Surfboard Shaper Shea Somma, A Life Hand-Shaped

Southwest France has been on a heater as of late. After what felt like months of a flaccid Atlantic, the ocean has finally come back to life, and all our sins have been forgiven for cursing its previous behavior.

For the past two weeks, we’ve been blessed with the kind of waves and weather this region is known for. The summer crowds have returned to their usual existence, and after a full day of shaping, we’re sitting here staring out at an empty lineup, with two-metre peaks marching through beneath a sun that is still hot at seven in the evening. A golden haze hangs over the ocean, giving everything the look of one of those filters meant to conjure up an endless French summer, except this is the real thing. The volleyball games are still in full swing, and we’ve found ourselves a nice perch from which to take in all the glory of it.

Ok Shea we just know each other but I can tell we come from the same clan. Tell me about your earliest memories of surfing.

My earliest memories around surfing begin with bodysurfing at Main Beach in Laguna. As early as I can remember, we would spend full beach days there: baking in the sun on the sand, swimming in the shorebreak, eating lunch at Johnny Rocket's across the street.

More than anything, I remember being captivated by the translucent turquoise water color there, and bodysurfing all day, staying in the water as long as I physically could, and falling asleep at night completely exhausted, still feeling the rocking rhythm of the waves as I drifted off.

I idolised the lifeguards there and would watch them bodysurf on their breaks. I tried to imitate their bodysurfing style, pulling into closeout tubes, attempting the occasional roll or spin. It was pure fun, and I was hooked from day one.

When I got a pair of Duck Feet swim fins I was absolutely over the moon excited! More than surfing, per se, I really loved just being in the ocean. It felt like such a natural playground, and all I wanted to do was explore more and more.

I read that you first became fascinated with surf craft through different explorations in the ocean trying different equipment. How did that experience shape your understanding about how a surfboard can make someone feel?

I grew up inland from the ocean, in Tustin, and the closest beach was Newport, which could be either 30 minutes or two hours away, depending on traffic. My first wave-riding memories were of bodysurfing and then later, like most kids, bodyboarding. I didn't start stand-up surfing until I was 11 or 12, and then I rode a 9'0" longboard for several years.

This was during the peak ’90s era of shortboarding, when the dominant surf culture dictated that if you weren't on a 6'0" thruster potato chip, you were a kook.

Yup same for me. I mean we were basically following orders right! I mean it's hard to understand now, but at the time that's how it was.

Yeah, so it meant that, for all my formative surfing years, I was on the absolute bottom rung of the surfing hierarchy, completely relegated to kook status. And while I would have loved to rip and be considered “in” with the local standouts at River Jetties, Thalia Street, and the other spots I’d go, I never had any illusions about my own ability or place in the pecking order.

Well there is a respectable confidence in that attitude.

Well, I think this really freed me up to explore different equipment and the feelings they had on offer. The beginning of my surfing life I was heavily into bodysurfing and bodyboarding, I developed a taste for thumpy, closeout shorebreak tubes. Pulling into a nice tube prone is still one of my favorite things to do to this day.

I love doing this too. I feel sometimes it just helps me feel connected to my youth somehow.

Yeah and then riding a longboard for years while the majority of my peers were on anemic thrusters really opened up my mind to soft, small inside waves that were totally underutilised by the crowds fighting for set waves out the back. The small niche scenes that existed then around riding alternative equipment also felt way more open, inclusive, interesting, and approachable compared to the dominant shortboard culture.

Man it was so fringe in the 90's so you must have had a very open mind about it. 

Well I eventually graduated to riding pointy thrusters for a few years...and struggled. Then, during a session on my birthday in my sophomore year of university, I snapped a 5'11" JS that had been my go-to board. After that, I began surfing a fairly hammered, chunky 5'10" early-’80s Zuma Jay twin fin that a friend gave me in exchange for gas money. I discovered the benefits of higher-volume, lower-rockered shapes in shorter lengths and never looked back.

The ease, speed, and instant fun that board gave me made me completely lose interest in pursuing the “higher-performance” shapes of the moment. I just wanted to go fast, have fun, and not work so hard. It reminded me of being a kid again.

I'm grateful to have grown up a bit outside the core of surfing and to have had my mind opened, from such an early age, to all the potential surf zones on offer when you're not only chasing “good” waves.

Oh wow I can totally relate to this. In the late 90's a co-worker lent me an old 80's CI twin fin that was super chunky compared to what I was riding. That board was life changing for me.

What I found so interesting about you is that you were a philosophy major and later worked in law for a public defender. That’s such a far cry from becoming a shaper full time. Did you have an epiphany moment when you knew that shaping full time was going to be your path?

From the moment I shaped my first board in 2008, I knew shaping boards would be something I’d always do, in one capacity or another, for the rest of my life, but I certainly wasn’t thinking about it as a career. It was something I’d been deeply interested in doing since I was a kid but never had the opportunity to try till I was 22, and from my first shape, I was totally hooked.

Which part of the process really spoke to you?

Well I had always been super interested in design and felt I had a good mind for it, but turning the designs I had in mind into reality using tools was super challenging and addictive. There’s something deeply satisfying about carving a chunk of foam into the form you have in your mind’s eye, then going out and riding it and putting your ideas and craftsmanship to the test.

I imagine an entire new perspective around surfing develops. 

Yes and there are always improvements to be made, both in concept and execution, and the pursuit is a never-ending puzzle to solve that keeps me totally engaged. I love the endless pursuit of perfection in a form and hand-shaping is inherently imperfect and idiosyncratic.

I was very lucky that, in the midst of making boards for friends, my brand got picked up by both Daydream Surf Shop in Costa Mesa and Mollusk Surf Shop in San Francisco. This exposed my work to a much wider audience than I’d had previously and allowed me to jump out of the legal world to pursue shaping full-time.

It’s been a roller coaster since, for sure, but I’ve been blessed to make boards full-time since the summer of 2019.

Ok on that note, you shared with me some stories about shaping in your backyard into the wee hours of the night while you had your other career. Shaping boards for friends and for the love of it. Can you take us back to that period? What kept you motivated before getting picked up by some shops?

When I first began shaping, I was a legal investigator for the San Luis Obispo Public Defender’s Office, which I ended up doing for 11 years. My job was to assist the attorneys in the office by gathering information about their cases, interviewing witnesses and victims, finding evidence, and otherwise getting cases in shape for trial.

My caseload included everything from relatively minor infractions, such as public intoxication, to misdemeanors, felony murder cases, and everything in between. While the work was interesting, and my contributions felt important and meaningful, it was also very stressful, both because of the demands of the job itself and the emotional impact of processing the subject matter.

I grew up with parents who were both in law enforcement, and I saw first hand how emotionally damaging that could be. 

Yes, and so I found shaping to be a therapeutic outlet during this time in my life. During the day, I’d be deep into cases involving people in the midst of the worst moments of their lives, and at night, I’d go home and make these objects that bring such pure joy.

Shaping became my antidote to mentally ingesting so much human misery: making these totems of positive experience, antennae of stoke meant to evoke happiness at the most basic, direct level. I am so grateful I found shaping during this time. It was a gift to be able to transmute that energy and alchemize it into something good.

You’ve described surfboards as “conduits to experience” which I find very profound. This realization that what you make can help change a persons mentality about surfing. When you make a board for someone, what are you really hoping to give them beyond a well made craft?

Aside from being a well-made craft, I hope each of my boards is received as a personal gift from me to the surfer or whoever ends up surfing it. I hand-shape every single board, which means that each one has hours of my time, physicality, and intention put directly into it. It is an object designed to elicit a very specific experience in the water.

In terms of the design of a shape, every detail is considered and intentional: the foil, the bottom contour, the rail shape, the template, the fin placements. Everything is meant to be in balance and alignment and to achieve an ideal form and perform in a particular way in the water. Also because each board is hand-shaped, the human elements of asymmetry and imperfection also slip in. Consequently, each and every one is a unique object, time-stamped by my hands at a particular moment, never to be exactly replicated again.

This, to me, is a beautiful alchemy that makes a hand-shaped board a precious anomaly in an age of mechanized commodities. I believe in mana, the energy that persists in an object, transferred from the maker to the object itself and then to the person riding the board. I believe that when someone is riding a board I shaped, I am in a kind of dialogue with the surfer through their board.

So, when I am shaping, I keep this in mind, focusing on my intentions for the surfer as much as I focus on making clean planer passes.

Ok so you grew up in Tustin, but now your life is on the Central Coast of California which is like moving to a different country. How have the waves and culture of this region influenced your shaping and even more personal, how has it shaped you as person?

One of my favorite things about surfing is the way being in the ocean immerses you, quite literally, in nature. Tustin, while a pleasant place to grow up, is part of the larger Southern California urban sprawl, and nature is found in vestigial pockets tucked among a sea of concrete. I think one of the main reasons I gravitated so strongly toward the ocean from such a young age is a deep thirst for experiencing wild places.

Yes I feel Tustin is one of those places where it's an amazing place to grow up, but also sort of an anonymous city. Ironically perhpas because of this it seems to spawn many creative people.

Yeah it can be. Once I came up to San Luis Obispo to attend university in 2003, and upon moving here, I knew immediately that I wanted to stay. Vast stretches of undeveloped land remain here, along the coast as well as inland in the hills and valleys, and it feels like going back in time. The access to unspoiled natural places, particularly the beaches, is an incredible privilege for which I remain totally grateful and by which I continue to be energized.

The drawback is that, being north of Point Conception, the oceanic conditions are much more raw and rugged, and therefore the surf conditions are quite fickle. It took me 10 years of living here before I felt I had even the beginnings of a good understanding of what makes many of the better waves around here work.

Sounds very similar to here. Compared to Southern California where it's so predictable and easy you don't really have to pay attention. You just park and paddle out.

Yeah well luckily, the exploration aspect of surfing may, in fact, be my favorite part, so driving around and making the treks has been time well spent in my book, even when, inevitably, the conditions don’t align. Living in this area has focused my shaping primarily into two areas: grovelers for the often subpar, windy, chunky conditions that dominate, and boards geared toward those groomed, powerful, hollow fall and winter days that are the real highlight of each year here.

As a person, I think living here has enabled me to have a closer relationship with nature than I’d have been able to have in most other places. I can leave my home and, within 30 minutes, be in a space that feels totally wild, totally alone. I feel it’s made me a healthier, more grounded person and given me a deep thankfulness for those spaces and the privilege of access to them.

On the flip side, I have almost no appetite to surf in a crowd anymore. If there are more than five people at a given spot, more often than not, I’ll surf elsewhere, which, I realize, makes me quite spoiled as a surfer!

So you mentioned that you have visited this region of France before and shaped some boards for people. Can you share with me how this region and the waves inspire you as a shaper and what your personal experience has been like spending some time here?

I have been so lucky to travel to France numerous times over the years, largely thanks to my wife’s enduring friendships with a few lovely families we’ve known since university, where we met them, and from her time as an au pair in Paris.

More recently, spending time specifically in the Basque zone has been a real gift. There is, of course, such a rich history and incredible cuisine here, but from a surf perspective, it’s also an amazing zone. There’s a really wide array of surf on tap, with beachbreaks, reefs, and points ranging from barrels and longboard waves to high-performance spots, all exposed to plenty of swell and occasionally serving up truly world-class waves.

As a shaper, this zone is a playground, offering opportunities to explore a pretty endless array of designs, from big-wave guns and barrel-riding boards to grovelers, traditional logs, and nearly everything in between. The surf history here is quite inspiring, too. Famously, Tom Curren, Miki Dora, Maurice Cole, Tom Parrish, and many, many more have spent serious time here, and it’s easy to see why.

Amazing food, incredible waves, deep history, and a culture that values leisure and a balanced life, enjoying community and life’s finer things, what’s not to love?

On top of that, I have had the privilege of shaping out of Tristan Mausse’s factory. I admire him deeply as a craftsman who has devoted his life to hand-shaping and doing absolutely world-class glasswork, and he is a total joy to spend time, work, and surf with. He’s thoughtful, intelligent, kind, extremely hard-working, wildly talented, and generous with his time and resources. It’s been an absolute highlight of my life as a shaper to be able to build boards together.

Ok last question, at this point in your life as a surfer, craftsman, business owner, a father and husband, what feels most important to you in how you want carry through in this world?

Oh man that's such a big question! Undoubtedly my number one role is as a father and husband. Having kids is the ultimate reframe in terms of priorities, as it should be. Seeing my kids growing up before my eyes has absolutely shifted my focus in such a fundamental way. I can feel their eyes constantly watching and absorbing everything. They're these little mirrors that reflect your actions, your words, your attitude straight back to you, warts and all. It's unsettling but also, motivating. More than anything I'd like for them to see love and intention in what I do. I want my impact on this world to be felt as someone who gives as much of myself and from within myself as I can in what I do. I think there's a prevailing notion, that I used to buy into, that somehow it's uncool or uncouth to try. That, everything should be done with no sweat, and if you're trying too hard then it's lame or something. Having kids I feel like I've shifted to an almost opposite perspective. If you haven't found something to put all of your being, all of your sweat, all of your intention into, that's the lame thing. I want my kids to see me totally invested, totally present, putting my being into my actions in this world, in everything from shaping a surfboard to working on our home, making our dinner, my relationship with Kendra, my wife, and all the moments, activities, and tasks in between, because that is what it means to be alive to your reality. And if you're lucky enough to find that kind of alignment between your actions and your purpose and your abilities, and present reality, that is truly a blessing. And! If you're lucky enough to be blessed that way, it's your absolute duty to see each moment, each act through, completely. I'm not nearly living up to all that but I'm doing my best, and if every day I can get a little bit closer to that, I'm on the right track. 

Merci beaucoup Shea for sharing your life, wisdom and passion with us. The connections we make through our pursuit of riding these masses of fluid energy help us all appreciate the time and sacrifices we make to do so. A bientot!