Description
It’s hard to separate fact from fiction in the life of legendary surfboard builder, Skip Blake. Blake maintains his mother gave birth to him in the sand dunes of Huntington Beach, California in 1948, and from that moment on he has never been more than 500 yards from the shoreline… we’ll take that with a pinch of sea salt.
But we do know that since his teens, Blake has lived and worked out of a shack on the northern edge of Huntington Beach, surfing the waves in the morning and shaping and waxing boards in the evening. His ability to carve divine contours into balsa and cedar wood have made him the country’s number one surf board shaper. Interestingly, Blake’s talents have not only been sought out by surfers, but also hot rod car enthusiasts wanting custom body work and even musicians, like Danny Chow, singer and guitarist in surf band Danny & The Breaking Waves. In 1967 Blake carved a complete guitar for Chow out of a section of smashed longboard then added to his legendary status by actually surfing the waves on it. There are no photographs to prove the feat ever took place but anyone who knows Blake wouldn’t doubt it happened for a second.
