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    Nick Blair Interview

     An interesting story by the guys at Surf Bunker….

    “Nick Blair is a surfboard shaper from the East Coast of Australia, he makes performance surfboards and uses cutting edge techniques and materials. To me the name Nick Blair was always associated with something that just got in the way all of the time. Fifteen years ago (ish) my wife and I were touring Europe for the summer in our campervan with our surfboards, trying to find the perfect place to live. We had given ourselves three months, some cash in the bank and no particular timetable.

    Looking back, life was good, but isn’t it always? There is something to be said for the human brain not being able to handle happiness. It has to make up a drama if there isn’t one. I remember making up things to stress us out, like where to take a shit that day or what we were going to cook for dinner. These seemed like huge decisions, because they were, they were the biggest decisions we had to make. The other thing about living in a van is that space and tidiness becomes a lot more important. Everything has it’s place in the van. There was no ‘dead wood’ as far as utensils or tools go. Why am I telling you this? It will become clear.

    It was Assumption Day in France and we were camped out in Biarritz waiting for the mother of summer swells to pass through, we had a BBQ lit when some guys in an English reg, very small panel van pulled up beside us, they did not know we were English (we had German plates on our van) but heard us talking the Queen’s tongue and introduced themselves. Turns out they were 20 years old and had spent some time in Australia, they had come back to the UK only to be depressed immediately by the biggest flat spell the UK has ever seen, so bought a van and called a ‘road trip’. They had jobs to get back to and were squeezing in three surfs a day like the frothing groms they were. Their names elude me now, but the waves that they pulled into the next day will forever be etched into my remembrance.

    So it turns out the lads could surf. Very well. They were full of chatter about the aforementioned and long awaited swell that had been upgraded massively and was showing already at sunset. The winds were good, the weather warm, the perfect day was just a sleep away. The fire was lit and we got to passing the early evening, the conversation was full of nervous energy, the anticipation heavy. We talked and compared surfboards, one of the lads had a board he got in Australia, he had it custom made by a shaper called Nick Blair. It was, without doubt the most seductive and eye catching design I had seen, I wanted to understand how it worked, I was asking questions and it became apparent that this board was a favourite and had been for a while.”

    Read the full article here