A Van, A Plan, The Man: Bryan Bates, boardbuilder, Seven Surfboards

Walking into Seven Surfboards in Pacific City, I meet Bryan Bates in his shaping room, fully masked and carving away on a sleek longboard shape. Bates, coated with a thick layer of shaping dust, notices me and after hitting himself with compressed air we shake hands. We’re scheduled to meet for an interview, and the first thing he asks me is, “Did you check out the surf on your way in?” I tell him I did and that it looks pretty clean, shoulder to head high with a few good peelers. The sun is blaring. He grins and asks if we should blow off this interview biz until later and go out for an afternoon session. Hell yeah I say; after all this whole thing is all about surfing.

Being in the P.C. lineup with Bates it becomes clear that this is a place he spends a lot of time. Everyone knows him, everyone knows he rips (he does, seriously rip), and everyone knows he shapes truly beautiful boards. Several of the surfers out there are on his boards and I’m a little frothy at the mouth looking at them. After catching a few, we chat on the outside about his history as a shaper, as we wait for the sets to come in. When they do, it’s difficult to finish sentences as both keep catching a fair amount of nice clean rights. How pleasantly rude we are to each other.

Back on land, we talk about his philosophy as a surfer, a shaper, and a steward of the ocean. Bates is the real deal. He surfs well, he talks about the ocean environment with passion, wisdom and intellect (he heads the local chapter of the Surfrider Foundation in P.C.). An environmentalist by nature, he picks up trash on the beach when he walks, leads volunteers, and does water quality testing. As a surfer, he rides longboards, shortboards, and everything in between.  “I just like to ride whatever fits the conditions best.  Every board can teach you something, and they’re all fun, you just have to figure out how to ride it.” On any given day at Pacific City you could see Bryan paddling a monster 12 foot tandem board, a 5’10 twin, a 7’0” thruster, a tanker single fin, a hi-pro longboard or something you may have never seen. “It’s very important to me to be able to ride all different types of shapes because I’d never tell a customer I could make them a board that I didn’t understand.” As a result, he studies every surfboard he sees intensely. “Looking at different surfboards gives me a chance to learn something I can apply to the boards I make, even if it is what you don’t want to do.”  Bates specializes in building boards for Northwest waves. He’s a native Oregonian, learned how to surf here, and 95% of the waves he’s ridden have been on the Oregon coast. As many of us who surf here know, Oregon waves can often be fickle, and Bates creates boards that perform at the highest possible level for Oregon surfing conditions.

Bryan got his start in surfboards, “the way most young guys do, with ding repairs.” He became intrigued by all the different shapes of surfboards and found himself wishing he could ride them all. “Taking a beat up board and bringing it back to shape was something I enjoyed and found I had an aptitude for, so I naturally started thinking of making my own surfboards.” Steve Swan was the first person to show Bryan about the basics of shaping and glassing, “Steve is a great teacher, he explains what and why he’s doing things as he goes.” And from there, Bryan spent six months in a converted barn in the country outside of Eugene, building boards for himself and friends. “In the barn I found an old airbrush setup, cleaned it up and found myself taping off crazy unique designs on these boards I was making. My friends were short-circuiting and it was then that I began to see a career in surfboards.”

He then contacted Cort Gion in Florence to see about working for him. “I brought a couple of the boards I’d been making in Eugene and Cort looked them over and said, ‘You’re going to do just fine.’” Bryan went to work polishing boards.   “Polishing is finish work, and very hard to get perfect. I spent a lot of extra hours on those boards. In the time between polishes, I just watched Cort work. I was able to spend  hundreds of hours one on one with Cort, and he’s a very good teacher. Cort taught me how to work with pigments and make fins, tape clean lines, do tinted lay-ups; he literally took me through all phases of surfboard construction. Watching him shape is an experience every surfer should have.” 

When the work dried up after summer, Bryan went back to Portland and found himself a spot in an old warehouse in the south waterfront district, “I called it the Industrial Death Zone, and the building it was in was recently torn down. I built a shop and had a party where I gave all my friends a gallon of cheap paint and said ‘have at it’—it was a wild paint job!” And then a new opportunity came up and Bryan went to work for Mike Tuel in Garibaldi working on a kiteboard project. 

“Mike had me glassing kiteboards and it was challenging. I got a ton of great feedback from him, who is a meticulous glasser. Mike taught me the importance of prep work and how to make the strongest board you can.” Once again, Bryan had the opportunity to spend lots of hours one on one with a master. He attributes his present skills to his teachers, “If I was in California or Hawaii in a factory setting, I might have made it to Sander by now. But working with these guys so closely allowed me to learn a lot about all facets of boardbuilding in a relatively short time. I’ve been really lucky to have some excellent teachers.” 

Perhaps the most striking difference in Bates’ boards from what you see from other shapers is his artwork, a talent intrinsic to him. “I just love color and unique designs. You’ll never see me make the same board twice. That is what keeps it interesting to me. I could simply make clear boards and compete with everyone else, but that would seem a lot more like work. I derive a lot of pleasure from laying down original, bitchin’ art onto a custom shape. I think the surfboard itself is a fantastic canvas, and it is fun to make big art.”

In high school, Bates took every art class offered, some twice, “at that time, you could substitute art classes for the foreign language requirement, so my Spanish sucks, but the boards are pretty.” So pretty in fact that many customers have a hard time waxing the boards up for the first time, “I get that a lot, ‘man, I don’t want to wax this, It’s too nice!’ and I always say, ‘It’s meant to be ridden, go ride it!,’ even the wall hangers are designed and built like any other, it’s still a surfboard after all.” A surfboard designed by Bates employs his own outlines adapted from templates of proven surfboards. “I’m lucky to have some very good templates, some passed down to me from my mentors, some I’ve pulled from boards I like. And I constantly create new ones through custom designs for my customers.” 

Ordering a board from Bates is about the least intimidating sales experience a person could have. He likes to talk to his customers in person and prefers to surf with them whenever possible. And when you surf with him, he watches your style from drop-in to kick-out, all in order to make you a better board. And he asks specific questions: where do you surf, how often, what are you riding now, what do you want to do on waves, what do you like about your old board, what don’t you like about it, etc.

“I think the best surfboard shaper is the one that makes the board you ask for,” says Bates, and with surfers ranging in age, body, skill, choice of waves, and style, it takes special expertise to make a board that will work for you. “That is really what you’re paying for with a custom shape is the shaper’s experience. He is synthesizing all the information he gathers from you with his knowledge of subtle differences in design and his local knowledge of surf to create your board.” 

Bryan has traveled the coast extensively, and no matter where you ride, he’s got an understanding of the waves there. “I love surfing here, I’ve traveled around enough to know that the Northwest is about as good as it gets. I wouldn’t live anywhere else. As long as you’ve got the gas and time, you could find a wave to ride just about any day of the year. Some of the best times I’ve had was just living out of my van, travelling the coast, surfing, and building boards when I could. I loved it, no phone, no bills, but the whole time, I felt so compelled to get myself a shop where I could make boards on my own.” That feeling led Bates to Pacific City almost two years ago to create a permanent home for Seven Surfboards.

His new shop in Pacific City consists of a shaping room, a glassing room, a “dirty” room (sanding, painting, polishing) and an area for ding repairs where customers can chill, listen to music and check out surfboards. “It wasn’t easy, I had to work a lot of dumb part-time jobs to get the money to make the shop, but I’ve never been happier. I can make the kind of boards that I’ve dreamed of in there.”

The boards he produces there are of the highest quality and Bates likes them to be as bomber as possible. He only uses “S” cloth on his boards which is a fiberglass cloth that is stronger, stiffer and better resists impact. It also costs him quite a bit more. His raw material bill at Fiberglass Supply in Hood River is significant, but Bates says, “It is worth it to me because I’d never want a customer coming back to me saying ‘You made me weak board.’ People in Oregon like to keep their boards for a long time, and I would say that the boards I make could last a lifetime if taken care of well.” Glassed on leash loops, handmade glassed on fins, resin pinlines, glossed and polished finish, and a one color pigmented layup all come standard with each Seven Surfboard. Leash loops don’t fail like plugs can, and designing his own fins allows Bates to adapt their shape, size and performance perfectly to fit the specifics of each board. He often matches the fin color to the pinlines as an artistic compliment to the design. He even names each board, like one does a work of art, which is exactly what it is.

Sometimes he suffers from a bit of separation anxiety after his customers walk out the door with their new board. “Every board I make, I’d like to take out and ride.” From start to finish he does it all, so it makes sense that he gets attached.  He likes the quality control intrinsic to being a one man operation and though many aspects of boardbuilding can often be tedious, he wouldn’t outsource anything, “I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so I’m the only person who will ever lay hands on your board. Building it start to finish also helps to make sure it comes out exactly as intended.”

This is the Bryan Bates way. So I ask him, “Why Seven and not Bryan Bates then?” He pauses. “It’s complex...seven has always been my lucky number, my grandfather’s too...my grandfather had seven siblings...then there’s the fabled seventh wave, seventh heaven, and of course, the seven seas, and when I played sports I was always number seven-...I don’t know exactly, it just seems there is a lot of good things in associated with the number seven.” Well, when you see and ride his boards, I think you’ll agree.

You can find Bryan's contact info, including a link to his website, on the Shops & More page (under the Shapers heading).

Words and photos by Stiv Wilson - July 2005

Stiv J. Wilson is a surfer and freelance writer currently living in Portland, but is destined to live on the coast.