Ucluelet's Chairman of the Boards

TheTyee.caCourtesy New Star Books

 

Turn left at the junction towards Ucluelet, away from Tofino, and if you're lucky and you like surfing, you'll end up at Island Rhino Surfboards, Billy Leach, Proprietor. The name Rhino derives from the surfing term to describe a board that is a "gun" -- a board for big waves. The shop is beside an auto body shop in an industrial park. Above the garage-type structure that Leach built is a huge sign that declares, simply: "Surfing is Good."

Leach has been in Ucluelet since 1999. The year before, in Sechelt, a place normally not associated with surfing, Leach built his first board. "I had lived on Texada and I saw waves big enough to surf," says Leach, 40. "I just didn't have a clue how to build a board . . . But I built a surfboard," he says pointing over his shoulder to where it hangs, a happy face spray painted on it. "Then I came out here and surfed a few times and I've just been building them ever since."

Surfer likes loggers

Leach lives in a motor home parked outside the shop and figures he has to clear about $1,500 a month to make a go of things. A trained gas fitter, handyman and welder, Leach could find an easier way to make a living. But building boards is his passion, says Leach. "I've built 270 surfboards in the last three years."

Leach is proud to live in Ucluelet and would love to post a sign at the junction between the two towns that reads "Ucluelet: Surfing Capital of BC." Ucluelet has a bit of reputation as the ugly stepsister of Tofino, logger country, home of the redneck, intent on destroying the environment for a day's pay. As Leach points out, they never mention the weather in Ucluelet on CBC; it's always Tofino.

"I like living here," says Leach who brings a real working-class consciousness to his work. "It will be good for this community if this business takes off. It really needs something. All our resources have been stripped from here. The big companies came in; they pretty much logged and fished till there was nothing left, and now the people that grew up here, the people that made Ucluelet what it is, are leaving. They have no choice."

"Surf is a resource that can't be taken from us," adds Leach. "If you could harvest it, it wouldn't be here. It would have been gone. They would have moved in and took it all long ago."

Leach resents the bad rap given to loggers. "I'm not down on a person if he does whatever work he can to feed his kids. There are excellent people here in Ucluelet. They're loggers and fishermen and most of those people would feed you if you were hungry. They would pick you up if you looked like you were cold," he says.

A wicked thing to do

Surfing in Ucluelet is growing among the youth. "And that's a really good thing because there ain't a lot to do here," says Leach, a father. "It's one of those things that makes you feel great after you've done it. It's something for the kids to do, something other than just hanging out or watching TV. It's a wicked sport."

Albert Strom grew up in Ucluelet, working at the Co-op store for twenty-three years. Strom figures there is more hype and lifestyle around surfing in Tofino than in Ucluelet. "Most of us here have to work eight-hour days rather than go surf," says Strom, who takes off work whenever the surfing is good at Twin Rivers, near Ucluelet. "Tofino has more of the surf lifestyle, where people are more likely to 'live to surf,' with work being secondary. I wouldn't mind doing that!" he laughs.

Strom recalls buying his first surfboard from the Wreckage, a funky junk shop in Ucluelet where someone working there was making boards in the back. One thing that characterized most surfers in BC in the early days was their willingness to surf practically anything, from plywood to glass-over-foam boards. With the nearest surf shops in Oregon, BC surfers had to scrounge boards any way they could. Some early surfers tried to make and shape their own boards.

One of Strom's earliest boards was made locally by Wild Island, a surf company that was started by Jack Gillie and Vern Ferster in Tofino. Gillie, a carpenter by trade, has made about a hundred boards, "more as a hobby, than with the expectation of making a living from it." These days, Gillie continues to make his own boards, but has closed up Wild Island.

In his attempt to make a business out of making and selling surfboards, Leach is taking an entrepreneurial leap of faith and he knows it. "People would think I'm crazy, building surfboards in Canada." When asked what is involved in building a surfboard, Leach replies, "It's pretty standard. It's fifty-year-old technology. Glass over foam. Old aerospace technology. Nothing has changed over the last fifty years on a mass scale."

War effort created surf bum

In 1930 Tom Blake received the first ever patent on a surfboard for his "Hawaiian Hollow Surfboard." Previously, the typical board of the late 1920s, according to surf historian Nat Young, "was still a solid redwood from six to nine feet long, flat bottomed, with the edges just barely turned up to the bottom side. Surfers would buy a redwood plank at the local lumberyard, take it home, chop it into rough shape with an axe, and then whittle it down with a plane and drawknife. The finished board was invariably flat, heavy and about 3½ inches thick."

World War I helped stimulate the development of waterproof glues that could effectively bond wood together. By 1935 Tom Blake was at the leading edge of innovation. He added a small fin at the bottom rear end of the boards. This allowed the surfer to pivot and turn more freely and with more lateral stability.

During the 1940s surfboard design took giant steps forward. Fibreglass, resin, and Styrofoam, the three main components of today's surfboard, came out of airplane research during World War II. Surfboards no longer had to be made out of wood. Los Angeles was the technical centre for the war effort. It was also the home of modern surfboard revolution. In a weird way, the "war effort" contributed to the creation of the ultimate pacifist and future counter-cultural icon: the surf bum.

Ollies and pop-shove-its

Over the last twenty years, a whole set of new words and phrases to describe surfing has emerged because of the development of shorter boards and the use of skateboard-like moves. Phrases to describe floaters and airs like Ollies, pop-shove-its, frontside grab airs, frontside stalefish-to-tail blunt, backside method grab stomp, frontside roast beef grab, fakies and the rodeo clown were unknown twenty years ago.

By the beginning of the 1990s, surfboard shapers began shaving down volume and outline to make highly sensitive boards -- perhaps too sensitive, according to Billy Leach.

"I build really strong, durable surfboards," he says proudly. "The reason being is that they are made out of petroleum products. I can't, with a clear conscience, build something that may be a pound lighter, that is going to last half the time just so some guy can go out and vainly fly in the air or something. Personally, I won't do it! I don't think so! It used to be bad if you went out and broke your surfboard in half. Now it's cool.

"People need to change their attitude. Three hundred bucks worth of petroleum products that is headed for the dump? That is not cool. I don't consider myself a huge environmentalist or anything like that. It's just common sense. You hit a certain point of wave to strength, where you go too far. The same thing happened with mountain biking. You've got people coming in for these $90 titanium bolts to shave two ounces off the weight of their bike, and you're looking at them thinking, 'Man, go ride the thing and shave ten pounds off your ass!'"

Goal of 20,000 boards a year

Leach also believes it is possible to make good wooden boards like they did in the early days. "My friend built a wooden board a year ago," he says. You should see this slab. It's cedar. He surfed and it was amazing. It was about seven feet long, narrow, kind of gunny-shaped. It was like an inch and a half thick and had an inch of rocker in the thing."

Due to the larger market and increased demand for surfboards in California, there is a division of labour there that doesn't take place here. "It's easier in California," says Leach "because you know I wouldn't be glassing and sanding and all that. I would just shape surfboards. Down there it's a few different trades. Up here you ain't got a lot of options. You just do it all."

In order for Leach to make a good go at surfboard building, he has to do the impossible: build 10,000 surfboards a year. To make a little more money Leach plans to sell his own boards out of his shop in Ucluelet. "I build a little better board. I charge a good price and I only build a hundred boards a year. And I can sell that easy, because I've got a good reputation for building good boards."

Leach is also gearing up to make 10,000 skateboards a year and market them into the US. "We have a pretty innovative product, and our cost is there because we use different materials," he says. "I find with any of these industries, if you just start using the same materials, building exactly the same product, where is the edge? It's not because you buy cheaper material. You're competing with big corporations for the same material. We use different material. Different processes that are a little more flexible, easy for us to tool up, we build our own equipment."

Meanwhile, Leach is waiting for capital to make a go of things. In a dying resource town like Ucluelet you'd figure it would be easy for Leach to receive government funding to build his plant. Guess again.

"They look at me and think, okay, he must be making money. I had a hundred grand in the bank. I capitalized myself. I could've just went and sat on the beach. But I love what I do. I love to build surfboards. I'd like to see better boards built, and built here in Ucluelet."

This piece is excerpted from The Cedar Surf by Grant Shilling, available in book stores and from New Star Books