There's this moment — the transition from paddling to planing — and no matter how much I've progressed in my surfing, that moment still contains that feeling of "weeeeeee!" Surfing is like this game of chasing that feeling. I’m always looking for that moment – just that moment.

I think about aging only in terms of where I am today — in the last two, three, four years I'm the fittest and happiest I've been in my life. So when everything's awesome, I wonder: how long can you possibly keep that?

Most healthy, fit people tend to get called "fit for their age" after age 60. So I figure: probably until then I can keep this up, and after that I'll have to work harder to not decline too fast. So the way I think of aging is abstract and intellectual — not so much emotional.

I'm an engineer by trade, and optimization is what engineers do. Early in my local surf journey I learned about displacement-hull surfboards — a hull bottom is shaped like the belly of a boat, whereas most performance shortboards are concave. I wanted to understand what the bottom shape actually does if you kept everything else the same. But you can't buy two identical surfboards with different bottoms. So I thought: why don't I just make them?

I contacted a local shaper, and we built two boards. I took them to the water — and couldn't feel the difference! But by the time we'd finished, I had fallen in love with the process of shaping. It brings together three things for me: design, craftsmanship, and a canvas for color and art. By the end of those first two boards, I knew I wanted to make more.

Over time I've completely departed from the idea of optimization, because surfboards are necessarily sub-optimal watercraft. With a speedboat you're optimizing for a single parameter in a controlled environment. But in surfing, what you're really optimizing for is having fun. You have to make the board unstable so you can turn it, but you also want it to plane. All you're doing is finding a configuration of not-optimal that brings you the most fun — which is why engineering optimization doesn't really apply, even though it's what sparked the whole journey.

One thing I've noticed is that the language for describing surfing sensations is really limited. People say "this board feels loose" — great word, but it doesn't carry much meaning without context. Loose dropping into the wave? Loose because the tail slides out? Loose at the top when you whip the tail around? Those are very different things.

So when people demo my boards, I ask specifically: how does it paddle, how does it feel to set the rail, to bottom turn, to top turn? That tells me far more than a freeform "how did it go?" One question I've started asking is, "What's more important to you — quantity or quality?" For me it’s quantity. The fewer waves you catch, the more each one matters, and maybe the less open you are to experimentation. In my opinion, everybody should be trying new boards all the time.

So my mantra is: Have more fun! Have different fun!