Environmentally friendly it is not. Foam dust and cigarette smoke hangs in the portion of remaining breathable air of a claustrophobic closet of a room. What’s foam dust you ask? Keep quite, learn a little you puke, as this is no Quiksilver/Roxy pop-out, made in China ,Google analytic marketing hustle designed for the bourgeois. I said, shut-up or get out, I don’t have time or patience for you spoiled maggots!
The craftsman and I kick, step,and shuffle through small drifts of the snow-like or if you lived through the studio 54 years, Peruvian Flake powder, freshly shaven. A Skil 100 lays on the soon to be cosmic, wave ridding, dream machine. Sinbad wished he had a magic carpet of a ride like this beauty, man! ”7′ ohh”, I say salivating as The man, a ghost from Dogtown past puffs his smoke simultaneously saying, “Look man I pulled in the rails so she will hold in the tube yet still flow, kids don’t know how to flow these days.Look at their hands when they surf. No flow.” Now listen very closely I am speaking of a certified legend, as this word is used to loosely these days, tagged and hash-tagged attempting to describe many a juvenile and or apprentice.
I stare at his gnarled hands,the callouses, lines, blisters, age spots, and scars reveal a life of shaping boards by hand. Dimensions, weight, and the intangible yet necessary are computed in his mind, he wants to talk to the rider about style and flow, he wants the board to work for the rider. “It wont stick in the wave, it will be loose. Your cutback will be like butter,man,” He says, moving his hands to the double barrel concave to V bottom.
Michael Olivares got his start humbly enough,roughing out boards, being the whipping boy (what would now-a-days be certainly termed child abuse but back then was known as paying dues) hanging around surf shops. The days when surfers where usually military veterans or other sturdy non-conformist looking to tune out of squares-ville, Dick Dale numbers blared on transistor radios, and the surf movie reigned supreme at the locals such as the Santa Monica Civic and the Hermosa Bijou. These cats used paraffin wax for traction, had surf knotts on their bodies and boards were made from balsa. Michael began his apprentice under the tutelage of another legend, Con Colburn who founded Con surfboards of Santa Monica, CA.
… to be continued
![olivides[1]](http://gerilewis.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/olivides1.jpg?w=450&h=337)
