After Tracey recently turned me on to Hess Surfboards, my radar has been tuned to finding other enviroboards. Yesterday I stumbled upon Grain Surfboards, a board company in Maine that makes “locally grown” wood boards. The “About” info on their site summarizes everything in a nutshell: “Mike LaVecchia combined his love of board sports with a passion for traditional wooden boat-building techniques to create works of art for riding waves.” Furthermore they sell kits to make your own wood boards (though their kits are a much prettier penny than the Foam E-Z kits.) But, oh Lordy, those are some beautiful boards.
After some further digging, I found out that they run classes on wood board building from their shop. Classes run from 5 to 7 days. But that might make an interested surf vacation – head to Maine, enjoy the scenery, build a board and ride it on the North Atlantic coast. Seriously, who’s with me? Camping on the farm where the shop is located, building a sweet wooden surfboard and surfing the waves in the above picture…it’s like an REI ad!
But I dug further, and here’s the sweet part for you, surf fan! Grain Surfboard donated a fish to be raffled off to benefit Stoked Mentoring and the Jordan Kelly Fund. Among other things Stoked Mentoring runs an after school program for students to build surfboards. Can you imagine?! Talk about a sweet after school program. Where was that when I went to school? But for just $10 you can buy a chance to win the 5’4″ Waka fish built by professional woodworker/Grain Workshop graduate Jeff Martin pictured to the left. (Plus you will be supporting what I think is a super sweet program.)
Get your raffle ticket now! Winner will be announced November 11th.