JIM GOLDBERG: Shaper of Wooden Surfboards

By Russell Drumm

"It was grease all the way," was how Jim Goldberg, a Montauk surfboard shaper, described how, after having local woodsmen harvest balsa trees in the Costa Rican jungle, cutting them himself into 11-foot lengths and rough-shaping them with a chain saw, he was able to baksheesh the 500 pounds of raw material, plus his family's luggage, back to the states last spring.

After five months of drying, two balsa wood surfboards and one made of barillo, a wood less dense and even lighter than balsa, have begun to take shape.

Two are already spoken for, one to be used as a coffee table, the other a wall hanging. The barillo board, now on the shaping rack in Mr. Goldberg's garage shop, will be shaped after a "gun," or big-wave board, designed and used by Pat Curran, a big-wave-riding pioneer. The barillo gun was ordered by Nick Truman, a surfer from Maine, who intends to ride it.

For years, Jim Goldberg has shaped foam boards under the Hook label, mostly for friends and Montauk locals. He has 40 years of surfing experience and an appreciation of past shapes and the materials used in the ever-evolving art of surfboard design and construction.

"The hot curl could have been ridden, but I didn't want to put wax on it," he said Sunday of the first balsa board he made, a replica of the shapely and finless planks built around the turn of the last century and considered to be the first modern surfboards. The Hook hot curl hangs on a wall in the Montauk house of Steve Levin, a fellow surfer and artisan.

"They had no fin, just a deep V in the tail. You turned it by dragging your foot. It evolved from the heavy, flat-bottomed planks made of heavy koa wood," the shaper said. Gracing the wall of the new Finest Kind liquor store down at the Montauk docks is another Hot Curl that Mr. Goldberg shaped from mahogany.

He said the balsa he was working with was red balsa, a bit denser and heavier than the white variety. The downside of white balsa is that the trees are smaller, making it hard to cut planks that are long enough. They have to be glued together, which makes for a less-than-clean-looking surfboard "blank," or preshaped form, when the planks are glued together.

"Balsa are weeds, but they get about this big around," he said, holding his arms out as though hugging a telephone pole. "When you hear a crash in the forest, it's balsa. It's a weed, but it's difficult getting it. My guys go into the jungle to cut the trees. They mill it in the jungle with an Alaskan chain saw. Pack horses pull them out. You think they're going to die, but they're pack horses. They hate balsa," he said of his lumberjacks. "It's wet, like pith."

Last winter, the horses dragged 30 milled planks measuring 21/2 inches thick by 8 inches wide by 11 feet long. "I drew the rocker I wanted on one, and used it as a template for the others," he said, referring to the gradual tail-to-nose upturn in all surfboards. Fresh-cut and wet balsa is not easy to work with. "Every three cuts I had to sharpen the chainsaw."

After adding rocker, the planks were smoothed, fitted together in the rough shape of a surfboard, held together with inner-tube and duct tape to keep their shape, then set out to dry in the Costa Rican heat.

When it was time to head back to Montauk from Pavones, which is in the sticks on the coast, near Costa Rica's southwestern border with Panama, Mr. Goldberg had three 185-pound balsa blanks stuffed into three surfboard travel bags.

"I hired Filo the cab driver. We heaved two onto the roof of his Land Rover van, one inside. At Pasa Canoes, they said, 'No way will they fit in the bus.' I gave the driver a 20." It was an eight-hour drive. In the capital, San Jose, where the airport is located, the shaper said he hired "two little street urchins" to take the wood-filled bags to a bus terminal to be stored for the night.

"They looked like two Charlie Chaplins, the way they were walking at each end of the bags, they were so heavy." The next morning, a truck and a taxi were needed to bring the balsa blanks and luggage to the airline terminal, where Mr. Goldberg said the baggage handlers greeted the bags with the same grunts of surprise as the other helpers along the way. The airline charged $50 per bag and checked through "500 pounds of surfboards and all the baggage - whew!" The shaper said he planned to improve how he shipped, but the struggle was worth it.

After five months of drying, the boards are being fine-shaped, and surfers, as well as nonsurfers, like what they're seeing. The boards are initially shaped using a power plane, then finished by hand using a small plane. "Wood is different than foam to work with. The density of each kind of wood dictates the depth of the blade," Mr. Goldberg said.

When the shaping is completed, the boards will be given the standard fiberglass coat using a resin that hardens with exposure to the ultraviolet rays of the sun, rather than a chemical catalyst. Mr. Goldberg said the U.V. resin made for a uniform coat that brought out the unique grain and light-reddish color of the balsa. The finished barillo gun will have a natural light-yellow color and a more spotted grain.

"The boards are totally organic, no catalyst. I'm not killing trees from the rain forest. It's a weed. I love to do it. Wherever it goes, it goes. It's artwork and a labor of love. I love it," said Captain Hook Goldberg, who will be returning to Costa Rica this winter.