Hothouse

At the 26-minute mark of the documentary Spoons: A Santa Barbara Story, which celebrates the pantheon of the area’s early surfboard shapers, like George Greenough, Reynolds Yater, Al Merrick, and Marc Andreini, an essentially unknown surfer-shaper named John Eichert makes an appearance. In a 10-second clip, just before the scene cuts away, he comments on the environmental movement in Santa Barbara.

“When making a film, there are so many constraints,” says Spoons creator Wyatt Daily, “that, unfortunately, during the editing process, very important people get left on the cutting-room floor. But John’s influence on surfing is so compelling that there was no way he could be left out.” 

Unless one resides within that micro-subset of knowledgeable, mostly aged Santa Barbara surf historians, Eichert’s inclusion requires context. Early Rincon charger and shaper Mike Davis calls Eichert’s 1960s IKE Custom Surfboards shop “the birthplace of the modern surfboard.” Meanwhile, Greenough, Eichert’s childhood friend and fellow surf reconnoiterer, says Eichert is the only shaper to influence any of his myriad creations. Andreini responds to Eichert’s name with one word: “Legend.” 

It makes one wonder: Why the anonymity? 

“He’s never been one to toot his own horn,” says Santa Barbara painter-surfer Michael Drury. “But let me tell you, John has done some shit.”

Drury doesn’t exaggerate. Eichert has done some shit. And not just surf shit. Set aside his paradigm-altering surf contributions and his résumé loses no juice. He’s logged old growth in Oregon, fished for king crab in Alaska, built and raced dirt bikes and dragsters, and crafted luxury yachts, salmon boats, and even a submarine. 

He once was commissioned to modify Hall of Fame race-car driver Bob Bondurant’s 1963 Corvette, refinements that Bondurant utilized to dominate the US and European race circuits in the mid-’60s. 

What’s more, Eichert did this while pioneering the nascent 1950s to early 1960s Santa Barbara surf scene, be it surfboard or fin design, progressive wave riding, or discovering the area’s then-uncharted breaks.

Santa Barbara in the ’50s was a surfing outpost, a veritable no-man’s-land where one could go weeks without seeing another surfer. The water there is cold, and wetsuits didn’t exist. If you could get your hands on a surfboard, it was crude and unwieldy, as much of a burden to carry as it was to ride. To take up surfing in that place and time, one had to be strong, athletic, and a bit masochistic. Eichert ticked all of the boxes.

“It was a lonely existence,” Eichert says. “Maybe 10 surfers in the entire area. If you were going to go, you had to go it alone. I loved it.”

That Eichert thrived within this wilderness is testament to his mettle and to his mind. He came into the world in 1941 equipped with the instincts of a graduate-school engineer. If something—a toy, a boat, a surfboard—could be improved, Eichert improved it. If something needed to be invented, Eichert invented it. “I’ve always looked at stuff and asked, ‘How can I make it better?’” he says. “I can’t accept the status quo, because I know there’s a better way. All I have to do is find it.”

Eichert had the good fortune to be born in Montecito, a bucolic enclave situated serendipitously close to Sandbar and Rincon, two world-class waves that played critical roles in his development as a surfer-shaper. It helped, too, that among his childhood friend group was a driftwood-thin kid named George. The two were an odd duo. Eichert was exceedingly athletic and gregarious, while Greenough was socially aloof. But both possessed fertile, creatively eccentric minds.

“I don’t know if it was divine intervention or coincidence,” Eichert says. “All I know is that I was born in the right place at the right time.”

In 1956, 15-year-old Eichert was alone surfing Hammond’s Reef, a rippable right-hander located a short bike ride from his house in the Montecito foothills. He was riding his first surfboard, a hand-me-down Bob Simmons of biblical dimensions that had been given to him a year earlier. He loved the board but knew that its cumbersome girth—10’6″ × 24″ × 4″ and probably 70 pounds—was limiting his progression. “Early shapes were built to ride swells and not the wave itself,” Eichert says. “I knew I needed to change it, but I wasn’t sure how.”

The answer arrived when another surfer paddled out that day on a board shaped by Dale Velzy. Eichert remembers sitting out the back, where he would catch and ride incoming swell before having to pull out at the spot where the swell started to break. “And right where I had to pull out, the guy would turn and take off,” he says. “He was actually riding next to the curl and trimming across the face. It blew my mind.” 

When Eichert got his hands on the Velzy, the differences between it and the Simmons were striking. “The rails were more refined. It was thinner, narrower, and easily 20 pounds lighter. I knew right away what I had to do to get the Simmons to surf like that,” he says.

Eichert lugged his board to a friend’s property and set it up inside an abandoned gardener’s shed. He used a screwdriver to strip it to its balsa core and his father’s hand plane and wood file to narrow and thin the outline and to add nose-to-tail bottom rocker. He sawed off the Simmons’ low-profile, 10-inch-long skeg and replaced it with a raked dorsal-style fin that he dreamt up on the spot and cut from marine plywood. Boatyard resin was used for the glassing, applied using a piece of cardboard for the squeegee. The process took two months to complete. “There wasn’t anyone around who could show me what to do,” he says. “But that didn’t matter. Even though I didn’t know what I was doing, I still knew that I knew how to do it.” 

The reshape was a marked improvement, and Eichert’s surfing progressed right out of the shed. More importantly, he’d discovered a way to combine his innate penchant for design and craftsmanship with his passion for wave riding. 

“To me, surfing was complete and total freedom,” he says. “I realized that I could use my imagination in any way I wanted to make surfing even better. What could beat that?” 

For the next few years, Eichert used the gardener’s shed to build boards for himself and a few friends. Because used boards were scarce in Santa Barbara, and because he lacked the money to purchase raw materials, he’d drive six hours round trip to Velzy’s San Clemente shop, where he’d buy secondhanders he could strip to use as blanks for his own shapes. While it was a rudimentary enterprise guided by his wits and intuition, Eichert by default became Santa Barbara’s first-ever surfer-shaper.

By 1959, Eichert was an 18-year-old senior about to graduate Santa Barbara High School, where he’d been somewhat of a stud in track and field, holding the third-highest national mark in the pole vault. (His coach, Gates Foss, is coincidentally credited with being the first ever to surf Rincon, back in 1938.) Consumed by surfing and board building, Eichert began to entertain thoughts of opening his own shop. “I was thinking that maybe shaping could be a career,” he says. “But I also knew that if I was going to do it, I needed to improve my glassing skills.” 

“He was gluing up sticks of balsa and producing these gorgeous boards out of featureless wood billet. It was sculpture, pure magic.”

That same year, Reynolds Yater, who’d already established gold-star credentials shaping for Velzy and Hobie Alter, moved to town. 

“Renny had such a solid reputation as a shaper and glasser, way better than mine,” Eichert says. “And I felt threatened when he got here. But then I looked at it as an opportunity. Who better to show you the ropes? I went and asked to work for him as a glasser.”

Yater had come to Santa Barbara for two reasons: lobster and Rincon. As a commercial fisherman, he saw Santa Barbara as an untapped resource. As a surfer, he saw Rincon as, well, Rincon. Surfboard making, if anything, was going to be a side gig. 

“When I got here, there were maybe a dozen surfers in the area, so surfboard building as a business wasn’t a viable option,” says Yater. “John was the only guy who had any glassing experience. So I hired him. He turned out to be pretty good.” 

Under Yater’s tutelage, Eichert went to work laying cloth. It was a speedy apprenticeship. Less than a year after he started, he was ready to go out on his own. “I still wasn’t sure if there was enough demand to have two shapers in town,” Eichert says. “But then Gidget came out, and surfing just took off.”

With a $500 loan, Eichert secured a $50-a-month lease in a 600-square-foot space located at 24 Cota Street on Santa Barbara’s Westside. With the rest of the money, he bought a bundle of balsa wood, a roll of fiberglass cloth, and a barrel of resin. In 1961, IKE Custom Surfboards opened for business. 

“Before then, I had never shaped a board from scratch,” Eichert says. “But I saw what other people were doing and was confident I could do it as well or even better. I was young and fearless and probably a bit stupid.” 

When Eichert opened his shop, surfing and surfboard making were in a state of rapid change. 

More surfers were entering the lineup, surfing better, and subsequently asking more from their boards. In response, shaping tools were going electric and being customized to the task. Resins became easier to work with, and foam was being developed as the go-to material for board blanks. Eichert embraced it all—except for the switch from balsa to foam, knowing that boards had to hold up when they inevitably washed across Santa Barbara’s cobbled and barnacle-covered shorelines. 

“I knew that foam was the future,” Eichert says. “But, early on, it just wasn’t a strong enough material for what a surfboard needed. If you built a weak board, word would get out, and no one would buy one from you.”

But shaping a board from balsa wood was no easy task. Those who were doing it had to be gnarly. Photos of Eichert from that era show a handsome, chiseled young man sporting unironic hipster facial hair and a physique genetically predisposed to the task. “You had to be pretty manly to build one,” Eichert says.

Likewise, as Andreini points out, one had to be just as manly to ride them. “We were all great surfers in 2-foot windswell,” he says. “But during the winter, when the water was colder and it was solid 6-foot at Rincon, there were only five or six guys who could handle those boards in that much power. John was one of those guys.”

“John was an extremely good surfer,” says Greenough. “Big and strong—built to handle any condition.”

Eichert also excelled at his craft, and soon IKE surfboards became the standard in the region’s lineups. “John was making some of the most progressive boards around. Everyone was riding them,” Andreini says. “The most magic balsa-wood longboard I ever owned was shaped by him.”

“John was the whole surfboard package,” says Mike Davis, who cut his teeth shaping under Eichert in the 1960s. “Board design, shape, lamination, all of it. He was gluing up sticks of balsa and producing these gorgeous boards out of a 10-foot-by-24-inch-by-three-and-a-half-inch-thick featureless wood billet. If he didn’t put the shape in that inanimate billet, it wasn’t there. It was sculpture, pure magic.”

Furthermore, Davis reckons that Eichert’s boards from that era are more similar to the surfboards of today than any other shaper’s from that time. “Every surfboard I’ve ever shaped has had subtle vee bottoms, straight off of Eichert’s original drafting board,” he says. “I truly believe that the modern surfboard began with him, inside his shop.”

Eichert’s growing mastery was abetted by the quality of the waves on which he could test his designs: Hammond’s, Sandbar, and, most significantly, Rincon, with its impossibly long, playful, machine-like wave that has provided every shaper within striking distance the ultimate testing ground for research and development. 

“If a board wasn’t going to work at Rincon, it wasn’t going to work anywhere,” Eichert says.

But Eichert, who tested every design he came up with, didn’t restrict himself to his neighborhood breaks. An hour west lay difficult-to-access cattle ranches that offered a variety of spots that he, Yater, and Greenough, among others, pioneered and even got to name (e.g., the eponymous John’s Pond). From Point Conception on up to the southern reaches of Big Sur, he trunked empty mysto reefs and sharky unnamed beachbreaks. Off of the Santa Barbara mainland, meanwhile, sat the Channel Islands, an alluring chain of uncharted possibility that, in 1963, Eichert and Greenough circumnavigated in Greenough’s family yacht, a 42-foot sloop un-coincidentally christened Marmetta.

“Adventure and discovery are things that I’ve always chased,” he says. “Back then, there were no crowds, no localism—just open coastline to explore and discover. It really was a golden era.”

Eichert’s shop soon became the hub of the Santa Barbara scene, especially on Friday afternoons, when it was the gathering spot for luminaries like Kemp Aaberg, Lance Carson, Pat Curren, Tom Morey, Bob Cooper, and Greenough, who would meet, discuss board design, and maybe drink a beer or three. “We talked about everything—surfing, politics, sports,” Eichert says. “It was a really vibrant place to exchange ideas.”

Eichert fed off the creative energy and used it to work toward solving one of the era’s main design issues: decreasing board weight while maintaining strength. To this end, he handpicked balsa strips according to weight and then assembled his blanks with the heaviest pieces in the center and the lighter pieces toward the rails, a practice that made it much easier to sand and refine the rail line, while also dropping weight. He also came up with the idea of coring half-inch-diameter holes in the sides of the center balsa planks, which eliminated 5 pounds. 

But Eichert’s most impactful innovations occurred when he turned his attention to the fin, a heretofore somewhat overlooked piece of the equipment. 

“I had done everything I could do to board design—downturned the rails, put vee in the bottom, improved rocker, reduced weight—and felt I had kind of reached a limit,” he says.

Eichert came up with a fin-box idea that allowed a surfer to adjust fin placement on their boards for the first time. He molded a raised, half-inch-high fiberglass tail track that had three strategically spaced holes in its sides. Oaken dowels inserted through the track and into a base hole secured the fin in the desired spot. The setup, which allowed Eichert to become the first board builder to offer three different fins with each of his custom shapes, also caught the eye of Morey, who evolved the idea into his injection-molded fin box. 

The most significant breakthrough, however, came when Eichert took the era’s state-of-the-art D fin, reversed it, slanted the front, and cut a deep vee into the base. He then tapered it so that the fin thinned gradually from front to back. “Every other skeg was just a flat slab of wood or fiberglass with rounded edges all the way around,” says Davis. “I think you’ll find that Ike probably coined the [surfboard fin] term ‘foil.’”

The idea, inspired by center keels on sailboats, reduced fin tension so that a board could pivot harder without spinning out. “Suddenly my boards got looser, more performance-minded, and I could push as much as I wanted without losing the rail,” Eichert says.

The resulting V-Slot fin incorporated the full breadth of Eichert’s intuitive grasp of hydrodynamic engineering and, hands down, moved the mountain. Andreini says it was “a complete game changer.” Yater, famously low-key, says, “It was a big deal,” and he incorporated elements of it into fins for his board models. Other shapers took the V-Slot to the next level, including Dewey Weber, whose Hatchet fin is a direct descendent. Greenough, whose contemporary Stage 6 fin is right out of the Eichert template, says that the V-Slot is the only advancement to influence any of his work, calling it “such an important innovation.” In Davis’ estimation, every company selling fins today utilizes fundamental V-Slot design theories, “whether they know it or not.”

That a design idea could be borrowed or advanced by someone other than the person who came up with it was indicative of the era. In the 1960s, progression in equipment and wave riding were at full throttle, and new ideas were coming into play constantly. If it worked, people used it. If it could be improved, people improved it. 

“I can’t speak for everyone, but none of us were proprietary about our ideas,” Eichert says. “We weren’t making things to become rich or famous. We just wanted to be better surfers.”

Apropos of this creative zeitgeist was the day, in 1963, that Greenough came into Eichert’s shop looking to get materials for and advice on shaping a kneeboard. Greenough had recently transitioned from his surf mat to a super-thick, flat-rockered egg that Eichert describes as a “dog.”

“George was a lightweight guy, and his board kept him stuck on top of the water,” Eichert says. “I knew he needed something thin and hollowed out that would let him sink the rails so that he could pivot harder and cut back and stay in the curl.”

After some discussion, Eichert gathered balsa scraps from around his shop and glued them into a blank. He then drew a plan shape onto a piece of tar paper, scribed it into the wood, cut out the shape, and gave it to Greenough.

What Greenough turned out was unlike anything else that had been made to date. 

Kneeboard-size at 4’11” × 21″, it was set apart by its dramatically scooped-out deck. The board—which, along with several of Eichert’s classic creations, hangs in the historical collection at the Beach House in Santa Barbara—was the first-ever “spoon”-style craft. 

“To his full credit, George did the shaping,” Eichert says. “He totally kicked ass on that thing. But what’s funny is that it took about 20 minutes to come up with the idea for it. The rest, as they say, is history.” 

The “history” he refers to was documented by Eichert and his friend Steve Lucas on a day Eichert calls the best Sandbar he’s ever seen. “Just these incredible overhead tubes running from the tip of the break wall down to the harbor mouth,” he says. “One after the other, with only us and two other guys out.”

After surfing to exhaustion, Eichert says, he got out and immediately called Greenough: “I told him the swell was starting to drop, he needed to get his butt down there, and to bring his camera.”

Greenough showed up with his new kneeboard and a 16-millimeter Paillard-Bolex. Because the camera’s tripod was so heavy, they forwent it. Eichert steadied the Paillard-Bolex on Lucas’ shoulder and started to film. The resulting footage showed Greenough sitting critically close to the barrel, speeding his way through roping Sandbar. 

“When we watched the film later, I knew I had captured something special,” Eichert says. “So I arranged for George to get the film into Bruce Brown’s hands. I think Bruce gave him two rolls of film in exchange for it.”

When The Endless Summer debuted in 1966, among its most indelible sequences was the Greenough footage that Eichert had shot at Sandbar three years earlier. “Everyone thinks that Bruce Brown shot it,” Eichert says. “But little do they know…”

By then, Eichert had moved IKE Custom Surfboards up to Goleta, where he hoped to tap into the growing surfer-student market at UCSB, after his Cota Street shop was red-tagged for various code violations the year prior. 

The move coincided with Eichert’s long-held sense that it had always been a matter of time before the demand for balsa wood fully gave way to foam. Eichert knew that the existence of IKE Custom Surfboards was at stake but had no desire to make the switch. “I’d have to change my custom business and go into full-on production shaping,” he says. “I’d have to go to foam and hire another shaper, and then I’d lose the whole reason for doing what I had been doing: using my hands, being creative, working one-on-one with the customer. Building surfboards had never been work. If I changed, I would lose that.”

IKE Custom Surfboards in Goleta lasted for about a year before it closed in 1966. Eichert, who’d married his high school sweetheart, Kay Fletcher, in 1961 and already had two children, went back to work shaping boards under the Yater label. For the next three years, he cranked out “probably hundreds” of Yaters, including his fair share of a model that came to be known as the Spoon. 

While he was working for Yater, though, surfing’s burgeoning popularity had begun to rob the sport of its rebellious allure, says Eichert. Improved wetsuit design had more people in the water, which meant that crowds at his local spots, small by today’s standards, had become busy and contentious. Board building as a personalized transaction, meanwhile, was shifting further toward the anonymity inherent in mass production. Disillusioned, Eichert left the board-building business entirely in 1969.

“It was time to get off of the merry-go-round,” he says. 

Eichert had always supplemented his custom-surfboard design with side gigs in fiberglass fabrication and innovation. At his shop, he’d been the first to laminate fiberglass skateboard decks, recognizing the progressive inherent flex the material provided street surfers. An avowed gearhead, he reduced the weight and bulk of the era’s dirt bikes and dragsters by switching out the metal gas tanks, fenders, and baffles for streamlined fiberglass replacements. After his time at Yater, he shifted his fiberglass-design focus toward the marine and boating world. From Alaska to Washington state to Avila Beach to San Diego, he fished commercially and custom built and modified everything from septic tanks and outhouses to 12-foot skiffs and 30-foot deep-keeled sailboats, luxury yachts, and swordfishing trawlers. Along the way, he invented and patented a mobile chamber to use in boat maintenance, as well as designed a commercial real estate office that still floats in Channel Islands Harbor. For a five-year period, he ran the Santa Barbara boatyard.

“Fiberglass is fiberglass, so I did whatever I could with it to make a living,” he says. “But as long as I was near water, I was happy.”

Today, in his mid-eighties, Eichert lives with Kay in a rural Central California canyon that, sans the nearby world-class surf breaks, has a markedly similar feel to the Montecito of his youth. The 3.5-acre Eichert compound starts where the paved road turns to gravel and marks entry into a narrow, sparsely populated cleft crowded with native oaks, sumac, and chaparral. Red-tailed hawks glide overhead, quail skitter about the yard, and it’s not out of the ordinary when the resident gaggle of wild turkeys saunters casually up the adjacent hillside, where deer, coyote, and the occasional mountain lion and bobcat lurk. 

In an effort to “get away from it all,” Eichert purchased the property in 2001, after several other buyers were scared off by the engineering problems it posed for development. In typical Eichert fashion, he parked a trailer on the lot and lived in it while grading and cutting the pad, drilling the well, pouring the foundation, installing the grade beams, and setting the retaining walls to make space for his home, his toolshed, and the shaping bay where he handcrafted the last of his balsa-wood surfboards. 

Eichert can see the whole property from a small, sunlit room that Kay, an accomplished oil painter, uses as a studio and where he houses a micro-museum of classic black-and-white surf photos, dirt-bike trophies, scrapbooks, boat-design schematics, early fin prototypes, and a few vintage custom IKE surfboards that he’s mounted on the walls. When told that his original boards could fetch $5,000 to $10,000 on the collector’s market, he just shrugs and says that he only wishes he could shape more, but arthritic hands and a bad back have put an end to that. 

“I can’t complain, though,” he says. “Life’s been good.”

But doesn’t he at least wish that he had gotten more recognition for his contributions to surfing? 

“It was never about that,” he says, waving off the suggestion. “Chasing attention and notoriety never crossed my mind. I just wanted to make surfing more fun. That’s all I ever wanted to do—make surfing more fun.”

[Feature image: Profile views of Eichert’s signature V-Slot fin and the man himself—with accompanying construction notes. “We weren’t making things to become rich or famous,” Eichert says of the midcentury design scene. “We just wanted to be better surfers.” Photo by Jay Paddock/courtesy of John Eichert]