Welcome back to Surf Splendor in 2014.

This is your host, David Scales.

I'm psyched to be back in action.

I spent the last couple of weeks in the Caribbean,

which will actually

be the focus of an upcoming episode called Anatomy of a Surf Trip. So look forward to that.

I got sidelined by a weird infection while I was down there, so I was out of commission for a while,

but I'm back, feeling strong-like

bull, getting together with Scott Bass for an episode of Surf News later this week. So there's

a lot of Surf Splendor content coming at you to make up for the holiday season lull. Today's

episode was actually recorded on Friday, December 27th in Dana Point, California.

It features a conversation with surfboard shaper Donald Brink.

Donald is a newer name to me.

I first came across him at the boardroom show in May of 2013.

He won the Best In Show Award for the alternative board category,

for a finless, asymmetrical board that was also reversible,

meaning that if you were going right, you'd use one side as the deck,

and if you were going left, you'd actually flip the board over and use what was

previously the bottom of the board as the new deck um it took me a while to even absorb the concept of

that and traction and you know um but donald was energetic and, and I found myself wanting to believe in his

concepts, regardless of what my kind of conventional surfboard design knowledge had ingrained in me.

So he showed me some of his other asymmetrical boards that he had there at the show,

...