Nelson Rice Archives - ��ϳԹ�� Online

Inside the Mind of a Custom-Surfboard Shaper

jrellosa — Fri, 10 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

John Oppito has broad shoulders, a week’s worth of stubble, and the type of handshake that makes you wonder why you spend most of your waking hours behind a keyboard. On an overcast afternoon in late January, he’s sitting on a stool next to his shaping bay in an unassuming, windowless warehouse nestled on the fringes of Asbury Park, New Jersey. It’s known as ��and has developed a reputation as the hub for one-of-a-kind hand-shaped surfboards on the East Coast. It’s less than two miles from the Atlantic Ocean but feels a world away. A fan hums in the background but fails to quell the bracing resin fumes. Oppito, 32, has on a navy blue New York Rangers sweatshirt, brown paint-splattered pants, and low-cut sneakers that—like almost every surface here—are caked in foam dust. “Everybody assumes my last name is Rozbern,” he says with a chuckle. He understands the confusion and explains that it’s actually the street name of his parents’��house, where he first started crafting boards. Over the last decade,��Oppito has become synonymous with , the label he created and co-owns with his friend and business partner, Kevin Strickland.

Rozbern Surfboards, along with the��boards Oppito shapes for the alternative-board collaboration —which features designs from shaping luminaries Rich Pavel, Gerry Lopez, and Ryan Lovelace—are the antithesis of generic. His creations often include elaborate color work and unusual customizations.��One example is��the��seven-foot Widowmaker channel-bottom board��with a psychedelic resin-swirl deck, which��earned Oppito honors at the Boardroom International Surfboard Show last weekend in Del Mar, California.

(Tim Torchia)

Oppito’s functional art��stands out for more than looks, though. He takes no shortcuts, building the boards by hand from start to finish. At a time when it feels like most hard goods are available at the click of a mouse, it’s refreshing that there are still people out there providing custom craftsmanship with a personal touch. Next to where Oppito signs his name on each board, along with the dimensions, board model, and customer’s name, he also writes, “!”

Yet Oppito won’t wax philosophically about the pureness of hand shaping or assert that there’s only one ideal way to build a surfboard. “I have nothing against the machine,” he says more than once about CNC��instruments that are the norm for mass producing boards in the surf industry. “It’s a tool. My opinion is that as long as you’re transparent about what about what you’re doing, it shouldn’t matter how the board’s made.” Oppito has only brought in a couple of board glassers in the last year to help him keep the turnaround time on his custom boards between four and eight weeks.

“I shaped a fish for my first board,” Oppito says about his board-building origins in the shed behind his parents’ house in Eatontown, New Jersey, during his senior year at Monmouth Regional High School. “A fish is not an easy first board to shape. I glassed the whole thing. The fins ended up ripping off by the second session, because I didn’t put enough glass reinforcement on them.”

Oppito performs some R&D on his six-foot-one Hound. (Tim Torchia)

From there, Oppito learned every stage of the board-building process and developed a DIY��ethos out of necessity. In California, Oppito explains, you can go to any supplier and buy a blank, resin, and everything you need to start shaping. But when he was starting, there was nothing like that in New Jersey, no factories to get information from. “You couldn’t walk into a reputable glass shop and say, ‘Hey, I want to sweep your floors and learn how to laminate a board.’ I just figured it out trial and error—so there was a lot of error.”

Oppito doesn’t bemoan his roots. His surroundings influence every board he builds. “I feel like, growing up in New Jersey, you have to shape everything, because we get literally every type of condition��imaginable,” he says. Ranging from ankle-high summer slop to world-class overhead barrels in the winter, the waves in the Garden State can be as fitful as traffic on the turnpike. Rozbern’s models reflect that diversity;��they include grovelers, shortboards, longboards, fish, twin-fins, and step-ups that fuse alternative and performance characteristics.

He developed a shape called the Hound with local charger Mark Gilmartin, who earned Surfline’s�� for a draining barrel he navigated on a��mango-tinted��five-eleven board��the day before Halloween 2017. That board was Oppito’s first try at the design. He still has it—well, at least half of it. “I think it lasted a whole winter until it broke,” he says as he reaches down behind a stool and retrieves the severed tail end. “This thing saw more tube time than most people have.” Although Oppito also has Gilmartin’s original order card, with all its specifications and a template for the Hound’s outline, he likes to keep “Magic Mango” nearby for reference. “You can nail all the numbers but not have a board come out as you mean it,” he says. “A lot of shaping is by feel and muscle memory. You know how the board should feel in your hand. You know how it should look under the lights.” ��

(Kevin Strickland)

But then there’s seeing the board in the water with his customers. Oppito sounds like an anxious parent when he describes waiting for feedback. “The worst is when somebody is surfing a board for the first time and I’m surfing with them,” he says. “I can’t even concentrate, because I am constantly watching them and wondering, Is the board working well? Are they liking it? Does it look good? Is it flowing like it should?��I have all these thoughts racing through my head, and I can’t even focus on surfing myself.”

Those nerves fade amid the whirring of Oppito’s Clark Foam–modified Hitachi planer��back in his factory. “In the shaping bay, I’m in my element,” he says. “I’m really just focused on making the board come out as I have it in my head.” When you watch him at work with his bulky Sony wireless headphones on, it looks like he’s in a trance.

(Tim Torchia)

While the countless variables that go into creating a board can make an average surfer’s head spin, regardless of the fumes, Oppito consumes himself with the process. It provides structure. “I approach the blank the same every time,” he says. “I’ll generally plane the blank to thickness first, cut it out, set my bottom concave, foil the deck, and then turn the rails. The best part is when you do the final sanding screen and everything comes together. This thing that has taken life slowly along the way, when you sign your name, you get to see all the hard work in a tangible object.”

That sense of satisfaction is fleeting. “Every time I make a board, I think it’s a good one. Then I look back at it even weeks later and think, Oh, I could have done this differently,” Oppito says. “When you start not doing that, you stop progressing. There is no such thing as a perfect surfboard. You can always find something that you could do differently.”

The post Inside the Mind of a Custom-Surfboard Shaper appeared first on ��ϳԹ�� Online.

Forget California. Mike Gleason Surfs New Jersey.

ndavidson — Mon, 11 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

“It’s bigger than I thought it was going to be,” Mike Gleason says after catching a glimpse of the waves at his home break. “It’s cleaner too.”��

The wind is offshore. A haze clings to the ocean, but is burning off with the morning sun around 10 a.m.��on this weekday in late March. The waves are shoulder-to-head-high. They crash on the sandbar with a thud. They drown out the Johnny Cash song playing inside Gleason’s 2004 Jeep Grand Cherokee. He’s in the driver’s seat, wearing a light blue t-shirt, faded jeans, and black Nikes. “Wow, it’s way bigger than I thought,” he repeats in between spits of chewing tobacco.

For those not familiar with Gleason’s location, the reaction might be disbelief rather than surprise. He isn’t in California or Hawaii. He is in Long Branch, New Jersey.��

“Some people don’t even know that New Jersey has a coast let alone waves,” says Pat Schmidt, a 20-year-old pro surfer from Manasquan, New Jersey, who, like Gleason, is sponsored by Volcom.

When most people imagine a perfect day of surfing, they probably envision tropical, turquoise-colored water and palm trees swaying in the foreground. Gleason has a different ideal. This morning it’s 53 degrees and the water hovers around 40. “It’s gorgeous out,” Gleason says. The conditions are balmy by his standards. He’s accustomed to surfing in frigid temperatures and water that looks more like an IPA. In the Northeast the best waves often coincide with the harshest weather. That was the case in January when Gleason drove two hours north to Long Beach, New York, for one of the season’s biggest swells courtesy of Winter Storm Jonas. After hunkering down in a motel room for 24 hours, Gleason trudged through two feet of snow on the beach to get to the waves. He surfed overhead, barreling waves for an hour and a half despite 30 mph winds and pelting snow. “When a snowflake hits your eye, it burns,” Gleason says. “Oh my God, it burns. But there were only eight of us out in the water and it was absolutely firing.”

He came back the next day and surfed five hours.��

“It is a special breed that really embraces the conditions,” says Billy Hume, Volcom’s East Coast marketing manager. “The guys up here are a bit of psychopaths. They will paddle out when it’s two foot and 25 degrees and they still love it.”

Gleason thrives when the conditions are most inhospitable and has garnered respect as one of the best surfers from the Garden State. His reputation, though, isn’t confined to the East Coast. He’s landed photos in national surfing magazines, was ranked by Red Bull last year, and starred in Volcom’s feature surf film—Psychic Migrations.��At 31 years old, Gleason’s surfing continues to progress.��

“It doesn’t matter where you go in the world, you’re never going to experience a true Jersey day that is firing.��It’s so dang perfect.”

After checking two nearby spots, Gleason goes back to the first. He turns left onto a sand covered side street and passes six “NO PARKING ANYTIME” signs. He doesn’t seem to notice, or care, and stops in front of a battered bulkhead.��

“In the summer the people who live here will call the cops,” Gleason says—motioning to a three-story modern beachside home. “But for now it’s cool.” He wrangles his wetsuit out of the trunk. It has an attached hood and is five millimeters thick, as are his neoprene boots and gloves. They’re as essential to surfing year round in New Jersey as a surfboard. Gleason’s current quiver includes 17 boards. He has twice as many wetsuits.��

He shimmies into the suit and pulls on the hood, covering his shaved head. His thick beard still protrudes. Gleason’s facial hair—which calls to mind a frontiersman more than a surfer—combined with his stocky, barrel-chested physique is partly why his friends gave him the nickname “” about eight years ago. But the sobriquet is also due to Gleason’s approach in the water. His turns are powerful and ferocious. When he hits the lip, he displaces water like a geyser. He while pumping through the tube. He goes right on one of the bigger waves this morning—picks up speed—then lofts an alley-oop. The 5'6″��board seems glued to his feet. He’s not wearing a leash.��

“That's the only air I can usually do,” Gleason says after returning to the lineup. He pulls off his wetsuit hood. He says he’s warm. He catches another wave within a minute.��

Gleason stood up on his first wave at this same beach when he was six. His father, a sales representative for a trucking company, worked as a lifeguard on summer weekends and always brought his family along. The youngest of three boys, Mike developed an affinity for the water and excelled at any sport on a board. “He’s just always had a natural style and flow,” says Bryan Gleason, Mike’s brother. Soon, the youngest Gleason was skipping soccer practice to surf in the fall. He started surfing in the winter when he was 12, often riding his bike to the beach then paddling out alone. When he was 17, the only Volcom team rider from the Northeast moved to California. Gleason got his spot.��

Within a year, Gleason too headed west. A trip to California during Thanksgiving of his freshman year at Monmouth University when he “scored crazy waves,” convinced him to transfer to Santa Barbara City College for the next semester. Soon after that, he received an offer from Volcom to pursue surfing fulltime. He left school. He’d spend a month in Hawaii then another in California every winter along with trips to the Caribbean, Mexico, and other premier surfing destinations. But it was also around that time when he moved back to New Jersey. It’s remained a fixed-foot ever since. “I love New Jersey too much,” Gleason explains of his decision not to relocate permanently. “This is home and where I want to be. It doesn’t matter where you go in the world, you’re never going to experience a true Jersey day that is firing. It’s so dang perfect. For its size, nowhere gets as good. Every wave you’re getting a tube or have the opportunity to get one.”

That’s why Gleason calls missing a swell in New Jersey “a nightmare” and “the worst-case scenario.” He’s not alone. When Schmidt saw the forecast for the Jonas swell he was on the North Shore of Oahu. He booked the next flight home.

While Gleason initially would never turn down a trip because it offered more exposure, the landscape of surfing in New Jersey has shifted. It’s no longer the underground scene it was back in 1996 when became the first (and still only) surfer from New Jersey to qualify for the ASP (now WSL) World Championship Tour. As surf publications have gone digital, features and galleries about the Northeast appear online almost every week in the winter. “The more publicity you get the better you’re going to do,” Gleason says.��

But the increased notoriety has drawbacks. Gleason remembers days when there would be only one or two photographers on the beach. Now, they often outnumber surfers, saturating the content. Carter McCoy, a photographer and Gleason’s friend, recalls countless times he’s taken a good shot of Gleason, only find minutes later that someone has posted a photo from the same angle on Instagram. “Then everybody knows where you’re at,” McCoy says. “It goes from one person to a packed lineup. It’s harder to have those secret solo sessions.” ��Sometimes if Gleason and his friends find a good spot to themselves, they’ll turn their phones off. ��Other times they’ll head north to the Cape or Maine and search for more secluded breaks. Gleason rarely ventures south. The logic is simple.

“I hate surfing in crowds,” he says.

This morning, he didn’t have to worry about that. There were only four guys in water. Gleason knew all of them. Still, he paddled out to an empty peak near a jetty with wooden pilings sticking out like acupuncture pins. Gleason hadn’t surfed in two weeks because the Atlantic had been quiet, but he’s learned to cope with the fickleness of his playing field. He bartends during the summer. He’s as passionate about fishing as surfing. If the waves are flat and the water is clear, he’ll free dive. He runs hills and swims laps, so when waves arrive, he’s ready. It also helps that he seems to have the sandbars and currents at his home break memorized even though they constantly change. He muses about topics like swell interval and direction with the attentiveness of an oceanographer.��

“You can usually see the trends of what the swells are doing,” he says. “Right now we are in a bad trend.”

The lack of swell and warming conditions cast doubt over whether the inaugural Cold War would take place at Asbury Park Casino Beach. It’s not your typical surf contest. Instead, New Jersey pros Sam Hammer and Andrew Gesler selected 14 of best surfers from their home state and New York, divided them into two teams, and squared off in man-on-man heats. The limit for the waiting period was extended from March 18th to the end of the month, before it was finally called on for the 25th. “It wasn't the classic Jersey surf we wanted, but we dealt with what we had,'' Hammer about the shoulder-high waves and 50 degree temperatures. “We want this to be cold. We don't want it to be as warm as it was today. We want people to freeze their asses off.”

While Gleason likes competition “but not so much for surfing,” the Cold War was an exception. He surfed for Gesler’s team, won his heat, and helped the side to the victory and $8,000 prize. He was also named MVP. He won a grill.

Back in the water at Long Branch, a little more than a week prior to the Cold War, Gleason wasn’t concerned about if the contest would run, the next stage of his career, or even the hole in his fishing boat that needs repair. Right now, he scans the horizon. He spots a set wave. He’s in the perfect position. He waits a few seconds, then in a flurry of motion drains his hood, yanks it back on, and flips around. He takes two strokes and pops to his feet.��

He disappears into the barrel.

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Leo Fioravanti Paddles Back Out

ndavidson — Mon, 22 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

One afternoon in early December, Leonardo Fioravanti stands on the back deck of the Quiksilver House on Oahu and surveys the Banzai Pipeline—the most photographed and arguably most dangerous wave in the world. He bounces up and down like a boxer ready to enter the ring. “It’s pumping!” he yells into his cell��phone. Kanoa Igarashi, another Quiksilver sponsored surfer, hastily waxes his board nearby.

“Are you wearing a [wetsuit] top?” Igarashi asks?

“No,” Fioravanti says. “It’s so hot, and if you get a big [camera] shot it looks way better.”

“Yeah,” Igarashi replies. “You also get way more wrecked if you hit the reef without one.”

Fioravanti, 18, doesn’t need the reminder. The four silver-dollar-sized��scars on his lower back are ample proof of the consequences of��surfing over Pipeline’s jagged, lava rock reef. On January 31, 2015, during his third round heat at the , Fioravanti wiped out then got compressed against the reef. His body went numb. Everything went black. He got the wind knocked out of him.

“I have been injured before, but this was different,” Fioravanti says. “I have never experienced that much pain.”

Fioravanti managed to undo his leash and swim to the surface. He raised his hand for the water patrol. Within two minutes he was stabilized on a stretcher and carried off the beach. Over 7,500 miles and two oceans away in Hossegor, France, Fioravanti’s mother, Serena Martini, watched her son’s injury unfold on the live webcast. It was a little after midnight. She had just flown to France from Hawaii with Stephen Bell, Fioravanti’s stepfather and the global team manager for Quiksilver. Bell received a call. It was Kelly Slater, his good friend. Slater provided updates and then gave the phone to Fioravanti.

“I’m OK,” Martini remembers her son saying. She knew he wasn’t. She and Bell didn’t unpack their bags. They flew back to Hawaii that morning.

At Queens Hospital in Honolulu doctors diagnosed Fioravanti with a fractured L1��vertebra. They gave him a back brace and told him he wouldn’t need surgery. But eight days later when Fioravanti returned to France and met with a back specialist in Bordeaux, he found out the vertebra was not only fractured, but had tilted and would in fact require surgery. When Fioravanti recalls the news that if his vertebra had shifted an inch or two more he would have been paralyzed, his typically ebullient tone becomes subdued.

“I thought I might never surf again,” he says.

The injury was just the latest in a string of obstacles on Fioravanti’s journey to reach his dream: winning the (WSL) world title. There are 486 surfers who have registered at least one point on the WSL Qualifying Series (QS) in 2016. Fioravanti is the only Italian on the list. Born in Rome, he grew up in the town of Cerveteri and learned to surf when he was four with the help of older his brother, Matteo. Italy is hardly a surfer’s paradise. Summer months are plagued by long flat spells, and even during the fall and winter waves are fleeting in the Mediterranean.

“It is like lightning in a bottle,” says Jason Baffa, who spent 108 days in Italy in 2012 filming for , which explores the country’s surfing culture and features Fioravanti. “You have to be in the right place at the right time and even then there are only waves for an hour or two.”

For Fioravanti, the meager conditions were not a deterrent, but rather served as motivation. When there were waves, his mother wrote him excuses to get out of school, and he’d surf until it was too dark to see. In the summer, he’d wait until around 6 p.m. when a ferry’s wake would create two to three waves.

“That was the highlight of my day,” Fioravanti says.

Still, he and his family realized that for him to get noticed, they would have to venture outside of Italy. The Fioravantis started spending summers in Hossegor (where Leo now lives with Martini and Bell) and entered contests all over Europe while Leo was still in grade school. After a junior contest in Portugal, Quiksilver offered him a sponsorship. He was nine. Soon, he was traveling to Hawaii, Australia, and Indonesia with big name riders like Slater, Jeremy Flores, and Dane Reynolds. When Fioravanti told other surfers he was from Italy, he always received the same response: “Are you sure there are waves there?” Although Fioravanti speaks five languages, he let his surfing answer those doubts. He was the European Junior Champion in 2013. The next year, his first on the QS, he finished 28th and was one result away from qualifying for the world tour. He appeared poised to reach his goal in 2015.

Then the injury happened.

After Fioravanti’s surgery on February 14th that required two titanium rods and four screws, Martini wanted to hug her son. She couldn’t. She was afraid she would hurt him. “He could move a little bit,” Martini says. “But he needed assistance with almost everything.” Helping Fioravanti into his brace was a two-person job.

In March, Fioravanti started his recovery at the (CERS), one of the best rehabilitation centers for athletes in Europe. He trained seven days a week from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. He got his brace off after six weeks, and had some added motivation. He could see the peeling waves at Capbreton outside the large glass windows of the gym.

“When you are that age you think you are indestructible,” Christiaan Bradley, Fioravanti’s shaper, says. “But after it was all taken away from him, he realized how much he needed surfing in his life. He went at it with all his effort.”

Bradley shaped Fioravanti a retro-style 6’0” single fin board, painted red, white, and green like the Italian flag, to help ease the transition back into the ocean. Fioravanti rode the board his first surf back, three and a half months after the injury. He still had the rods and screws in his back. On his first wave, Fioravanti and screamed…with joy. “I felt like I had won something,” he says. Five months later, after a second surgery in June to remove the hardware, after two-a-day surf sessions and yoga classes to regain his form and flexibility, he did win. He took first place in the ISA World Games U-18 Championship at Oceanside Pier in California.��

But Hawaii and the Pipeline still loomed. Fioravanti’s first event this year? The Voclom Pipe Pro. Martini tried to dissuade her son from entering. “He listened but said he had to go [to Hawaii],” she says. “He said this is my life.”

“The North Shore is where you prove yourself in front of everyone,” Fioravanti says. “It is the place where you have to step up and show you can hang with the big boys.”

Although he put on a tough demeanor for his friends and family, Fioravanti confided that he was “little scared” and “not very confident” for his first surf back at Pipeline in November. Despite catching some of the standout waves of the winter, those worries persisted. The night before the Pipeline Pro, he could hear the waves pounding from his bunk bed in the Quiksilver house. Fioravanti tried to block out the recurring dream he’s had since the injury. He’s underwater and everything is black. He can’t move. He hits the reef and it shatters into a million pieces.

During his first heat, he displayed no fear. He caught the two best waves and won by 9.33 points.

“Leo always charges,” says Roberto D’Amico, Fioravanti’s friend and one of only the handful of other Italian pro surfers. “He is a gladiator.”

But during his third round heat, Fioravanti waited 12 minutes before he took off on a wave. It closed out. He couldn’t escape and slammed straightforward.

“Holy shit,”��Bradley thought watching the webcast. “He’s done it again.”

“It felt like déjà vu,” Fioravanti says. But this time, he didn’t hit the reef. This time his 6’10” board didn’t break. This time he swam to the surface and when water patrol jet ski approached, he didn’t wave his hand. Instead, he shook his head and said he was “all right.”

He paddled back out.��

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Nelson Rice Archives - ���ϳԹ��� Online

Inside the Mind of a Custom-Surfboard Shaper

Forget California. Mike Gleason Surfs New Jersey.

Leo Fioravanti Paddles Back Out

Nelson Rice Archives - ��ϳԹ�� Online