I’ve been looking online and i stores at a lot of wooden surboards these day. Here’s what I just found on an unamed site that will remains unamed which actually has a ton of cool boards. anyway, the pricing said that it was $417k. I don’t know how it’s possible that any board, wood, bronze, or gold even could cost even a fraction of $417k. I suspect, unless there’s some other meaning of the letterl k when following a dollar sign and number, that this is ocmpletely wrong and the author/shaper made a mistake. on the other hand, assuming that it was only 417 for a hollow board as beautiful as the one i was seeing is also crazy. these days $417 will get you a used, factory made firewire board. Not that that’s bad, it’s just that a hollow wood board takes a lot more hands on work.
So then I was in a surf shop back home where they have a replica of the duke board. the thing is massive and super heavy. I tried grabbing onto it’s rails and doing a squat type move just to get it off the ground and might have moved it half an inch…might have. This puppy was beautiful. made of koa wood, had the duke lettering up top and was glassed with a super glossy finish. all of this added up to $10k. Now that is a proper use of the letter k when denoting price. $10k for a decorative surf board seems like a bit of a stretch too…for the average person that is. Give me about $20 mil and I’d have no problem shelling out $10k for that board.
Turns out that a buddy of mine worked on that same store and he mentioned to me one day how people are always wanting decorative boards but are never able to buy them cause of the huge price disparity between cheap crap and quality stuff. The reality is that there is no cheap crap when it comes to actual surf or beach decorations. there’s the super tacky bright stuff blue, wooden surfboard that you might hang in rick Kane’s room in arizona and the super expensive stuff. Anyway, we figured, why not provide an in between. Funny enough, that’s where Papa kai started making alaia boards. At first it was just to provide surf decor for tourists. The more we played around with the alaia shapes though the more we had to try them out in the water…that was
about a year ago and I can say that over the past 2 months I’ve ridden my short board once and my alaia the rest of the time…needless to say. I caught the wooden surfboard bug, and I didn’t even have to spend a “$1k”
Jeremy
