Larry Mabile ripping into his version of Simon Anderson’s thruster.
For the past four years Scott Bass (of Down The Line surf talk radio) has been hosting a gathering of the surfboard tribe, “as cliche as that sounds,” he’s quick to add, called the Sacred Craft Consumer Surfboard Expo.
Anyone truly into the art of surfboards already knows about the expo and has probably attended every single one of them. But for those of us who buy our boards off the rack and only think about them when something goes horribly wrong, having the Sacred Craft as the fourth horseman of this fall’s ASR Trade Show apocalypse was the perfect chance for us to see something we’ve so far missed entirely. And we don’t think we were alone
Follow the jump for the rest of the story or Click here for a small photo gallery from the show.
As Bass says, “The expo is all about the surfboard, the surfboard shapers, the designers, the manufacturers and all the culture that flows from the surfboard.” And, for those who enjoy talking about surfboards as much or more than they like riding them Sacred Craft is Nirvana.
Over 115 different surfboard related companies were represented at the show and each booth was manned by someone (often the shapers themselves) who was willing to to talk rail, tail, concave, flow, and fins for as long as necessary. Not only that, there were also organized seminars where fans could listen to the experts discuss all kinds of surfboard minutia.
We couldn’t believe the crowds stacked up around Sacred Crafts’ three plexiglass live shaping bays in which shapers competed in the shape-off. For us it was a lot like watching historical interpreters at Sutter’s Fort and we wanted to remind people that there are machines that do this now, but obviously, we were in the minority with our heretical thoughts.
Ultimately, Sacred Craft is about the magic of surfboards, and for those under the spell we doubt there was any better place to be on a flat, sharky, August Saturday and Sunday in SoCal.
