Chain of Custody

Dale Velzy’s wood clamps rest in a dark corner of Josh Martin’s shaping room, not as relics or nostalgic trinkets, but as beloved tools in repose between jobs. When Velzy passed away, his widow, Fran, made sure that Josh received them. The gesture may have had something to do with Velzy’s relationship with Josh’s old man, Terry. Likely, it also came from a suspicion that Josh, with his ever-working hands, would not only appreciate the clamps, but would also keep them greased and operational. They would not lay idle. More boards would be made with them. 

Extend that line of thinking and you’ll find Martin’s process as a shaper. “When my father passed away,” he says, during a languid, roaming conversation late on a summer afternoon in Dana Point, “I was sitting with my mom and we were talking about what we should do with his ashes. She suggested that we have a paddle out, but I told her I didn’t think that was really dad’s style. I said, ‘What if we mixed the ashes with Elmer’s Glue and laminated a balsa blank? Then I could shape it and dad would be the glue that holds the board together.’”

Josh Martin’s tools and creations, some obvious, some surprising—like a resin-layered mixing stick and a pair of sequoia chopsticks.

For Martin it’s not enough to just make a surfboard. It has to have meaning and purpose—a reason to exist. It has to have a soul. Not “soul” in the most clichéd surf sense, but a soul. It has to be an extension of flesh and blood.

“When somebody asks me to build a balsa board for them, I always like to sneak something meaningful into one of the chambers, just as a little connection to them. I recently made a balsa board for Corey Colapinto and put a pinto bean in it. It rattles every time you shake it. I hope it makes him smile when he takes it out. I also made a board for Rachael Tilly and put a chili pepper in it because she doesn’t like spicy food, sort of an inside joke.”

Martin doesn’t necessarily take his talents and abilities and creativity for granted, but they do entertain him. He doesn’t have a TV in his house. He’d rather be shaping or tending to his beehives. He isn’t exactly after irreverence, but rather connection. He points to a sliver of balsa that’s chambered, cutout, and ready for lamination. It’s part of a board he’s working on for a friend who also lost his father. 

“He brought me this $6,000 Taylor guitar and asked me if we could do a trade for a balsa board. He said his dad had given him the instrument, but he never learned to play it. Now that his dad was gone he just wanted to unload it. I found a note in the guitar case that his father had written him. He talked about how he hoped the guitar would bring him a lifetime of enjoyment. I’m going to put that note in the board, so his dad will always be there with him.”

Josh’s own father first picked up a Skil for Hobie around 1962, the start of a career which culminated in him being credited with hand-shaping more boards than any human on the planet. He died in 2013, after a fitful battle with melanoma. For most of his life, Josh harbored no ambition of following in his father’s footsteps. He ran a successful air conditioning company that gave him the financial freedom to raise his family, disappear to Baja when time allowed it, and buy a house down the block from his dad’s rental. “My dad never liked the idea of home ownership,” Martin says. “He didn’t want to be tied to a house payment.”

A religious man, Terry wasn’t all fire and brimstone, though he was Puritanical in his approach to life. Simple living was good living. He drove an Econoline van that had two seats up front. In the back, a hammock swung from corner to corner. “That was my spot,” Josh says. “We’d drive out to the desert and camp and catch lizards and stuff. We had the best times. My dad was happy to let me explore and discover the world on my own.”

While Terry was more or less the triggerman for the Dana Point mafia, building most of their shooters for half a century, there was never any pressure for Josh to join the cadre of shit-hot local surfers he grew up amongst. “Having witnessed him sweeping up around the shop in the late 70s at Hobie’s,” says C.R. Stecyk of his initial impression of a young Josh, “it was apparent he had a prodigious work ethic. Then during the proto International Tribe era, Shawn Stüssy had an atelier next to Terry’s workshop in Laguna Canyon. He showed me some hulls that Josh had made under his and the elder Martin’s guidance. Seeing as Stüssy is quite persnickety, and that Terry had shaped more boards than anyone in history, I paid attention.”

For Josh Martin it’s not enough to just make a surfboard. It has to have meaning and purpose—a reason to exist. It has to have a soul.

Josh’s origin story is further steeped in California surf history. When his father settled in Dana Point to shape boards for Hobie, he came with a son from a previous relationship and needed a nanny to watch Josh’s older half-brother. At about the same time, Mickey Muñoz’s sister moved to town and was looking for gainful employment. Terry hired her to watch his boy, but as things go, they started dating and, eventually, along came Josh. 

“Modern romance prevailed,” says Stecyk. “Hobie shaper Terry Martin married Candy Muñoz, the sister of the Mongoose.”

“Josh has a very similar saintliness as his dad,” explains Muñoz. “Josh is, as Terry was, an artist in his own way. Of course, Terry taught him how to make surfboards, but he also gave Josh the freedom to figure things out on his own. I spent a lot of time with Terry and we had a lot of conversations. Now, I lean on Josh for a lot of that stuff. He has an amazing mind.”

With a dad like Terry, and an uncle like Muñoz, Josh was bestowed with the tools, the knowledge, and the talent that would serve him well as he matured. First, however, he needed to figure out how to harness those assets. 

“I don’t think there was really ever any pressure to follow in his father’s footsteps,” says Muñoz. “It was just kind of the natural evolution of things. His dad would show him something that might pique his interest, and he’d explore that.” 

“I remember it clear as day,” Martin says, “my dad gave me my first blank when I was about five. He gave me a surform, a sanding block, and a couple other tools, and let me hack away with it. I made a shark out of it. I carved out gills and even put the fin in the middle of the deck…because that’s where shark fins are, obviously. Of course, I went on and shaped surfboards, but early in life I tried my hand at a bunch of different jobs. I worked for the U.S. Marshals Service as a bailiff. I worked in a butcher shop. I spent some time on a swordfish boat. I loved that. But then when I got married and we started having kids, I needed something more dependable, so I had this air conditioning business.”

The A/C trade ran unimpeded for a number of years, but during the economic decline of 2008, things slowed down for Martin. He dipped his toes back into shaping, but it wasn’t until his dad passed that he went all in. A longtime family friend sold a couple of his prized Terry Martin shapes, and gave the proceeds to Josh to build his own workshop at home. It was the only affirmation he needed.

 “It’s all a blank canvas for Josh,” says Ryan Hurley, son of Bob Hurley, who’s recently been collaborating with Martin on concept balsa foilboards. “He has such an open mind and is willing to pretty much try anything. He also has the ability to pull it off.”

Surf crafts—modern and ancient—obviously fall into his window of attention. But just for shits and giggles, Martin will also spend a day grinding and polishing buttons for a sweater that his wife knitted. Or, he’ll make a fin key out of leftover surfboard resin and give it away on Instagram. Recently, he made a board out of salvaged ancient sequoia. With the cutaways, he made sets of chopsticks to sell online.

“He’s a pragmatic genius, designing for reigning world champions and legendary, historical figures alike,” explains Stecyk. “His efforts are not a nostalgic regurgitation of past forms. Rather, he’s using ancient materials in a thoroughly modern manner. One day he’s teaming with Tom Morey, sculpting 3,400-year-old sequoiadendron giganteum planks into boogies for President Barack Obama. The next, he’s fabricating Rachael Tilly’s multiple density polyurethane foam board, constructed featuring concentric curved Sitka spruce stringers running around the board’s entire outline. This is a complex union of orthotropic wood, strategically placed matrixes of molecularly cross-linked foam, with a skin of directionally arranged woven glass fibers and epoxy. All of which are calculated to work together for maximum flexibility and strength.”

Martin could easily rest on his father’s laurels and Velzy’s clamps. He could make a dozen high-gloss balsa boards a year at ten grand a pop and make a good, honest living. Except he’s an artist and a futurist. What’s old must become new again. 

Case in point: his modern, multilayered approach to the hot curl. Blending a traditional design with modern concepts and materials, the result is akin to putting a new V8 engine in a ’32 Ford coupe. Be it a chambered board made using the same techniques his dad and Velzy applied more than 60 years ago, or a post-modern foil carefully sculpted from balsa, Martin’s mind works at an intersection of material, design, and technique.

“He has one foot in the past,” says Muñoz, “right at the very start of surfing as we know it today, and one foot in the future. He has an experimental mind and thoroughly enjoys the challenges of combining new and old. He looks back, so he can look ahead.”

As is so often the case, perhaps Stecyk explains it best: “Anyone who is carving wood from primeval, storm-felled redwood trees that were seedlings when the prophet Methuselah was a child commands respect.”