HANDMADE
“On day two I got some other tools, because the cheese grater wasn’t really cutting it,” deadpanned a dust-caked, purple-haired Andrew Doheny. He was describing his first handshaping experience—one that apparently involved various kitchen utensils—as we stood in front of a barn-turned-shaping-bay nestled among towering pines in Moss Beach, California, some 8 hours north of Doheny’s home in Newport Beach.
Unsurprisingly, the board that came out of that first slapdash shaping session looked like “quite a piece of shit,” according to Doheny. “But, sure enough, the board kind of worked. My friends were riding it and they were doing airs on it, and it was pretty cool to have a board that looked like a piece of shit, but was really fun and could still put a smile on your face. Ever since then I’ve been hooked on shaping my own boards.”
Ten years and a whole lot of handshapes later, Doheny was just finishing up a nearly-rockerless, 5'6" swallow tail in the makeshift shaping bay. The low rocker is a staple of Doheny’s boards, which you’ve likely seen him putting through their paces in web clips filled with wild fin-ditches, layback snaps and white-knuckle carves in everything from pulsing Newport Beach to perfect pointbreaks in Mainland Mexico.
“I enjoy riding small, fast, flat-rockered boards in good waves—waves they’re not meant for,” he explained. “Even if everything else sucks on a board, with no rocker, you’re going to go fast. You’re really feeling the wave. You’re really flying.”
Doheny is an interesting case study in professional surfing, backyard board building and where the two intersect. A surfing prodigy who grew up in the surf industry epicenter of Newport Beach, Doheny turned heads and telephoto lenses as a grom by slashing and punting all over 54TH Street peaks, earning himself sponsorship at an early age. Doheny had access to
