(ABOVE) Kauai shaper Terry Chung with one of his balsa-wood boards, created from trees he grew on his property in Kilauea.
As a wave-obsessed young surfer in Honolulu in the 1960s, waterman Terry Chung's beloved first surfboard was an old balsa-wood cruiser that his family bought off a neighbor. Four decades or so later, Chung—having become a big-wave legend and elite shaper on Kauai's north shore—worked alongside his buddy Laird Hamilton to pioneer the new style known as foilboarding. (So named because a hydrofoil underneath the board lifts the rider out of the water, a sensation Chung likens to being "a seabird skimming over the top of a wave—no resistance at all.")
“After you start going a certain speed, lighter foam-core boards start to shudder and want to lift up,” he explains. “The heavier, stiffer wood just calms everything down.”
Chung helped spark today's foilboarding craze, thanks to an eye-popping sequence in the 2011 film A Deeper Shade of Blue that featured him swooping above massive azure swells. But as foiling evolved, he found that regular foam-core boards were too light and flexy for the heavy-duty tow foiling he and his buddies were doing in the big stuff. So he returned to his first love: balsa. "After you start going a certain speed, lighter foam-core boards start to shudder and want to lift up," he explains. "The heavier, stiffer wood just calms everything down."
After experimenting unsuccessfully with local woods, Chung ordered a batch of balsa lumber from Ecuador and began crafting boards from strips of the soft, buoyant wood. Then one day a surfing buddy laid a handful of balsa seedlings on him, so Chung planted them on his six-acre property in Kilauea and spent the better part of a decade watching them grow, gradually adding dozens more.
"Each board literally takes years to build, since you have to grow the wood first," he says. When the trees reach about a foot and a half in diameter—after seven years or so—he mills them into planks and "forgets about" them for another a year or so, until they're dry enough to become surfboards.
Because of the effort involved and his limited supply, Chung generally reserves his homegrown boards for his tight-knit crew of Kaua'i tow foilers and friends scattered around the world's XXL surf meccas. Not that he dwells on it much, but every now and again after finishing a ride, he says, "the thought comes to your mind: 'Man, this board—I grew it, I built it and now I'm riding it.' That's pretty cool, you know?"
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