Visit With Skip Frye
Skip Frye amongst his quiver of longboards, holding an original Greenough spoon.
Earlier this summer I visited the master shaper and living surf legend at his shaping bay in San Diego. His quiver really is amazing. This is about half of his personal handcrafted fishes and longboards — he has another room this size filled up as well. Skip cherishes his boards, keeping them all very clean and organized. When I was with Skip in the Outer Hebrides a few years ago, I watched him clean all the wax off of his board after a surf, then polish it with at towel. He said he does this to all his boards, after every session.
Skip is such an inspiring guy, I don’t know anyone more humble. The following quote from a recent interview with Skip from the website Liquid Salt caught my eye. It’s such a contrast to the us Open which is underway this week in Huntington Beach. It reminded me why I was originally drawn to surfing other than to, let’s say, the nfl or nascar
“It’s getting more and more crowded out there everyday as the sport grows by leaps and bounds. We have to learn about the aloha spirit. One thing that goes against that is competitive surfing. It’s in the media forefront so to a lot of people that are in the water — they act like it’s a heat.
I used to compete and in fact I have benefited from competing in two different eras. But I am not so much into that anymore. I don’t really attend any of the competitive format things just because I just don’t like that aspect of surfing. I just like it when you go out with your friends and have fun and everybody is number one. In the competitive format, there’s only one person that really feels good about it.”
This is the link to the rest of the interview, which was posted a few days ago: Liquid Salt