Michael Kew interviewed Al Merrick in 2005, when Merrick was 62. Quotes were used in "You Can Call Me Al: in the Court of Al Merrick," which ran in the January 2006 issue of TransWorld Surf.

I was born in Bradley Beach, New Jersey. My parents moved from there to Florida and we lived in Florida and Colorado for a little while, mainly in Florida, I guess until I was seven or so. We moved to California, near Palm Springs, then to Encinitas.

Yeah. What year was that? Mid-‘50s, I guess. I was 12. I was born in ’44, so it would’ve been 1956.

No, I lived in a place called Noah’s Ark Trailer Park in Leucadia—it’s now a state park.

It was a cool place to live because we were right on the beach.

Grandview was further up. There was a tomato field between there and the trailer park. There was a big white-sand beach in front at the time, but when they put the marina in at Oceanside, that destroyed it. It’s all rocks now.

No, not yet. I was just a kid growing up on the beach.

What sort of stuff did you do besides surf?

Just the normal things kids do. Played a lot of basketball. BB gun fights in the bamboo forests down there (laughs), stuff like that. But mostly I surfed. A couple years later I was on the Surfboards Hawaii team. I was the first president of Swami’s Surf Club.

I used to have to try and find someone to surf with there.

So back to the early days. You went from Encinitas to Carpinteria?

I moved from Encinitas to Summerland in 1966.

I worked as a flower grower, then I worked for the Santa Barbara Boat Company, doing boat-building and repair and stuff. I started making boards there. Re-shapes. You know, cut down a longboard, strip off the glass, re-shape it.

Did you have aspirations to become a shaper at that time?

No, I don’t think I did. I was a fairly good craftsman, thorough, good with my hands. It was probably ’68 when I made my first board, and not too long after that I started making boards for friends.

I don’t remember when I actually tagged my boards with a name. Probably ’70 or ’71, maybe a little earlier. I always say I started making boards in ‘69—that’s when I started actually thinking that I could make surfboards.

Well, my first board came out really great.

Red bottom with a purple spear on the deck. A 7’2” pintail. I had already cut down a few longboards but was the first board I’d actually taken a blank and put a template on and shaped the whole thing from a raw blank rather than stripping glass off. I did it in the boat-building shop. They had all the equipment and stuff.

I borrowed some money from a friend of mine here in Carpinteria to buy a barrel of resin and some fiberglass, and made boards in his garage for a while. Then I opened a shop on Anacapa Street, which is close to where my wholesale shop is now. An old warehouse, it used to be a fish-processing plant. I had a little retail store. My wife made clothes, which she sold there, and there were two rooms in back, one for shaping and one for glassing. I’d work half a day as a boat builder and the other half I’d come in and make boards. There was a little bell that would ring when someone opened the door of the retail store—it would go off now and then while I was shaping or glassing, and I’d go up and help them. It just sort of went from there.

Then you moved to Carpinteria not long after?

By then of course we were into shortboards, short meaning 7’6”, 7’0”. This was around that time when I developed the tri-plane hull, which I still use today.

Concaves were kind of unheard of at the time—everybody was doing vee and roll, things that were passed down from longboards to shortboards. So I started using concaves in conjunction with rolls and vees. Maybe a little bit of influence from George Greenough there, some of his ideas.

He didn’t really shape much except his kneeboards, But yeah, he had a lot of influence.

In terms of the surf industry, Santa Barbara was sort of a backwater. Did you feel like what you were doing was the beginning of something special, or were you just living your life?

I was just living my life, doing what I liked to do. Santa Barbara’s such a beautiful place, and during winter of course we’ve got great waves. Those happened to be years when the surf was especially great at Rincon. But yeah, Santa Barbara was still kind of shut off from the rest of the state. Gaviota Pass would wash out so people couldn’t get in from the north. Because we weren't really joined with to either the north or the south, we were our own little entity here, and I think even my surfboard design reflected that. I didn't really have the opportunity or desire to look at a lot of other peoples’ work. Things just developed around our waves, around Rincon.

Good in the sense that it forced me to make my designs unique. Bad in the sense that maybe I didn’t develop in other ways.

And you'd named the company “Channel Islands Surfboards” by this time?

Yeah, well the island one. In the early days, I did each logo by hand, drew them onto every board.

What made you pick Channel Islands for a name?

The Channel Islands had always been kind of a refuge for me, going surfing out there.

The early ‘80s—that's when things really took off?

Yeah. Well, no. Before Tom got big, Shaun Tomson was living here and riding a few of my boards. But Tommy was developing around the same period of time too. Our whole team at that time was really good. A lot of guys who rode my boards were doing really well in the contests. And there were some guys down south during the early days of the NSSA riding my boards, Willy Morris and Chris Frohoff, guys like that.

Davey Smith was a big part of what was happening up here; he was really progressive for the time, with floaters and even aerials.

Oh yeah. Davey was doing airs back in, what, ’82?

Even before that, I think. I saw a photo of him doing an aerial in 1980.

Yeah, so I mean . . . amazing. As far as I know, he was the first to do aerials. Or the first in California, anyway.

It was, because Davey was a pro and he did some traveling, but there weren’t all that many events, so he was here most of the time. The pros now, you know, they’re grabbing their boards and they’re gone.

Yeah, if that. The other great thing with Davey was I could hand him all kinds of weird boards, just feed him stuff to try. He was great that way. He’d really work on something—it wouldn’t be like he took a board out for one or two waves, then toss it. He’d work on it for two weeks and learn it, learn how to ride it.

My first memory of Tommy was him coming into my shaping room with his mom. He didn’t talk at that time at all. Didn’t say a word. His mom did all the talking.

He showed up and his mom asked you to shape him a board?

Yeah. He was 12 years old or something, and he stood there while his mom told me what he wanted. It was funny.

When Tommy was doing all the amateur contest stuff, he and I surfed together almost every day. I’d take him surfing, coach him a little, take him to contests.

You drew your coaching experience from your competitive surfing?

Just from watching surfing, watching pro contests, amateur contests, surfing in them myself.

I’d run beach drills. I’d make up all kinds of different things for them to do. Like, they'd have 15 minutes to catch three waves, and after each wave they would come to the beach and do 10 push-ups, then go back out. Or they had to run around a flag after each wave that they wanted to keep. Just different stuff to try to get their competitive skills up to. Normal stuff that people were doing in other sports, and we just kind of adapted it for surfing.

Out of that, Tommy won the amateur world title in 1982.

He won the juniors in '80 and men's in '82. By then Tom's name was really out there. People knew who he was. He went pro right after that.

But Channel Islands was still basically a local deal at that time?

Pretty much, yeah. We weren’t really selling boards outside the local area. We may have been selling a few wholesale, I’m not sure.

Were you looking to expand outside of Santa Barbara?

I never much thought of that stuff. I never thought of expanding, I never thought of getting big. It was just a daily thing, you know. Then as it progressed, I went along with it. I always wanted to be the best at what I did. I wanted to be “the best shaper in the world”— except, you later realize, there's no such thing. So that was the motivation driving me, but as far as getting really big, it just sort of occurred. Tommy obviously was a giant part of it. I was making boards for a lot of the guys on tour for a while, and that just kept going. Some guys have my boards, but with another company's label. Andy [Irons] had a lot of my boards, Bruce had a lot—most of the guys on tour have.

Yeah, that was the next big phase, when Kelly came onboard.

I don’t remember exactly. I’m bad with dates.

I’d seen him surf at Santa Clara Rivermouth and knew he was extremely talented. Everybody already knew who he was. He'd won every title in his age division—just, like, everything. He was still an amateur when he began surfing for me, he was 14 or something. Rob [Machado] started getting boards from me shortly after Kelly.

I think Kelly and I were the ones who brought on the idea of minimal boards—that whole idea got carried to an extreme by other people in the industry. But I don’t think we ever carried it to an extreme. You look at Kelly’s board that he surfed the (1991) Trestles contest with, which people thought was really small and narrow. Chris Brown’s, too, at the time. But I’ve got that board in the shop—you go look at it now and it’s got thicker rails than what Kelly’s riding now.

Really thin, narrow boards. Rob was so quick, and we made him really minimal boards too, you know, minimal amount of foam so the boards changed directions really quick.

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