SB Surfboards

SB Surfboards premiere team rider Sebastian Zietz heads off to Japan today. During his stay, he will be doing a promotional surf trip with Bewet Wetsuits. Everyone here is stoked about Bass's new sponsorship with Bewet. Could lead to some good coop marketing down the line.

So everyone here at SB Surfboards is working, minding their own business when we just hear this loud crashing noise. We run out to the alley and a car had driven off the side embankment, nose dived, spun around and got pinned up against the building next to us. Luckily the guy driving was alright!

Alana's recent trip to Mexico has earned her some well deserved respect from her fellow female pro surfers. Megan Abubo was absolutely blown away by Alana's surfing. Here's a link to the blog:

http://surfermag.com/features/onlineexclusives/megan_abubos_blog/

Kauai super grom Kyle Galtes just placed 2nd at the Rip Curl Grom Search in Huntington Beach. He was edged out by Taylor Thorne in the final but this is still a solid result for Kyle. Look for more big results from Kyle at Nationals and throughout the rest of the year.

Check out this video of Steve handshaping a custom surfboard for Ricky Whitlock:

Well the day off came and went too fast and now we are in Nagoya. Nagoya castle is an old Warrior Japan era castle that is a big tourist attraction now. Steve is a natural born craftsman so he was frothing over the woodworking and rockwork at the castle. After checking out the castle we headed to West Surf Co. West is one of our top selling shops so we were very excited to go check it out. When we got there we were all psyching because their front window display was 4 Boysens; a Bruce Irons board, a Brad Gerlach board, a Mike Todd board, and one of 104’s (the owner of West) boards. If you did not know better you might think that this was an SB Surf Shop. There was SB product all over the place, pictures of Steve and team riders on the walls, and a promo video of Gabe Kling and Mike Todd playing on the TV. We hung out at the shop, wrote up some orders and then headed to Mana Table. One of our best customers 103 owns Mana Table so he went all out for us. Super good food, sake shots, and about 50 people. Definitely one of the most successful stops of the tour so far and now its time to move on to Osaka.

The ride from Shonan to Hamamatsu was way minor compared to the drive from Sendai to Shonan. Pretty quick actually. It was only a couple hours but the owner of the shop called us like 8 times cause a bunch of customers had already shown up and we were late. They had this 4 feet by 6 feet canvas on the side of the building for CJ and Loafer to paint. But right when they started to paint it, it started raining. Had to cancel that temporarily and start back up in the morning. CJ and Loafer weren’t complaining though cause it just meant we got to party sooner. They took us to some local bar called the “Bar Coyote.” First tacos we had all trip. Steve claimed they were the best he has ever had(big claim but they were really good). After this we went to check into the hotel. They must have known we were coming cause they reserved room #666 for CJ and Loafer. Apparently 666 is not the number of Buddha’s arch nemesis. Tomorrow we drive to Nagoya and have the day off. Finally, we will have a chance to be tourists and not a traveling circus.

Finally, left the snow in Sendai and headed for the most popular surfing area in all of Japan: Shonan. Our dealer in Shonan is called Shop My Crew. It is a super core shop basically right on the beach. Full on mini California style shop. Anyways, we ate some really good chicken and octopus on skewers for dinner and partied with the Shonan Locals. After dinner we cruised a Ramen bar. Well enough about the food. The waves were pretty bad and cold(didn’t keep a couple hundred Japanese guys from surfing) so we didn’t get a chance to surf but we met a bunch of our best customers and got a chance to talk about the SeaGull and White Rabbit models. Here are some photos to check out:

Well we are about a week into the trip and this is our second surf shop that we have visited. Tyron is a really good shop. It is bigger than most shops and has a lot of good product. Toyoda, the owner, has been getting SBs for about as long as Steve has been sending them to Japan. He used to sponsor Travis Molina for wetsuits in the nineties. This was a cool deal because it was like a mini forum in the surf shop. Kind of had a town hall feeling with all the shop staff, riders and customers gathered around Steve as he explained all the models. Tyron is pretty much just a high performance shortboard shop so CJ and Loafer were bored but get those guys a Georgia Max Coffee (hot coffee in a can in a vending machine. Why do we not have this in America????) and they will find something to do. Overall, good meeting with Toyoda and his right hand man Tetsuya. Off to Shonan!