Flower and Sunkiss

Well, this most certainly wasn’t my first surfboard but it was a special board. Maybe you will agree. It had a very, very interesting life! The one on the left.

The one on the right was Natalia’s first surfboard. The same very interesting life.

We had walked into the surf board shop at Sorake Beach on Nias, Indonesia to rent boards. We stayed at the Friendly Inn with Rick and Sheryl.

As we were staying there for some time, over the course of time, I had gone by the shop almost every day. The shop was between our bungalow and the point. We could either paddle by it of walk by it coming or going surfing.

There were 7 blanks standing in the corner of the surfshop. The shop owner said that an Ozzie had brought them and was going to shape them, but had suddenly changed his mind and left. There the blanks stood.

Like I said we were there for some time.

One day I got the idea to tell the shop owner that I would shape all of them, he puts up the materials. I had to glass these two but he would glass the remaining 5. I get the two boards. He gets the 5.

Here they are as you see them. It was my 108th and 109th board. Surfers remember such things, don’t they? I mean unless you’re some kind of machine in a manufactures establishment.

Anyways, no more renting two boards for the week. I put in a week of work and get two boards. Good deal, yeah? Natalia was well on her way to learning how to surf and so when she got this board she was ready for it. Natalia did the designs. We were limited to pigment colors. We were on Nias. It had taken the shop owner a three day turn around trip to go and get the glass, resin, acetone, etc. For some reason we named our boards. I had never done that before. Flower and Sunkiss.

So every evening, in the some what cool of the evening, Ha! –we were at the equator, I was at his shop for that week shaping the boards, then glassing ours.

We stayed for 4 months with a turn around visa after two months.

We went over to Bawa at the end of our trip there on Nias. After Bawa we went to the Philippines for the typhoon season and then the next year we went to Sri Lanka. Eastern Province at Arugam Bay to stay with Fred and Somlak at their Siam View Resort.

We made a decision to leave our boards there as we were going to Japan. We could come back the next year and have them. That was our idea.

The painting of Flower and Sunkiss is on our patio of our bungaloo at Siam View, Arugam Bay, Sri Lanka late August, 2004. I had taken up water color painting as a hobby.

In December of that year, 2004 the tsunami generated in Nias went to Sri Lanka, Arugam Bay and reclaimed Flower and Sunkiss.