Ryan Burch is a supremely interesting person. He’s one of a kind, both in his surfing and his general life. He does things differently than most people, surfing in his own unique way and riding his own unique boards. Those boards, as strange as some of them may seem, are highly sought-after. He’s a well-traveled guy, but as a Southern California native, the colder areas might feel a bit foreign to him. And in the video above, he dives headlong into one of them: Tofino and the surrounding area.
Vancouver Island is a tough place to surf. It’s cold, it rains a lot, and the better waves often require a serious slog through the mud. But rest assured, there are waves worth the mission, and Burch spent some time looking for them.
Much of Vancouver Island is a temperate rainforest. It doesn’t take long to escape the cities and towns and find yourself deep within an ancient forest full of towering old growth — although that old growth is rapidly diminishing — and the coastline is a rugged one, full of driftwood and cliffs. Eagles sit high above, eyes peeled for prey, and sea lions bark endlessly from the barnacle-covered rocks that make up most of the coastline.
One of Burch’s favorite materials to work with when shaping a surfboard is cedar. Yellow and red cedar is abundant on the Island, so Burch thought he’d take advantage of that fact.
“Really the best looking thing is just nice-looking piece of uniform grain wood,” he said. “Cedar is one of my favorites for that. I’ve made fins out of red cedar in the past… a huge resource up here in the Northwest is the abundance of trees. It’s a good place to focus on using the materials you have at hand.”
With that in mind, he visited a local woodworker’s shop to pick through the scraps in search of a few pieces that would make a beautiful set of fins. He’s a guy who doesn’t subscribe to the one-board quiver mentality, and prefers to make surfboards for the particular conditions he’ll be riding it in.
“If I’m having a crack at making a board and it’s just one board for the area, I typically gear it for my ideal set of circumstances,” he explained. “I just kind of let it be whatever for all the rest of them.”
After getting to know the area’s waves, he decided he’d shape a little fish shape with cedar fins. Then, since he’s guy who enjoys sharing the stoke, he left it there. And local ripper Reed Platenius got his hands on it in no time at all.
