“I just want to keep learning every day,” Will says with a playful grin. “That’s my favorite thing to do.”
“Whatever you do, don’t fall.” The number one rule was conveyed in an uncharacteristically serious manner. “If you do, you’re going to get all cut up and I’m gonna have to take you to the hospital,” my guide elaborated. “And that would be about the most uncool thing we could do today.”
I was keen on maintaining an aura of cool, given that my guide was the legendary Will Allison, an understated East Coast hall of famer and shaper of some repute.
Earlier that morning, we’d loaded up our boards in Will’s 12 ft John boat, strapped on our rubber billy-boots, and headed out into the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW). Will, steering from the back, wearing a long sleeve rashguard, long compression bottoms, and a layer of warpaint to protect his freckled-Irish skin, navigated us through narrow tributaries, winding and weaving until we reached the back of Figure Eight Island. Shortly after the engine went quiet and the boat skidded to a halt in the sand, Will grumbled a bit about the size of the home kitty corner to our current embankment.
“They got houses this big on the beach down there in South Ponte Vedra?” he asks me. His delivery isn’t contemptuous; rather he conveys a general sense of amazement that any person would need such a large house.
Will appreciates the need for some space, though. The Allison compound sits high up on a marshy hill in the Hampstead area of Wilmington, near Wrightsville Beach, NC. His family has owned the house since he was a kid. Those not traveling by amphibious means would enter the property from a dirt road under a green canopy of both native and non-native flora. Will planted a lot of what is here, including several varietals of bamboo. His business is conducted in the shaping bay in front and home office in the back, both of which he built and both of which sit detached from the Allison home.
Both the office and the shaping bay seem typical of a man who earns his living from surfing. While inside the bay, Will talks seriously and knowledgably about board design and function, proudly showing me the ten boards that will be hauled to the glasser in the coming days. In the office, there are well-organized stacks of custom order forms, and his eyes glow when he shows me the Jeff Divine collection that adorns the walls. Will’s livelihood is based around surf, and he is lucky enough to love the work he does to earn a wage. This kind of existence is rare, but it is not what makes Will unique.
After we unload the boards, Will swims back out into the water towing the boat behind him, and so that it won’t be completely beached when the tide falls, he dives down to anchor the boat. When he joins us on the shore, he is all smiles as he picks up a 9’3 pintail he shaped many years ago.
“This will probably be the last time I surf this board,” Will says in a purely matter of fact way. He laughs and adds “I guess Joe really likes it too!” which serves to remind us we’ll be delivering this beauty to an old friend of Will’s in St. Augustine.
We follow him up through the sharp marsh, scattering fiddler crabs with each step. In his mid-60’s, Will is walking with a bit of a hunch, but his pace conveys a renewed anticipatory energy. As we climb the dunes to the secluded beach, Will is the first to get a look at the inlet. “A few peaks out there,” he announces. “Let’s surf.” After I personally summit the dunes and lay my eyes on the gutless, sideshore “peaks”, I wonder what conditions could illicit any hint of hesitation in Will’s plans.
This coast has a tendency to disappoint, test one’s fortitude, and push one towards other hobbies. But I can imagine Will making this trip just about every morning, in every kind of condition, and delivering a similar assessment.
Will’s surfing is as smooth as ever. The slight hunch and slow pace on land is adapted, but not left behind in the water. The little weight that he possesses is slightly forward as he fades into waves that stand up and crumble. He walks back and forth over every inch of his 9’3, cutting back with sharp turns when the waves energy subsides, connecting each section until the long, skinny, flexy fin he designed drags across the shelly sand.
Sunset Beach, 1974: Clockwise from top Will, Barney Sheffield, Norbert, and Bob Mignona
I’m definitely not the first to appreciate Will’s smooth, effortless surfing. Aside from a case stuffed full of Eastern Surfing Championship accolades, inside the Allison household there is more evidence that the home’s owner has lived a surfing life. Above a desk where Will’s wife Karen checks the Wrightsville surf cam every few hours from her computer, there is a photograph of Will dropping into pumping pipeline in 1974. There is a surfer peeking over the shoulder, admiring the same stance I saw in the inlet that day. Will laughs as we try and decide whether the guy backed out because he didn’t have priority, or for lack of paddling power. “It was pretty competitive out there then, too,” he says.
Back at the inlet, after about two hours carving up surf that would cause any surf reporter to encourage sleeping in, Will asks “Should we check Wrightsville? I reckon I’d like to see what my wife’s up to.”
After a safe landing on the backside of Wrightsville Beach, we headed for the ocean side, this time sans Alaskan sneakers. Sure enough, there was Karen, illegally surfing next to the Susan Collins pier. Karen and Will have been a team for quite some time. Aside from operating a successful real estate business, Karen serves as The Allison Surfboards marketing team, updating the Facebook page and relaying messages to Will. While not exactly unwilling to market himself, Will is not known to make much of an effort. The board Will’s loaned me for the day—with its slate-blue resin job, bamboo-deck, and signature abalone sea horse—has been an eye catcher on the beach since we arrived. A woman complements me on it and I point to Will, informing her the man in front of my finger shaped it. After she says she thinks her father would really like one, Will tells her that he can be found in the Yellow Pages.
The exchange is indicative of the way in which Will approaches surfing and board building. Will has surfed just about every day and improved on his shapes for more than thirty years. These two simple facts are why people ask him to shape boards. There is no Instagram feed or even website to draw in the customer. He says he knows he makes boards that ride well because he surfs all his own shapes, every single day.
Will’s customers know his boards ride well, too. He is as busy as any shaper when it comes to custom boards, and he makes everything from mush-destroying squash tail quads to wide nosed logs for shops all the way down to South Carolina. More recently, a custom board Will shaped for Raleigh artist Clark Hipolito laid the seeds for a collaborative relationship: Will shapes the boards, Clark paints them and sells them. Hours before our outing, Will put the finishing touches on two shapes that will hang in a fancy high rise in the state capital.
The things Will loves about surfing share similarities with the things he loves about board building. His eyes widen when he talks about how much he enjoys the learning that’s involved in shaping. “I just want to keep learning every day,” he says with a playful grin. “That’s my favorite thing to do.”
As the day wore on, we spoke about about how cool it would be to get Will’s boards back in some shops in Florida. He feigned interest, and we left it at that. I’m not counting on Will initiating a follow up conversation, and that makes total sense to me. All Will does is surf.
