Chinese Imports, Bad Economy Swamp Surfboard Shapers

COCOA BEACH, Fla. — This sleepy beach town has long been a surfer's paradise, a carefree spot where craftsmen turned out hand-made surfboards in backyard shacks, dropping their tools to hit the water when the waves were good.

Now those days seem to be fading like a cloud-scudded sunset, victim of the same forces of globalization that have hit so many American industries.

In the past decade, cheap surfboards imported from China and other Asian nations have found their way into surf shops around the country, selling for hundreds of dollars less than American-made boards.

Add in the current economic downturn, record gas prices and a surfing world turned picky by web cams and precise surf forecasts available on the Internet and many shapers feel they are facing a major wipeout.

"You think of surfers and this free lifestyle, but it's a business," said Pat O'Hare, 66, a Californian who relocated to Florida's east coast and has been building hand-made boards since 1963. "People in business just look at the money and the bottom line. It's sad. I feel like the last cowboy."

The surfing craze hit Florida in the post-World War II era. A growing population of young beach-lovers and their kids took up the sport that originated in Hawaii but grew to popularity in California in the 1950s and 1960s, when surf culture was popularized by movies like "Gidget" and the honeyed harmonies of the Beach Boys.

A whole generation of teenagers flocked to the waves. Some, like O'Hare, loved surfing so much they started building boards, learning the trade in informal apprenticeships with older masters. The dream was to build a life around surfing, free to surf when the waves were good, travel a bit, build a few boards, make enough money to survive, but mostly to enjoy life.

"I remember when I bought my first board as a kid," O'Hare said. "Back then the boards were balsawood, but fiberglass boards built on foam blanks had just come out. I asked the shaper whether I should get wood or foam and he said wood because he didn't think foam would last."

But the foam-based boards revolutionized surfing, enabling "shapers" — as board craftsmen are known in the trade — to build much lighter and more buoyant boards than the wooden monsters that came before them.

Boards got shorter, easier to turn and surfing suddenly went "radical."

The surfing subculture waxed and waned for the next several decades, but board building remained basically the same: a lone shaper would take a foam "blank" and using planes and sandpaper, shave and sand it down to a carefully-crafted shape tailored to the desires of the individual surfer buying it and the waves of his home-break.

Along the way the foam "blanks" were improved, as were the resins and coatings, and of course the skills of the shapers, who toyed with different configurations of fins, thicknesses, tail designs and the general curves and outlines of the boards.

Surfing boomed again in the late 1980s, just when a now-famous Cocoa Beach native, Kelly Slater, graduated from high school and joined the professional surfing circuit. With surf clothing companies booming and selling products nationwide, eight-time world champion Slater and other professionals got hefty endorsements and the sport reached a new zenith.

"We doubled our business every year until 1991," said Pete Dooley, 57, who began building Natural Art surfboards in the Cocoa Beach area in 1972. "Then the '91 recession hit. I had a 6,000-square-foot factory and 12 guys with families working for me. I swore I'd never let that happen again."

Dooley downsized, but kept making boards and a good living until the globalization crisis hit the industry in the past five years.

"The Chinese can land a board here for what it costs us to glass one," he said, referring to the process of adding layers of resin that harden around the foam blank. "I visited one of their factories and I was impressed. There were 25 shaping rooms and 500 employees. People here have to work two jobs to support themselves shaping now."

Dooley and his wife, Deb, are shuttering their surf shop on Florida's famous beachside highway, A1A, but will continue selling made-to-order boards via the Internet on NaturalArt.com.

Another Florida shaper fighting the globalization wave is Tom Neilson, 53, who shaped his first board at 16 and still uses pretty much the same tools today. For decades Neilson sold his boards at shops from Florida to New York, but in the past six months the orders have dried up, largely because many dealers are carrying the cheap Asian boards, he said.

"They've overproduced and are literally dumping boards here," he said. "The quality just isn't the same. It hurts the entry-level surfers who don't know better. They buy a cheap Chinese board and it breaks. They'd be better off buying a used American board. It totally hurts surfing because it turns everybody off."

Neilson just opened his own shop to have a place to sell his boards. As in most other Florida shops, hand-made American boards go for $475 to $600 or more for longer models. Chinese boards — now stocked in big-box stores like Costco — can sell for around $300, sometimes less.

Most of the older shapers believe they can survive the current crisis because they build better boards and have loyal customers who want a hand-made, custom board and not a mass-produced cheap model.

But the glory days of hard-living, fun-loving shapers churning out boards at night and surfing all day may be receding like an out-going tide.

"When I was a kid, it was more like a cult," O'Hare said. "But for me, it's still hands-on. You have to have a feel for what you're doing. It's sad to see it change so much."