SCULPTORS have an ability to see a work of art hidden inside an amorphous block of stone. Terry Martin has that X-ray vision. Only his medium is rigid foam, and inside each slab is a surfboard waiting to be liberated.
On this day, Martin is studying a rectangle of polyurethane in his Dana Point workshop. It's a cramped closet redolent of resin, with deep-blue walls and slits of fluorescent light that cast the white foam in sharp relief.
"I like to sneak up on it like a detective," the 69-year-old said. He grabs a dull handsaw he has owned since 1963 and starts cutting. "People don't understand what goes into making a surfboard. It's not something that can just be pumped out of a machine. Where's the soul in that?"
Martin is making a 9-foot-6-inch longboard. He puts on protective earphones and fires up an electric planer that's as heavy as a dumbbell, a Skil 100 model favored by surfboard shapers that was discontinued long ago.
He glides back and forth along the block, his fingers adjusting the depth of the planer's blade with each pass, his sandaled feet performing a dance so that he is always applying the proper pressure. Then it's on to a series of ever-finer sheets of sandpaper and wire netting. With his barrel chest and thick white beard, Martin is Santa moving through a blizzard of foam dust.
Over the next hour, a surfboard takes form like a ship emerging from a foggy harbor.
Martin estimates he has hand-shaped more than 50,000 surfboards over the last 55 years. He's a legend in the tightknit fraternity of the world's master shapers, men who learned their craft through long apprenticeships.
He's also an endangered species.
The custom hand-shaped surfboard is a Southern California icon as integral to the region's culture as palm trees are to its skyline. But some fear the craft is fading as mass production and a flood of imports revolutionize surfboards in ways not seen since the 1950s, when polyurethane replaced wood as the primary building material.
A decade ago, an estimated 80% of surfboards sold in the United States were completely hand-shaped. Today, it's estimated that less than 20% are hewed by hand -- some suspect far less.
"It's becoming a lost art," Martin said.
Surfing is steeped in tradition and the mystique of secret surf spots, once-in-a-lifetime waves and magic boards. A surfboard imbued with the touch of its shaper is the conduit between a rider and nature.
