Surfing cardiologist produces new wave, bamboo boards

by Kevin Cody

Shale Gordon was a heart surgeon 10 years ago. Today, the 47-year-old Hermosa Beach resident manufactures bamboo-laminated surfboards. The boards, he claims, are lighter, stronger, and better performing than conventional boards. And they are as beautiful and environmentally friendly as old balsa boards.

Gordon’s career change, as improbable as it sounds, had a certain inevitability to it.

He was born in England and raised in Malaysia, where his father was a heart surgeon. In Malaysia, he became fascinated with bamboo. His Hermosa back yard is ringed with bamboo. He and his wife Mei, an oncologist born in Malaysia, regularly raid their yard for their salads.

After nearly 10 years as a surgeon, Gordon developed Repetitive Stress Syndrome in his right shoulder. He attributed the condition not to the thousands of heart bypasses he performed, but to decades of surfing all over the world.

The shoulder injury progressed to Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, an incurable condition that is so painful that 60 percent of its sufferers commit suicide.

"People find they just can’t live with the knowledge that their future consists of lying in bed and making painful treks to the bathroom. Just working the television channel changer is painful," Gordon said.

After contracting the disease in 1995, he spent the better part of the next two years in bed.

Finally, with the help of "large doses of anti-depressants," he got out of bed and began trading stocks, using a voice-operated computer, which made it unnecessary for him to type or use a mouse.

During this period he and his wife visited friends in Byron Bay, Australia, just south of Brisbane. The subtropical climate helped ease the pain in his shoulder. When a 16-acre farm neighboring their friends’ property became available, the couple bought it and began growing bamboo for sale in the local markets.

The Gordons now spend their winters on the farm and summers in Hermosa.

Through his interest in bamboo, Gordon met an Oregon bamboo grower and surfer named Gib Cooper. Like surfers everywhere, the two often talked about building a better surfboard. In recent years surfers have experimented with Kevlar, carbon fiber and even hemp. But nothing matched fiberglass for cost, performance and ease of use.

One day Cooper suggested woven bamboo as a substitute for fiberglass. He showed Gordon a roll of bamboo similar to what is used for windscreens.

Gordon, in partnership with Gary Young, a surfboard shaper form Hawaii, spent over a year experimenting with the woven bamboo. The boards were strong and striking in appearance, but difficult to manufacturer. After a year, the partnership was dissolved.

The breakthrough in the bamboo concept, Gordon said, came when he received a photograph of a 1950s era bamboo peeler from a South American friend named Hidalgo. The world-renowned authority on bamboo is famous for having built a bamboo ceiling that spans 300 feet, without interior posts. The lathe-like peeler shaved bamboo stalks to produce sheets of paper-thin bamboo veneer. After more research, Gordon found a Chinese company that was still producing the bamboo veneer.

Pound for pound, laminated bamboo is stronger steel, Gordon said. And almost as important as its functionality, the veneer has a masculine beauty.

Confident that he had found the materials for making a better surfboard, Gordon began searching for a partner to manufacturer the boards.

Two years ago, at the surf industry’s annual trade show in San Diego, Gordon met Australian surfboard shaper Frank McWilliams. The Australian had shaped boards for top name surfers and had, himself, experimented with different materials for making surfboards. McWilliams also lived in Byron Bay, not far from the Gordons’ farm.

Gordon overcame McWilliams’ initial skepticism about a bamboo-laminated board with the offer of $500,000 from his stock market trading to set up a factory.

The bamboo posed several challenges. Like carbon fiber, and unlike fiberglass, bamboo doesn’t like being bent 180 degrees. Learning to wrap the bamboo around the rails took several months of experimentation. The final technique required vacuum bagging each board to make the bamboo lie flat.

Extruded polystyrene foam was selected, rather than the polyurethane foam used in conventional surfboards because styrene is more "environmentally friendly." Also it bonds with epoxy resin, which is more environmentally friendly than the polyethylene resin used with polyurethane.

Styrene comes in 2-foot by 8-foot by 3-inch sheets. It is typically used for home insulation. Unlike foam used in conventional boards, it does not come from the manufacturer with a built-in rocker — the critical, changing curve that runs the length of a surfboard.

To resolve the rocker problem, Gordon and McWilliams hit upon clamping the laminated blanks on a rocker template while the epoxy that binds the bamboo to the foam was hardening.

"We spent six months experimenting. Frank wouldn’t let us sell a board until they were perfect because he knew, being the new kids on the blocks, that if we put out one bad board, competitors would use it to ruin our reputation," Gordon said.

To overcome surfers’ skepticism, Gordon and McWilliams hired reigning world champion Sonny Garcia to ride their boards. Garcia’s support has generated widespread publicity for the board in Australia and in surfing publications.

The publicity has pushed Bamboo Surfboards of Australia to operating at its capacity of 100 boards a month. The boards retail for $650 to $1,000, or roughly $200 more than conventional boards.

The additional price, Gordon said is justified by the additional strength. Also, because bamboo is buoyant, unlike fiberglass, bamboo boards paddle faster than conventional boards. But the board’s strongest selling point, he said, is its "flex."

Conventional boards, he said, flex lengthwise. But because of their stringers, they don’t flex rail to rail. Bamboo boards flex lengthwise, and rail to rail.

In a recent surf magazine article, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard described the importance of flex in surfboards

"If you have identical boards, and one flexes and the other one doesn’t, they’ll feel worlds apart. Think about it like this. The only difference between a $200 pair of skis and an $800 pair is the flex. The expensive ones have very sophisticated flexing characteristics…Surfboards, in contrast, are the crudest things going."

"It’s the loss of flex that’s the culprit behind the death of your magic board….when the materials break down, you lose the resiliency of the flex. Your board no longer responds. It’s essentially dead," Chouinard said.

Gordon said the rail to rail flex allows his boards to accelerate faster than conventional boards. And because bamboo has strong flex memory, the bamboo boards retain their ability to flex and snap back longer than fiberglass boards.

Gordon recognizes that surfers are as susceptible to the herd mentality as other consumers. For bamboo boards to gain widespread acceptability, which would enable him to lower production costs, the boards have to be perceived as desirable.

Gordon hopes to create that perception next month during the Sunset Beach $250,000 Rip Curl Cup contest on the North Shore of Hawaii.

Sonny Garcia has two other board sponsors, in addition to Bamboo Surfboards of Australia. But Gordon is confident that, with the world championship at stake, Garcia will select the best board in his quiver. And that board, Gordon insisted, is bamboo.

Bamboo Surfboards of Australia are available locally at ET and Just Surfboards in Hermosa Beach. ER