When Forrest Minchinton drops into the Deus Temple in Canggu, we already know ahead of time we’re travelling towards fun. This calm well mannered Californian is a pleasure to have in town. There’ll be bike rides cause he’s just so damn good at them and early morning surf expeditions and of course, he leaves us with the gift that keeps on giving, the boards he shapes for us.
We’d been chatting before he got over here, sorting blanks and what not, when he gave us the heads up he has a new shape he wanted to leave us with, his Chine Fish. He’s the son of a shaper, who spends a substantial amount of time with his dad, small wonder he brings a significant range of acumen & insight, belying his age, to the shaping bay. And we thought it fitting, when we glassed them, that we acknowledge that.
Enter another son of a shaper as well as another mad keen motocross rider, Mark ‘Mad Chook’ Cormack. Mark is an Australian glasser who has worked with the who’s who of shapers along Australia’s east coast. The two had met a couple of years ago in California at the track and had already been plotting to do some sort of collaboration together, we just bought things to a head.
The parallels in these two guys lives notwithstanding, the chemistry in the shop was faultless. The easy banter flowed, they discussed the whys and wheres from both sides and hatched a shared strategy in no time at all.
While the six boards are similar they are not all the same, the six boards quickly became five when Rui, one of our own here in Bali, snaffled one up. His was glassed alone, with a black deck flecked with real gold leaf highlights, a first for us here. In the other five, you can trace the lines of family descent across them, opaque decks with abstract, tie dye-esque, bottoms. While they were throwing resin in the shop out back, our designers in the bunker were super busy coming up with the goods in a collaborative logo that just says, hell yeah.
Images by Harry Mark & Andy Mac
