Like the shaping industry itself, Randy Cone is at a crossroads. His passion for surfing big waves and hand-crafting precision surfboards drew him to the heavy water Mecca of Maverick's at Half Moon Bay. But his young and growing business in Pacifica is competing for his attention and energy, even as he strives to provide for his new family.

Randy's experience is not all that different from of the rest of us. Enslaved by the siren call of waves, attempting to juggle careers, family, friends and the daily grind, we try to find an all-too-brief window of recreation that aligns with Mother Nature's fickle moods. But only for a rare few do all those competing demands intersect in the dynamic and hyper-competitive business of board-making, which has inevitably become globally industrialized.

In Randy's case, that trend has profound implications for his future; marquee shapers are evolving more into board designers, with production outsourced overseas. Yet, the infinite three-dimensional curves of the surfboard remain a wide-open canvas for innovation and experimentation, both in materials and shape, as never before in the post-Clark Foam era.

Shaper-Rider

Honed by a quarter century of annual pilgrimages to the North Shore of Oahu, and several years of getting Maverick's dialed, Randy has a rare and potent bond of big wave and expert shaping experience. He has paid his dues in the water and behind the planer, having cranked out 7000–8000 boards in his career, working at the rate of 20–25 per month and 4 to 5 a week, translating into 70–80 hour workweeks. For those in the know— experienced surfers who can appreciate his obsessive craftsmanship—his boards are lethally effective equipment that can sharpen anyone's performance level. Randy will shape you exactly what you want, but has found his niche with traveling boards, semi-guns, guns and Maverick's big-game chasers.

Raised in Goleta, California, just north of Santa Barbara, Cone keenly remembers riding his BMX bicycle across the railroad tracks to the beach as a grom and smelling the tropical scents wafting from the Sex Wax factory before it was uprooted to a larger facility down the road in Carpenteria. Perhaps that formative experience cast a cartoon-like olfactory spell over him, drawing the young man with a vaporous crooked finger toward his destiny with surfing and shaping.

Among others, he credits Kirk Bjerke as his principle mentor in terms of "big wave surfing knowledge and a lot of big wave gun knowledge." But when he was 14 years old, he apprenticed for Haakenson Fiberglassing in Goleta, which brought him close to a unique band of shaping legends: Rich Reed, David Puu, Al Merrick, George Greenough, Malcom Cambell, Kirk Bjerke, John Bradbury, Bob Krause, Jeff Bushman and Steve Huerta. Channeling these gurus, Randy shaped his first board (a stout little quad) at age 16 and then shaped and surfed for David Puu of Morning Star Surfboards for the next few years. After a couple decades shaping and competing around the world, all currents eventually drew him to Maverick's, which he began to surf in 1998 before settling in the area in 2000.

Downsizing the Gun

While quick to pay tribute to the master shapers of the past, Cone has taken a different approach to applying their cumulative knowledge and his unique talents. In a counter-intuitive and deceptively deft stroke of shaping alchemy, he has downsized the Maverick's gun. As he succinctly puts it: "giving a shorter board a bigger board outline." As a result, his boards look familiar, but somehow vaguely different. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but the first time you ride one the performance gap becomes clear. "If you do that, naturally, the nose and everything is going to look a little wider, because you’re holding your curve of the bigger board in a smaller board," says Cone. As a symbol of this evolution, Randy recycled a large geriatric gun with the new smaller shape rising out of its back to create a new masthead over his shop, a literal sign of the times.

And forget the nose-flip fad of the past as well—he's over it. A shallower entry rocker is an integral part of this design progression, allowing the rider to get up to speed faster. As he notes with a twinkle of irony over all the focus on the front of the gun, "Once you’re up, the nose of the board doesn't even come into play, since you’re riding on the back third of the board." Otherwise, "If you're gonna pearl, you're gonna pearl."

While he's been applying this theory to his guns for years, and other shapers have been comparing notes and adopting this progression, too, Randy sees these elements creeping back into the short-board evolution as well. The "potato chip" competition thruster has started to put some carbs back into its diet and it's livelier and more fun to surf as a result. Cone religiously watches all the ASP WCT "Dream Tour" events via the Internet and he has witnessed board outlines of the pros becoming straighter and flatter. "Now they've gone wider, too, and word gets around, like, 'Hey, what are your measurements?'"

Twiggy Borrows a Board

In paddle-in big wave surfing, those specs may be the difference between standing up on a mountain-sized wave and actually surfing it. Cutting the gun back down to size—by over a foot—to 9' 0" made all the difference for Grant "Twiggy" Baker, who came over from South Africa and rode one of Randy's boards to victory at the Maverick's contest on February 6, 2006. Baker came to the contest after securing a controversial write-in nomination—thanks to the energetic voting of his countrymen— and having borrowed a 10'+ gun from his friends, and fellow contestants, the Long brothers. In an early pre-contest warm-up he pearled badly several times and fell flat on his face.

Shaken, Baker asked what went wrong. Maverick's charger and film-maker Grant Washburn quickly diagnosed the problem: not the rider, but the board. Having witnessed Baker's heroics first hand in equally gnarly Dungeons in South Africa, Washburn said with conviction of a fellow charger: "That kind of big wave rider can surf anything, so Long’s board clearly wasn't right for the wave” at Maverick's. He warned the rattled Baker that he would "get killed" if he continued to attempt waves on Long's board.

Wandering back to the drawing board in search of a replacement, the pair stumbled upon the dark forest-green 9' 0" gun in the shop that had been earmarked as a "wall hanger" for Randy's folks. Baker had his doubts about the relatively dwarfed size of the board. Despite being competitors in the same contest, Maverick's devotees Washburn and Cone prevailed on Baker to try it out. The gun was cut from a blank with a thick half-inch stringer with a strange evil twist in it; hence the dark color choice to cover the flaw. But that twisted board changed the fate of the three and may as well have been a lightning bolt stringer struck from the hammer of Thor (or the hand of Gerry Lopez, for that matter). Baker's confidence grew exponentially as the board went "insane," and he fully admits that "I would never have won that event without Randy's help."

As Baker recounts, "It all started with the fact that I don't like to travel with big boards. Anything over 8'0" is a major hassle and I find it much easier to beg and borrow big boards, when and if I need them." He used Rusty Long's "big yellow guy and it just didn’t seem to fit in the bowl and I had some crazy wipe-outs on the thing. Then for a while I tried using a really short board that was 7'6" and, even though I could catch the waves, I kept spinning out at the bottom and had some even crazier wipe-outs because of it."

Washburn then convinced Randy to lend him a board. Baker recalls, "When I first looked at the Green machine, I thought 'here we go again.' It was like nothing I had surfed on before, with it being super narrow and thin with the two-plus-one 'widow maker' fin setup and super heavy for a 9'0", not to mention the fact that it had been made as a display board for behind a bar! But after my first wave on the board, I knew we had something special. It was really fast to paddle for how small it was, and dropped to the bottom like a stone and turned like a short-board…basically everything you look for in a big wave gun."

In addition to the board, Baker suggests, "I do feel that one of the biggest factors in winning the event on that board was how much we surfed Maverick's leading up to the contest, and the fact that I only had one board and that really helped me get a feel for how the board went and I got so used to it in all conditions."

While the board is still leaning in Randy's shaping room for inspiration, Baker has been riding a Cone 8'0" that’s "one of the best boards I have ever had" and a 9'2" he surfed all winter in Cape Town "that goes even better than the Green machine." The bottom line is that "his boards are amazing and I definitely feel that's because he is one of the few shapers that surfs the waves he makes his boards for. It helps with the end product and I can't wait to see what he has lined up for me to ride this winter."

Randy Gets it Dialed

Randy himself has been a regular invitee to the Maverick's contest and team riders consider his shapes at least two years ahead of the curve, both for guns and their natural extension to everyday boards. Reflecting on that fateful green 9' 0" that Baker rode as an example, Randy notes that his guns are becoming shorter, glassed heavier, with lower-volume rails, less than 3 inches thick, and wider at the nose and tail than a traditional rapier-like gun. Cone says this alters the "swing weight" of the board and, in combination with the critical glassing that is still done in-house, fine-tuning of the edges, fin placement, and glass weight, it all adds up to a board that can ride radically better in the water than any mass-produced plank. And his latest creations have moved even further along that continuum from the "Green machine."

The confidence that breeds when you stand up on the edge of the abyss on a ledging peak at Maverick's can make all the difference. The only disadvantage he sees with a smaller, heavier board is in being held down deep after a fall in big surf, where less floatation can make it harder to get back to the surface if you're used to climbing your leash. On the other hand, if you prefer spending more time on the surface, you're more likely to make the wave in the first place if your board is killer.

Randy confirms that a variety of tail shapes are functional finishing touches on his Maverick's guns, mainly by achieving "a longer water line" and allowing for a margin of extra purchase on the wave face. Shapes he has favored include small swallows and diamond tails on the guns and rounded pins on more multipurpose semi-guns for the heavier Northern California surf. He expects tail shapes will keep evolving amid experimentation on smaller equipment, along with fin set-ups.

Intrigued by the quad (4) fin cluster, a futuristic throwback gaining popularity over the more functional and established thruster (3) fin group, Cone has doubts about the performance of quads in beefier surf. They have cropped up on the professional tour and at Pipeline on the North Shore, but tend to "stick" on bottom turns, not as loose and drivey as the thruster. Peering at the Monster Energy Pro on his computer in January, Randy watched an otherwise masterful Danny Fuller seem to hit a hitch as the two inside fins grabbed on one bottom turn; "There it is, see!" At the Boost Mobile Pro in Trestles, tour stalwart Mark Occhilupo tested one out in the early heats, but went back to the familiarity of his tri-fin in the later rounds. Yet in hollow, fast surf, the 4-fin clearly offers a different "feel" of speed and agility for those who make the adjustment, while in softer conditions less pumping down the line can be a distinct advantage.

Randy has remained adaptable in his approach, getting some of his blanks rough cut by an APS-3000 computer shaping machine. Still, he favors a first computer cut on the deck, while saving the bottom for the magic of the power planer, rather than trying to iron out the computer's heavier strokes on the critical rocker. With prodding from his cohort Washburn, he is also in the process of testing out some of the early bio-foam blanks by Homeblown Surf Blanks and Foam Systems, which offers a less toxic MDI-based polyurethane foam versus the TDI-based foam that allegedly put Grubby Clark out of business on environmental grounds. These are made up of sugar- or soy-based polyurethanes that leave a much lighter footprint on the environment—and on the blank blowers and shapers themselves. Once refined, the hope is that these alternative blanks will ultimately make a stronger and more resilient choice—a fusing of performance and conscience.

The vast majority of Cone's boards, however, still use proven conventional polyurethane blanks from Surfblanks Australia. Polystyrene (EPS) blanks are also offered, though the lighter materials, like the epoxy pop-outs, don't necessarily handle the wind and chop of heavier seas. The custom boards are mainly coated in epoxy for durability, performance and lower toxicity. Experimentation in the glassing cloth is also forthcoming with fine-woven bamboo cloth making a strong statement, picking up where hemp cloth left off. One constant of the new era in shaping is that materials costs are going up, but the trade off is an expertly shaped board that instantly feels right underfoot and lasts longer—not a bad thing in our disposable culture. Just scroll through the long lists of used boards for sale on Craigslist or SurfPulse for failures to get the mix just right, and you'll realize it's worth paying a small premium. Like the fit and feel of a fine tailored suit of wool versus buying an off-the-rack polyester blend from Wal-Mart—it's no contest.

The Odd Couple

Business and surfing partner Grant Washburn sees the shaping industry quite clearly in qualitative terms. Like Oscar and Felix of the Odd Couple, Grant and Randy have a unique working relationship, driving each other in the surf, in the shaping room, and beyond. Cypress-sized Grant towers over most other people, an exception in the shrub-sized big wave community, while Randy is more compact. Grant is animated, enthusiastic and brimming with business ideas, while Randy is very subtle, quiet, wry, focused, conservative and methodical about the board business and his priorities.

Grant once said self-mockingly, "I'm terrified they'll hold Maverick's one day in small conditions and a surf contest will break out." Disarmingly humble and friendly, Grant is fiercely opinionated about the direction of board building and the integrity of his friend, Randy, who he describes as a workaholic and perfectionist—all the qualities you would want in your shaper. Washburn sees the future of independent shapers in the quality of their craftsmanship, materials choice, closeness to their customers and knowledge of their local conditions. Predicting polarization of the shaping world, he sees high-end specialization as where the innovations will still take place, while mid-tier equipment will not be able to compete with the mass-produced, low-priced entry-level boards overseas.

In addition, Washburn is enthusiastic about adopting shaping room practices that recycle the resin, pigments and glass cut from the finished boards. Colorful custom resin tinting is a hallmark of a Cone board and the byproduct is a kaleidoscope of scraps and drips left over in the glassing trays. This same ingenuity and creativity has spawned a side furniture project, as the pair shape the spare materials into Tim Burton-esque chairs with high backs and seats, along with Koa wood feet. Some of these functional art forms have already made an appearance in the Minna Gallery in San Francisco. To date, they have produced three exceptional chairs: an ice-green arm chair (pictured), an opalescent elliptical recliner and a modern blue armless beauty that would make Alice at home in Wonderland.

Kudos from Down Under

Rounding out his international fan base, Cone's refinements have touched others overseas. Damon Eastough of Australia thought enough of Randy's talents to "travel halfway around the world to get one of his guns." He had an 8' gun shaped for powerful 10–12' surf around Margaret River after hearing about Randy's design theories and working on tow board designs himself. Says Eastough, "The board is suited to take off late without grabbing and make adjustments without being too locked into a line on the way down." Moreover, "To me it feels like a board that has been made by a surfer who has spent a lot of time surfing guns. I can get a gun in my area, but it's rare to see the shaper out on them. I found Randy to be very generous with his time and ideas, and the quality of his product shows in the performance. Mass produced boards are perfect for the fashionista—they look good, but don’t cut it if you surf a lot."

Johnny Get Your Gun

In an era of industrialization, high volume shaping and wide open materials choices, it pays to shop around. So the next time you hungrily fondle a few board curves and rails in the racks at your local board shop, torn between price and value, if you are ready to step it up, work with a local shaper who knows the conditions in your area. Look around you in the surf and see what the local rippers are using—very likely it's not a pop-out. There is a ton of local shaping talent out there, near every cove, point and beach break. Ask around, do your homework and you just might score a performance board that exceeds your limits. After all, you can bet Randy Cone and his test pilots at Maverick's are gearing up for winter. How about you?

For more information about Randy Cone’s boards, visit www.randyconesurfboards.com.

Mike Wallace has surfed for over two decades on the East and West coasts, Hawaii, Europe and NorCal. Currently a resident of Moss Beach with his family of four, he can often be found haunting the beaches south of Devil's Slide in search of the perfect sandbar with his dog, Moose.

Comments? Send an email to mike (at) surfpulse (dot) com.

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