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SURFERMAG.COM ONLINE EXCLUSIVES

SURFERMAG.COM: Do you think if Skip would have been a surfboard shaper, but with a suit and tie and with a certain maybe more polished look, your parents or your mother might have said, “Please be like Skip Frye; we’re stoked he’s a great shaper and look at that fine young man?”

RICH PAVEL: If Hobie Alter had lived down the street I’m sure they would have said, “Do you think our son has a chance succeeding in the way you have?” Yeah, the answer to that question is yes. And yet they wouldn’t have been necessarily pleased, but at least they would have been able to see the possibility. Things have really changed. You’ve got to remember: If you were a healthy, virile, vital, able-bodied man, and you chose to wallow away your hours out in the surf in the post-war era…that was shameful; that was sinful. What are you doing surfing? Don’t you have a job? Don’t you go to work? And now they’re making a movie, Riding Giants. And I think the Chart House made a career out of employing the guys who were ski bums or surfers. You know, “My name’s Scott Bass, I’ll be your waiter tonight.” And the people from uptight Midwest, East Coast or wherever, were like, “Wow, this is nice, these people are happy” [laughs].

SURFERMAG.COM: [laughing] Yeah, never mind the saltwater coming out of our noses…

RICH PAVEL: [Laughs] Yeah. So that’s the essence of that––there was a way of being that surfers have, and I don’t think they are aware of how very aware they are. They are aware of their environment, they are calibrated to things like tides, they’re following weather patterns all over the globe. They are much more in tune and in touch with forces of nature and aspects of the universe than other people…it’s not that they wouldn’t give a consideration, but because of the lifestyle commitment, it’s a very very different way of thinking. And like I said, I admired and respected that way of being. That sort of having a natural basis to what you’re about.

SURFERMAG.COM: Let me bring you back to your first surfboard. And you made your board and you mentioned that perhaps even before that, you had made a subconscious decision to be in this lifestyle and make your living in this lifestyle, and perhaps manifesting itself into you being a shaper. Between your first board and the time that you became a production person, or you were starting to actually make money doing that, or maybe it wasn’t that much time, but tell me about that period between, “Okay, I can do this,” to “Okay, I’m doing this”?

RICH PAVEL: It’s a lifetime when you’re living it, but when you look back on it, it goes really quick.

SURFERMAG.COM: And who were you working for and how did that all come about?

RICH PAVEL: Probably the real transition came from Bill Caster, and what was going on was, it started out with: You make your own fin and then you make the board for the fin you have, and then you glass it after you shape it and then go ride it. And then make the next one and then make whatever changes or whatever. And that was the whole act. That was it. There weren’t any other considerations. It wasn’t like, “How am I going to garner money doing this?” That had nothing to do with it. I wasn’t really able to think in those terms because of my capacity, but because of where I was at with it, where I was coming from with it. And I was always into science. I had a teacher in second grade and interestingly enough––I think it’s funny where we get some of our best input—it was a Catholic nun and she had influenced me into the world of science and absolute knowledge as it was defined in science, against the backdrop of the concept of where absolute rightness is arrived at in terms of Biblical academics.

SURFERMAG.COM: Yeah, that seems like a contrast or a paradox, that a Catholic nun would actually be tapping into the scientific, that whole vibe: “Let’s ask questions until we get to the answer.”

RICH PAVEL: And without speaking in academic terms, basically what she was switching me onto was the concept of epistemology and the limits and validity of knowledge and how we know what we know.

SURFERMAG.COM: [interrupting] Epistemics, what a great concept and amazing that you mentioned that, but I’m sorry, please, go ahead.

RICH PAVEL: So, this sort of more natural way of being, and it was kind of like hippies were sort of the enemies growing up in your parents’ household, but then the more you learned about them, you go, “Well, what could possibly be bad about that?” [Laughs.] It was a heavy time, too—I remember being on the schoolbus and having to drive through demonstrators. But they weren’t pounding on our bus, they were like handing out flowers, like a daisy-through-the-window thing. It really got you thinking about where this world was headed and what was going on with it in a way that I don’t know if that is as active in our culture and society right now. It’s there, but it’s got a different resonance to it, a different vibe. But what was happening was basically this: There was that tremendous pressure and expectation. And probably the guy that was setting the standard for quality and excellence in surfboards on a commercial level--and I wouldn’t say that as an individual, Bill Caster held anything over the Steve Lises or Skip Fryes of the world--but in terms of if you’re doing it for a business, Bill Caster had his act together. I remember being in the Gordon and Smith factory. They had a huge banner written in big letters—“Caster Says”—and it was just so funny because whenever they ran into a problem at the factory, that’s kind of who they looked to.

SURFERMAG.COM: Go ask Caster?

RICH PAVEL: Yeah. He was kind of the final word. He’s the one that got me to get my first laminate. I didn’t have any laminates. I didn’t have any stickers. Gloss polish, pin-lines: no, uh uh. Those were the guys that got rocks thrown at them.

SURFERMAG.COM: Discuss the stigma with colors and pin-lines and stuff?

RICH PAVEL: Yeah, the best boards you could possibly get weren’t coming out of a factory. They didn’t. They were being made by individuals. And it wasn’t even like cottage-industry level, it was out of their garages and backyards and stuff and that was really what I was born out of. That was the real defining transition, going from having been taken under the wing of Stevie (Lis) and taught the way to be in the shaping room and approach and…flat out: Stevie is an intuitive genius, if not outright. And his approach and everything—priceless.

SURFERMAG.COM: And so Bill (Caster) was more of, “okay, once you’ve got that aesthetic, methodology, let’s apply the commercial brain trust toward it and a meshing of those two things…”, right?

RICH PAVEL: Yeah, capitalizing on building surfboards, and I thought, well, anything worth doing is worth doing well. If you’re going to do it, do it right. Don’t pretend you’re building surfboards, do it. Just that really stellar combination that Caster put together was my really great influence early on as far as quality and craftsmanship and that sort of thing. And he’s a quality guy, that’s the common ground. He was always a quality guy.

SURFERMAG.COM: Let’s fast-forward a little bit. Recently Dave Parmenter put out an article and he basically said the whole retro thing is kind of a farce, except the one good thing that’s come out of it, is that there seems to be a modernization of the Fish design. He didn’t say that specifically, he said that if anything good comes out of it we can see it in the modernization of the old ‘70s surfboard into something new. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the modern Fish.

RICH PAVEL: I didn’t read the article but I did have that conversation with David. And it was a good one. In fact, we’ve talked at length. In the course of that conversation, one of the things I emphasized was that we’ve got guys who the only board they’ve ever ridden has three fins on it. That was the universe of surfing. They grew up in a universe of surfing where it was only three fins. So, for them, anything outside of that realm, it’s like, “Whoa.” And yeah it had three fins but it was narrow and thin too, that’s the thing that was maybe the biggest holdup.

SURFERMAG.COM: So tell me about your Fish designs and what you’re doing with the board.

RICH PAVEL: Well, there were those early influences that had to do with proximity, you know, surfing that whole little range from PB point over to the Marine Room and back, that’s like a little wave garden. And coincidentally some of the least accessible coastline in all of California because of the way it was built up and when it was built up and the way the bluffs are. So you have these little sessions and moments there, and you have time to sort of suss out and create a deeper understanding and relationship with designs, and that is where these refinements were born out of, combined with the influences that came after those early influences. So I would really look to guys like, to put names to it, Maurice Cole, Simon Anderson, Al Merrick. I wouldn’t put Merrick, and I don’t think he would either, in the same class as, say, Simon Anderson, but the guy’s done such a great job “polishing the stone,” as they say. And I think a big part of, say, Rusty’s success or the success of the Channel Islands is they’ve been able to identify concepts that work even if they didn’t originate them and make successful applications.

SURFERMAG.COM: If I was to take the state-of-the-art 1978 Rich Pavel Fish, then take one of these new boards off the rack [points to the lineup of brand new Rainbow Pavels], what would be the differences and who influenced those changes?

RICH PAVEL: The influences would have been guys like Simon Anderson and Maurice Cole. That’s like a continent and two oceans away. So the influences come from far and they are wide, so I couldn’t take too much credit for it. We don’t know where our influences come, necessarily; a lot of times we pick up our influences and it’s an unconscious thing. But those would be some that I could easily identify as far as what makes their boards that you see here different than, say, those 1970 art-type Fishes.

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