dave would fix the cars and I did the ding repair. We never entered a single surf contest in high school, neither of us possess an NSSA trophy. We viewed weekend surf contest as a colossal waste of surfing time. Every possible weekend Dave, his stepbrothers Jeff and Jaime Nelson and I would load up two barely legal 4-wheel drive vehicles, a custom converted van and a road warriors' 60's Jeep and head for northern Baja points breaks.
After surfing our brains out we would sit on the cliffs eating sardines and crackers and mind surf all the sketchy waves that looked doable if it were not for the cruelly placed death rocks.
"Ya know," Dave would say after taking a long swig of warm contraband Tecate, "if you got pulled into one of those waves going really fast like behind a ski boat you could make that section and getting tubed the rest of the way."
Yeah, but how would ever get a speed boat down to Baja?
15 years later Dave owns a swimming pool construction company and has a wife and two surf gremmie sons. I too am married and am working full time at my family's surfboard factory. We both try to surf 5 days a week but not together on a regular basis. We can go long streches of time without seeing each other but when we do it's like we haven't missed a beat.
Dave drops by the shop one day saying he needs us to build him a tow board. I say yeah, we can do that. We've been making a lot of tow boards over the last few years. Insane balsa and redwood boards shaped by Billy Hamilton for some tow-in guy named Laird for example.
I'm intrigued but I can't help but give Dave a hard time, "So you've seen the Laird DVD eh?" thinking that this is some sort of He-Man mid life crisis. Dave says he hasn't seen any surf movies in ages and I believe him because I had to explain to him who Kelly Slater was in the mid 90's. He doesn't keep up on this stuff.
Turns out he has been tow-in surfing with a talented local surfer Pat Connor. Pat has a house in Baja and it has become a base camp. They are towing into all the strange nook and cranny "spots" that are otherwise unsurfable (they will however, go nameless in this article. You know how it is).
Gary Hanel, a local shaper who lives on the same street that Dave and I grew up on and is like a second Dad to us is commissioned to shape the new tow board. We decide to use Clark Foam's new high density blank and give it a solid glass job, though not a heavy as the Hawaiian boards we have built. We figure out where he wants the foot straps and install the Lokbox fin system, the same system Jeff Clark uses to tow at huge Maverick's. It's a sweet science project and it reminds me of back in the day when we used to get all our stuff ready for our haphazard trips.
Back then Dave never had a towel or a leash or wax or sunscreen or anything. I got in the habit or bringing two of everything, even wetsuits. It's funny to think that now this same guy has a jet ski, a trailer and all this gear he needs to pull off these surf missions.
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