San Diego's Core Surf Shops

As any old timer can tell you, entering a surf shop used to be a sensory experience just as entering a bakery or floral shop surrounds the senses.  The stench of fresh resin and the choke of foam in the air bring back flashing waves of nostalgia for anyone who's been in the sport long enough.  But in a day and age where it seems everything in southern California has been bought off, paved over, and sold to Starbucks, it doesn’t take a leap of the imagination to think that the beloved surf shop of old has followed suit. 

            But these gems of the sport, so-called "core surf shops," have hardly gone the way of the Dodo, and remain bastions of surfing's soul, littered throughout San Diego.

            Every surf spot has one.  And when I say surf spot, I don’t mean a place where waves simply break over shallow areas of sand, rock, or reef in the ocean.  What I refer to is a place that has a long and colorful history in the annals of SoCal surf culture.  A place where legends have been made and reputations destroyed in equal parts; one with a defined pecking order, a code of respect, and at least three generations of surfers that have called that spot their own for as long as they can remember.  Two prime San Diego examples that come to mind are the Sunset Cliffs and Windansea.  Since the 1940’s and 50’s, each of these spots have had an indelible impact on the local community, and both have core shops to show for it. 

            Hidden deep in the warehouse district behind OB lies a shop that embodies what it means to be core in this sport; even the word “shop” is being used in quite liberally here.  They don’t carry any clothing and don’t sell wax.  In fact, you’d drive right by if you didn’t know where it was or failed to notice the dinner plate-sized sign asking people not to park in the area reserved for employees.  All they do here is make some of the finest surfboards you’ll likely find anywhere in the world.  If you surf OB or the Sunset Cliffs, you’d have to be blind not to notice their label being carried by half of the surfers in sight.  The place I speak of is of course, Plus One Surfboards.

            Drawn to the profession by the same passion, and out of careers far removed from surfing, are the two owners and shapers of Plus One: George Gall and Joe Virgilio.  Simply put, these guys live for board building.  Both led successful lives before the creation of Plus One: George, an engineer and teacher; Joe, a business analyst.  But under different circumstances both were inevitably drawn to the profession that they both now agree is the only one for them.  They’d always grown up surfing, and as Joe confessed to me one evening: “I just always loved building shit.”  You don’t need me to connect the dots.

            Everything at Plus One is done in-house, allowing the duo to control every aspect of their product.  In the basement is the gargantuan shaping machine that is now standard in nearly every serious board shop, as are the two shaping bays where the boards are taken out of the space-age behemoth and hand-shaped to George and Joe’s personal standards. If you can navigate the way upstairs past tons of stacked blanks, used boards, and fresh ones waiting for pickup, you’ll find where all the glassing, sanding and airbrushing takes place.  And as the Plus One, 5’7” fish sitting in my garage will attest, even the fins here can be hand-shaped out of wood for a few extra bucks.  Thankfully though, the guys at Plus One are not the only San Diegans that have mastered the fine art of board building.

            Ten miles north of the Sunset Cliffs is a surf shop as different from Plus One as the wave it identifies itself with.  Windansea has been a SoCal surfing icon for as long as anyone can remember, with a long history spanning from the pre-foam days, through the era of the famed Windansea Surf Club and Mac Meda Destruction Company, and all the way up to the modern era of aerialists pulling maneuvers on wafer-thin boards that the old timers could never have dreamed of.  The wave itself is equally as varied, one day offering up long and backed up crumbly walls perfect for a 9’0” single fin, and the next sending spitting barrels through the inside bowl.  As such, only a shaper talented enough to make a wide variety of boards to fit such a moody wave could find his niche at Windansea.   This man is Tim Bessell, of Bessell Surfboards, and his claim to fame in the shaping world is being able to fabricate anything from the most high performance shred models to the boards that even pre-date his time growing up surfing here in San Diego, and later, North Shore. 

            Unlike George and Joe, who were eventually drawn to their passion from other careers, all Tim as ever known is surfing and surfboards.  In his 37 years doing it, he’s personally created over 47,000 boards here in San Diego and in Hawaii, where he moved at age 18.  In the Islands he worked his way up the ladder, as any haole must, working as a sander, in sales, and then finally shaping under Sunset and Lighting Bolt, to name only a couple.  Since that time he’s had contracts with Lost, Gordon & Smith, Town & Country, and now his boards are found in shops not only in California but Japan, Peru, and of course, Hawaii. 

            As stated, Tim can shape it all, regardless of the era.  But what seems to drive Tim to get better and better is his work with experimental materials and design.  For instance, his current board of choice within his vast quiver is a 6’4” parabolic, carbon fiber, dolphin skin, asymmetrical quad-fin.  Most of the technology is now relatively well known; the parabolic frame and carbon fiber for advanced strength, dolphin skin to pass water under the deck faster. But the asymmetrical tail design and fin placement is something most have never even heard of, though its been around since a long time Windansea local, Carl Ekstrom, invented it over 30 years ago.  Tim, a protégé of Ekstrom, continues to push the vastly underrated concept into the modern era.  In a nutshell, the idea is that symmetrical boards would only make sense if we rode facing forward, toes pointing to the nose and heels to the tail.  But since we don’t, any experienced surfer can tell you turning backside is completely different from frontside.  So why not make a board that complements this fact?  If you ask me, the sport could really use these kind of innovative ideas to lead it in the right direction. 

            As George at Plus One once confided in me, soul surfing in the shaping industry is not throwing on an Eagles album and lighting up a joint while you shape a single fin.  It’s continuing to push the craft in ways that redefine how we ride waves.  George Downing, the first to make major design progress back in 1950, knew this as well as George, Joe, and Tim do now.

            So the next time you paddle in after a two-hour session having jockeyed with 30 other guys and snagged only a handful of mediocre waves, look to these two shops and their shapers for inspiration.  Much has changed through the years here in San Diego, but surfing’s soul has hardly left us entirely; it’s just harder to find.  And as always, the summer crowds will eventually head back to Arizona and elsewhere, the Santa Ana’s will return to glass over our favorite spots, and finally, the north swells will turn SD’s best winter spots into the waves that truly define what it means to be a surfer from San Diego.          

For the best in equipment, or if you just want to shoot the shit with some really cool guys, drop by the shops mentioned in this article:

Plus One Surfboards

3630 Hancock St. Suite D

San Diego, CA 92110

(619) 219-7873

Bessell Surfboards

515 Westbourne Street

La Jolla, CA 92037

(858) 456-2591