The Surfers Journal
Light / Dark
February 12, 2017
There is nothing to indicate that we have arrived at the facility where some of the world’s finest surfboards are exclusively designed and shaped by the man whose name accompanies his winged logo. We are in the San Diego suburb called Bay Park. It’s in a small, middle-aged light industrial complex with a rollup garage door, behind which is a desk serving less as office furniture than as a depository for small gifts from friends and stacks of paper. Visible among the top layer of clutter are a box of fresh doughnuts, rolls of tape, sets of fins, new and old surf magazines, paper towels, a dirty coffee cup, a bucket of Red Vines licorice, pencils, Post-it notes written on and laid out in a line, a stack of manila folders, and various other apparently misplaced items. Without a computer in sight, the Post-its do the job of reminding Frye of things important, like the entire reason for the shop’s existence—building surfboards.
A photo on the wall of Hawaiian power surfer Barry Kanaiaupuni bullying a muscular Windansea section causes Frye to stop and comment on one of his favorite surfers. So does the shot of Rabbit Kekai signed, “To my nemesis,” something Frye interprets as a playful jab from one of the only modern surfers who might have ridden more waves than him. While still chuckling at that thought, he points out the Goodwill-worthy chair beneath the photo, deeming it, “Good for napping.”
Directly behind the lobby is an oversized shaping stall, designed to accommodate surfboards as large as the 13-footer he recently completed for himself. All other available wall space is dedicated to finished surfboards made by Frye and mostly, for Frye. These are among the most treasured items in contemporary surfing, yet he occasionally loans a few, or gives one away. The latest recipient is the son of the man who gave Skip his start, Pacific Beach standout, Phil Castagnola Jr.
All boards are arranged by size, shape and model name, with some so cherished by Frye they have been individually christened. After a day’s surfing, each board is tenderly tucked into its board bag before being bedded down for the night.
You could actually come to know a lot about Frye without ever speaking to him or reading the histories. His surfboards reflect him perfectly in that they are understated, purposeful, and, at first glance, uncomplicated. If the boards were articulate they might quote Bible scriptures about honesty and simplicity, and how they do not follow trends. In fact, they set them.
The dance began fairly late for someone who rose so highly in the ranks. Skipper was 16 in 1958 when he rode his first wave and subsequently had his first board shaped at La Jolla’s dearly departed Burland Surf Shop by one of the all-time masters of the craft, Mike Diffenderfer. By the early 60s, Frye had gathered scraps of board-building knowledge through watching his then-best friend Mike Hynson shape. In 1962 Olympic Surfboards’ co-owner Phil Castagnola gave Frye a blank of his own to “whittle on” and it was there, at Olympic, that the talented (some might say magic) hands of the aforementioned Diffenderfer and those of legendary shaper Bill Caster guided him toward journeyman status. Shortly thereafter Frye’s soon-to-be-longtime employer and lifelong friend, Larry Gordon, brought him into the Gordon & Smith fold, where he remained, building boards, many of which were his own models, until 1990. Then he moved on to start Skip Frye Surfboards, where he resides as its sole employee to this day.
While it’s currently popular to reach back in time to move forward with the latest design, Frye was nearly alone in a back-to-the-future quest in the early 90s when he combined the work of Bob Simmons, the great surfboard designer who had then been dead for nearly half a century, with the Fish, which he, Frye, helped refine decades ago. Known as the Fish Simmons, this hybrid has become one of his most enduring models.
Frye’s your man, the man, if you’re seeking a smooth glide. If, on the other hand, your interests are in a vertical assault, you should probably try another shaper. The boards are made to turn in a mostly linear fashion, to plane, to glide, to trim, and to get every ounce of joyful energy from the generally soft waves that roll into the spot where he first discovered stoke and has not strayed far from—Pacific Beach Point and the adjacent Tourmaline Surfing Park.
On most days everything at Frye Surfboards including Frye himself is covered with a fine white dust, the byproduct of reducing hunks of foam to pieces of timeless sculpture. While he is currently most famous for his long gliders, Fish and Eggs (designs he has contributed greatly to) are also on the menu. If you want one of those 10-plus Gliders, however, be prepared to pay up to $2,000 for the shape alone. You provide the blank. This might seem unreasonable until you consider the decades spent in joyful research, gracefully moving down the line, learning just where to add or flatten rocker while assessing the right fin size and combination. Production schedule rarely exceeds one a day, and there are no ghost shapers. Nobody but Skip Frye has ever shaped a Skip Frye Surfboard. Selah.
Don’t expect to pay Yamaha prices for a Stradivarius.
For a man with few visible vices, the covetousness of his own art sucks him in like a whirlpool. Sometimes he loses to the current, test-riding a board made for a customer, meticulously removing the wax later, apologizing if caught. So far nobody has complained—Frye riding your board does little to reduce the value. Of the craft he makes for himself, he says, “None of them are really mine. I’m a caretaker.”
While he takes his self-assigned post as seriously as a presidential bodyguard, some surfboards are so special that they, as he says, “Talk to me.” When the cosmic chatter gets too loud, say around a board’s birthday, he may feel compelled to paddle it out for a celebratory ride.
Try as I might, a thousand words, ten-thousand, fail at describing what is unique about Skip Frye, and by extension, his surfboards. Anyone can see the quality and enjoy their riding characteristics, but there’s something else. Words again—awesome, unreal, sick, classic—fail miserably. While holy probably overstates the case, observing the best of Frye’s quiver might send even the most dedicated atheist to the blessed church of the open sky. But words don’t hint at the endorphin-laced glide, or the peaceful stoke left in the wake while perched on the deck of one of the purest surf craft ever made.
Today a photo shoot is about to begin. Lifelong friend and one-time business partner Hank Warner, former shop gremmie and longtime friend Ken Lewis, Frye and his all-girl crew known as Team Oji assist in locating boards, removing them from their bags and rubbing them clean in preparation for their close-ups before the boards are exposed to direct sunlight. After laboring all that morning and much of the previous day in pulling and cleaning boards, Frye, who is nursing a fractured ankle, sits for a moment. Once comfortable, he produces a harmonica and blows for the kids gathered at his shop. At an age when one would expect them to be under the spell of the latest electronic game, they would rather be near the man known as Skip to the surfing world and as Oji to them. Like the children he cares for, 75-year-old Oji defies age limits, and if not for his injury would be skateboarding along with them.
I once overheard a man say he plans on being buried with his Skip Frye surfboard, with the hope, I suppose, of gliding into the afterlife on his favorite wing like some aquatic pharaoh. The boards are as valued for their riding characteristics as they are as art pieces. Perhaps another reason for their value is the impossible belief, an absurd, unstated article of faith, that in riding one you might tune into the rhythm of their maker’s great heart.
[Texts by Ken Lewis]
Where pure San Diego provenance is concerned, one has to at least give the Magic serious consideration. Originally a Larry Gordon design, the mannered G&S shape has delivered on numerous levels since the 1970s. “Its one of the great, classic shapes of all time from Larry,” Skip says. “I’ve made more than I can count.” Available in two templates—the Summer Magic and the more-pulled Winter Magic—there is a common-sense balance to the dimensional relationships in both versions. Overall, the Magic conjures, perhaps, a black Labrador Retriever: easygoing, and untouchable in the field. Finning is to preference, with singles and two-plus-ones finding their way onto most orders.
Frye shaped his first Egg in 1968, when he took his 6’6″ vee-bottom (“kind of a dog,” he says) and rounded off its broad, square tail with a handsaw. “Once I did that, the shape worked. It was game on.” Soon after, he shaped a new board using the sawed-off tail design on the nose as well, tuning it in ever so slightly. The little double-ender proved fast, neutral, and versatile. Decidedly unsexy outline-wise, the Egg should have enjoyed universal appeal during the early 70s, when California surfers struggled with pulled Hawaiian templates in weak waves. Instead, clued-in rippers from the Cliffs to the Shores rode them in happy obscurity. They still do. Whether single or tri, 6’6″ or 8’0″, the mainland surf landscape would be far easier on the eyes if more good surfers Egged up.
While Skip is the first to say that the design is all Stevie Lis, he quickly points out that his loyalty
to the shape is second only to its creator. This no-frills design is, when properly surfed, incredibly maneuverable and capable of brutal down-the-line speed. Other than the curvier, pulled-tail DH
(or Derek Hynd) Fish, Skip has done little to alter the shape because, as he says, “It’s always worked on every kind of wave.” He has, though, stretched them into longer and longer lengths over the last few years, even making a couple of 9-footers. Age has done anything but slow Skip down as he is taking new looks at old shapes to make them work better for himself. To see the 75-year-old Frye riding a 9-foot version of a design he’s been toying with for half a century is to view a poignantly beautiful exercise in devotion.
This design’s antecedent was an accident of nature shaped for Select Surf Shop proprietor Phil Castagnola (R.I.P.). Skip relates: “I was making boards behind Select and I over shaped one—made it too thin. I foiled it out even more and put a single Gephart flex fin on it. Turned out to be great.”
A very early iteration of the now universal Squashtail, the boards work well as either singles or tris.
While not a particularly popular Frye design, Skip has reinvigorated the shape with fins based on the small, heavily-raked templates of P.B. Point surfer Jeff Grennin. And the board’s name? First guy to
see it remarked that it was “thin, man.”
In the early 90s Skip was on a design tear, sparked on making bigger, wider-outlined boards capable of skimming across open faces at near-catastrophic speeds. Frye began revisiting the works of proto-shaper Bob Simmons, particularly his “planing hulls,” deciding to blend the fish design with Simmons’ outline and concaved bottom contours. This inspiration brought about one of Skip’s most in-demand shapes and a creative period he calls, “maybe the most important of my career.” The design’s speed and versatility have produced a cult following in a few select regions. (note: an offshoot design, the Swish, combines the Fish Simmons with a traditional swallow, marked by a narrower tail.)
This trusted shape found popularity in the mid 1970s through Skip’s employer of the time—G&S. But as the name alludes, this model wandered aimlessly for a couple of decades before finding a reasonable campsite. In 2013 a customer asked for a “full-bodied mid-length with a wide tail.” Skip quickly dusted off his 40-year-old Gypsy template and mowed out an updated version of the arc-tailed classic. “It came out so good that I grabbed an 8’8″ Yater blank and made myself one the next day,” says Skip. The modern Gypsy is wider and thicker than the 70s originals but, as they showed decades back, they adapt to a variety of lengths. Skip notes that FCS plugs and a small tri kit work best on the mid lengths, with a 7.5-inch single recommended over 9’6″.
Along with the Egg and his version of the Lis Fish, The Eagle is the design most typically associated with Skip. Originally a pointed-tail version of his G&S signature model, the Eagle has evolved over the decades from a vee-bottom craft to a concave-hulled streaker most often ordered in the 9-foot plus category. All of that parallel rail line makes for a steep learning curve. Once the code is cracked, however, sheer momentum and the interaction of its various parts offer feelings found nowhere else. Counter-intuitively for such long craft, Eagles are best surfed from the tail to amidships. Whether riding waves or scratching for the horizon, they cover water like unlimited class paddleboards—leading to Skip’s “cross country” approach to San Diego reef fields. (note: There is no such thing as a “Double Eagle.” Just extra-long Eagles.)
The K might be the closest thing to a “shortboard” in Skip’s orbit. The shape blends a tight, rounded pintail (something you might see on Occy’s old Rusty boards) with a racy shape that feels like you’re riding a stretched shortboard. Gun-length K Models have been well-surfed by local underground chargers on major swell days at Todos, Salsipuedes, and Little Makaha. While many hold that the model-name references Skip’s Mission Bay High classmate, Barry Kanaiaupuni (who rode Hynson Red Fins), the actual namesake is Pacific Beach surfer Timmy Kessler, who helped with the design.
While Skip can’t recall the precise year, he does know that at some point he threw a swallow template on the tail of a K Model—and the light bulb snapped on. That touch of width added to the tail block, combined with the precision of the dual pintails, took the K somewhere new. “For good waves,”
he says, “there’s no faster board. It just flies. That’s the shape you want to bring to a wave that will let you run. There is no low gear. It just goes.” Skip advocates these in the mid-7-foot range with a tri-fin kit. For California reefs and points at their most revved, a Skip Swallow makes a world of sense.
At the height of surfing’s 60s-surf-star era, G&S’s Larry Gordon knighted Skip with a signature model. It enjoyed a modest-to-small production run—at least compared to national breakouts like Bing’s David Nuuhiwa Lightweight and Greg Noll’s Mickey Dora Da Cat model. Yet the lineage of Fryes-to-come is immediately apparent in the pinched rails and dropped rocker. If you pick up on a touch of a Phil Edwards or Hynson model here, you would not be mistaken. Both Hynson and Frye venerated Edwards’ surfing and planer craft. The Frye model evolved into the Squaretail, a stalwart in his mix and a solid all-around traditional longboard.
When Skip’s daughter asked him for a custom board, he blended a Thinman tail with an Egg nose, creating a soft, amorphous outline perfect for the job at hand. What he hadn’t counted on was the Braden becoming a breakout success at Tourmaline Canyon, with positive feedback pouring in from the local crew. Seems the board skated across the flats with aplomb, leading to a slew of orders. Folks at spots like P.B. Cove, San Onofre, Doheny, and Mondos would find this well-suited to their pursuits.
A true Skip Pintail is an infrequent visitor in these or any other waters. And like all rare birds, it jumps from the flock, grabbing the eye with the surprise of it all. Influenced by Hynson and Gerry Lopez, Frye began building pulled pins while at G&S, and he has kept it in his pile of templates ever since. While most associate Skip with more ample-figured designs, his blend of North Shore dims and inherent “Skipness” makes this a hybrid worthy of consideration.
[Feature image: Photo by Shawn Parkin.]
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