Summer of Shred: Mikey's Homemade Shred Stick

Guest blog spot!

My friend Mike shreds the ocean for reals. He decided to take his mad skills of board repair** to the next level and shape his own board from scratch. If that's not shred-worthy, I don't know what is. Here's what he wrote about his recent experience:

"ok friends... so last week i went up to york (maine for you out of towners) to spend a week at grain surfboards (ah ok, i'll plug em: http://www.grainsurfboards.com/ ) to learn how to build my own wooden surfboard... pretty spendy (and i even slept in a tent every night), but definitely one hell of a week. i learned a bunch, and at the end of the week i walked out the door with my own handmade stick (a 5'4" steve lis inspired retro fish- 5'4"x20 1/2"x 2 5/8"), some info on a few semi-secret local surf spots, and a few good contacts/new friends within the industry (the owners of corduroy surf shop in portland maine, the entire 3-man grain board building crew, nick lavecchia (local surf photog who's beginning to blow it up on the national/international scene), and cyrus sutton and ryan tatar of korduroy tv who are doing some pretty cool things out of oregon)...

i still need to glass it, but i'm confident i can do that, and i'm pretty stoked on the whole thing. things went really well, and the grain crew was pretty impressed with my work. hopefully this is the beginning of something really cool and really big (for me)...

attached are a few pics of the process (pretty much one/day) over the course of the week.

shred free or die!
- mikey/tio pepe/el hobbito"

** Tio Pepe's board repair, while in developing countries involved some extra work, like having to go to Heladeria Arenas Blancas to eat popsicles for the sticks. It was hard to not eat Trits! Here is some photographic proof of his hard work. He seems to work on fish a lot.