In The Green Room with Rich Pavel
by Ken McKnight and Ryan A. Smith
posted 2004-11-28
Situated directly across the street from the sand in San Diego's Ocean Beach, The Greenroom is more than a surf shop. Owned and operated by Rich Pavel this piece of surf history is the living room in which, today, a huge slice of surf history is being offered up to us and, now, you.
Photo by JP St. Pierre
On this morning, coffees in hand, surfer/shaper/proprietor Pavel discusses his shop's rich history, his continuous contributions to board design, by way of the Fish, and his torch-bearing duties as keeper of the keys to a group of heavily-guarded underground surfers and shapers that have quietly remained at the forefront of innovation since surfing's modern era.
AAS - You recently moved up on the hill to shape at Channin in Encinitas, CA. Word has it you now are shaping in the same room that the late Mike Diffenderfer shaped in for so many years. Did you get invited to shape in there?
Rich - No. It wasn't by invitation. It just happened kind of organically within the last year or two. I'd come back from Australia and I was looking for a place [to shape]. I went by there and those guys were really natural about it. They just said, "You can shape in there." They really made me feel welcome.
AAS - Is there a ghost in the room?
Rich - You know what, some of the guys that work there swear by that. I'm not of that mind, but, I'll tell you, the vibe's there, the spirit of it, the lighting and the feel is unmistakable. It's there!
AAS - That would be an inspiring place to mow foam?
Rich - You're talking about a repository of board-building knowledge that exists in few places. To be in that guild-type setting is inspiring. These guys are the old guard, the tribal elders. I like the fact that I'm shaping in Diff's room. It is almost like it was destiny.
AAS - Tell us about your old shaping room.
Photo by Ryan A. Smith
Rich - I came back from my last Australian trip and where I'd been working. I've always been about quality. I'd shaped in Oz, Hawaii, and the Choice factory the majority of my career. I built that facility with Kelly and Larry Duff. At the time, it was a new watermark for those types of facilities. Prior to that I had set up at Rosecroft gardens, but that's another chapter.
AAS - Let's qualify the year.
Rich - I know exactly. I signed the lease in September and the following October the stock market crashed. It was 1987. I was going into this full on. I borrowed $80,000.00.
AAS - Heavy time to borrow money.
Rich - It all got paid back.
AAS - So, what is this we hear about your Clark Foam relationship? You've been designing plugs for them? Not many shapers have been invited to work with Clark.
Rich - It is truly an honor. I'd done a specialty plug about ten years ago, one I designed. We were talking in the office one day a few years later on one of my visits up there, Gordon asked a very direct question, as he often will, that involved statistics. They have a methodology of statistic keeping up there that is impeccable, and they kind of looked at each other, went to the computer, pressed the printout and it turned out that the original 6'2" C sells into more areas geographically then any other blank they have. So in that context, that is the universally-accepted blank. And I designed it with the mind that the Fishes are universal to surfing. It may not be the only board, but its validation has history behind it, and the principles and everything at work in that board are not known to the industry, but it is a phenomenal design.
Photo by Ryan A. Smith
What happened, that caught on here recently, is a follow-through to the Fish Revolution. That is what [Clark's] plug is, a follow-through to that. The things that are sort of timeless about the Fish are what are timeless about good surfboard design. So the blank is going to work for boards of multiple eras, in that there is a recurring theme in good design.
AAS - It's not just a plug for the Fish but for all surfboards?
Rich - Yeah, for example, the Free Ride era, think Shaun, Rabbit, the Parrish round pins, or MR's twins.
