Quick Take
No full story of Santa Cruz's surfing history can be written without mention of Doug Haut, the longtime surfer who became one of the industry's most well-known and respected surfboard shapers. His influence on how surfers interact with their waves and on the many shapers who followed in his wake is incalculable.
A few years ago, when I was pondering a name for my occasional series of profile pieces on quietly influential figures in Santa Cruz County’s culture and history, I went with “The Shapers.” The term was powerful but not necessarily showy. It fit nicely for my purposes.
But in a town devoted to surfing, “shaper” already has a specific meaning. In the realm of surfboard manufacturing, a shaper is a board’s designer and creator, shaping a polyurethane-foam blank to a specific design and/or certain hydrodynamic qualities, often with a simple carpenter’s planer. It is fine and exacting work. To the degree that a custom-made surfboard is a work of artistry and handicraft, the shaper is its artist and engineer. If a talented pro surfer is like a master violinist, the shaper is that surfer’s Stradivarius.
In Santa Cruz, there is at least one man who fits both the metaphorical and the literal meaning of “shaper.” He’s Doug Haut, one of Santa Cruz’s foundational figures in the manufacture of surfboards. This year marks the 60th anniversary of Haut Surfboards, which first opened in several shops in Soquel and Pleasure Point before finally moving to the Westside in 1969, where it still sits today at the corner of Swift Street and Delaware Avenue.
Haut is something of a folk hero for both surfers and fellow shapers. His boards from the 1970s and ’80s are collectors’ items and, even today, Haut boards are coveted by surfers with the budgets and exacting standards they command. But he is also an important name in any family tree of Santa Cruz shapers, having worked with and influenced dozens of other manufacturers.
Indeed, the story of Santa Cruz surfing cannot fully be told without Doug Haut. That story, in fact, is told in the big bold new exhibit at the Museum of Art & History titled “Princes of Surf,” dedicated to the three Hawaiian princes who first brought surfing to the U.S. mainland in Santa Cruz in 1885. That exhibit moves through the decades of local surf culture, and includes a display of Haut’s surfboards and photos of his old shops.
“He’s an artist,” said his longtime friend Richard Novak, co-founder of the skateboarding empire NHS Inc. “He has the eye, and the feel. He owns that market, and he owns it all over the world. He constantly downplays himself, but he’s a f—ing legend.”
At 85, Haut today calls himself “semi-retired.” He still shapes boards, but now he does so behind a computer screen instead of sweating in a shaper’s shop. His business is a custom business, designing boards for the specific needs and desires of his clients. Surfers trust him because Haut was a top-flight surfer in his own right. He has an instinctive feel for what surfers need in the water, factoring in not only the client’s age and abilities, but the qualities of the surf breaks where the client is likely to be surfing.
Producing a small number of high-end, meticulously crafted boards has become the strategy that allows Haut to continue to work in a world where a newbie can get a Costco surfboard for as low as $100 — Haut’s boards can cost up to 15 times that much.
“The Costco boards are good in a way,” he said with a chuckle, “because it gets people into the water. But you’re in a Volkswagen, when what you really want is a Porsche.”
Haut was born in Wisconsin, but moved with his family to the Bay Area as a teenager. Having a deep affinity to being in water, Haut attended high school in the Peninsula community of Los Altos. After high school, he found his way to Santa Cruz, and took to surfing with a passion. In 1957, he first met fellow surfer Novak.
“We were pre-baby boomers,” said Novak, remembering those early days. “So we had about eight to 10 years before the baby boomers came along. And we had the world to ourselves. You could sleep on the beach at Malibu, and that was probably the most crowded place. Everywhere else was free. Doug and I talk about it all the time. The only hindrance we had surfing was that the equipment didn’t advance fast enough.”
Haut soon traveled to Hawaii, following an “Endless Summer”-style trek to find better waves and to make himself a better surfer. It was while in Hawaii that he first turned his attention to making surfboards, working with legendary shaper Mike Diffenderfer, often described as the “Michelangelo of shapers.”
“I worked at [Diffenderfer’s] surf shop in Honolulu,” said Haut. “And we would have shapers from all over the world come through there. I was just a sander at that point, and I was working on everybody’s boards, and I got to watch them all work.”
By the mid-1960s, Haut had returned to Santa Cruz and opened his first surfboard shop in a rented barn in Soquel. His timing was fortuitous. When Haut and Novak were first surfing the empty surf breaks as teens, surfboards were mainly made out of balsa wood. In the late ’50s, polyurethane foam – lighter and more durable – quickly took hold and transformed the industry. Haut and Novak both knew Gordon Clark, one of the pioneers largely responsible for introducing foam surfboards to the marketplace. That relationship served Haut well. When Haut lost his Pleasure Point surf shop to fire in 1969, Clark fronted Haut the foam blanks he needed to start again.
From his beginnings, Haut brought a signature style to his surfboards with distinctive shapes and features. He was especially known for the care and craftsmanship of his rails, or the sides of the board. And he was an innovator in the versatile “pumpkin seed” style. As the Santa Cruz surf scene began to grow and expand, it did so largely on Haut boards.
“When I came to Santa Cruz in 1978,” said Westside shaper Ward Coffey, “either you’re riding a Joey Thomas or a Haut, or you were out of it.” Coffey served a long apprenticeship at Pearson Arrow Surfboards, under another shaping legend, Bob Pearson. When it came to break out on his own, Coffey found a supportive mentor in Haut.
“Doug comes along and says, ‘You’re ready,’” said Coffey, who soon opened his own business from a shaper’s station at Haut’s shop. Coffey said that he didn’t so much learn from Haut the nuances and techniques of shaping as much as he learned how to run a shaping business.
“It was all through osmosis,” he said, “watching what he was doing with his laminators and the sanders, the polishers, the glassers, checking on the finished product, and then going out surfing [to test the boards]. That is the stuff that really influenced me.”
Haut also had a sophisticated sense of where the surf industry was going. When the demand was high for more agile short boards, Haut made short boards. When windsurfing became popular in the 1980s, Haut was ahead of the curve in designing boards for that style.
“He really knows how to see the trajectory of a trend,” said Coffey, “to kind of distill it, and create something for it that has his touch on it, his signature.”
That sense of exploration even went, briefly, in the direction of skateboards. The “H” in NHS, in fact, stands for Haut, as he helped establish the skateboarding company with his friend Novak and Jay Shuirman. Once the company was on its feet, Haut decided he wanted to go back to the ocean and to making only surfboards. (A few years later, Shuirman died of leukemia, and Novak has been the primary guiding hand behind NHS for more than four decades.)
Haut’s business boomed in the ’80s, which also saw a big increase in the younger surfers wanting to learn the art and craft of shaping. Haut began teaching younger shapers the complexities of design and hydrodynamics, as well as the nuances of how waves behave in the idiosyncratic surf spots in and around Santa Cruz.
Early in his career, Haut experienced one transformative wave in his industry, the move from balsa to foam. Later, he experienced another, the slow pivot from hand-made boards to the joys of computer design. As he got older and the hard physical labor of hand-made shaping began to wear on him, he turned to computers. Now, he’s content with designing on software.
Haut takes a practical approach when it comes to computers. For example, in the old days, when he was hand-shaping a board, he could never really precisely duplicate a board he had made before. If he did shape the perfect board, he would get frustrated that he couldn’t make an exact copy of it. With computers, “you can scan that magic board that you think is perfect, and then you can make that shape again, forever.”
He finds himself doing a lot of long boards these days, largely because as a surfer gets older, there is an inverse correlation between how much money that surfer is willing to spend on a new surfboard and his or her ability to get up and maneuver on a short board.
NHS will soon release a new T-shirt marking Haut’s 60 years in business. And, like his surfboards, that career has a specific shape, especially when it comes to how he does his work.
“Well, you’ve got to learn how to hand-shape first,” he said. “I mean, someone can’t just jump into [using the computer for shaping]. You have to get your craft down first. But once you do, the software can make it perfect. I’ve been doing [the computer work] for 18 years now, and I’m still learning. And that’s what keeps me going.”
Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.