Fin City
Key to any surfer’s long, elegant journey across a wave is the small appendage that’s not visible unless the surfboard is resting under a surfer’s arm, leaning against a coastal shack, or strapped to a beach-bound vehicle. A single fin, or a set of them, is critical to controlling the board’s speed and maneuverability in the water. I don’t surf, but I begin to understand this concept just a little better after a conversation with Chuck Ames, at the headquarters of his international surf fin business. It's tucked inconspicuously in a warehouse-type building in Goleta, within eye-view of the Santa Barbara airport and less than a mile from the beach.
“It’s all about lift over drag,” Ames explains, as he shows me his dog-eared, annotated copy of “Theory of Wing Sections." First published in 1949, it's replete with physics equations – and it's the bible of his business. “I use this one a lot,” he says, pointing to page 336.
Ames is not the least bit fazed that I have never ridden a wave. He’s perfectly willing to walk me through a lesson in basic surfing physics, an abbreviated history of surfing equipment, and the concurrent development of his own niche business. Casual and genial on a cloud-free January afternoon, Ames sounds like the SoCal surfer he is, so there’s really no way to know he’s an innovator and a giant in a realm that only true surfers understand. “The faster you go, the more of a difference the fin makes," says Ames, indicating that beginners are not his market.
Not everyone finds a way to make a good living doing something they love but for Ames, experiencing ocean waves, beginning with his childhood in Santa Monica has always been at the core – and still is today. “I love to surf,” Ames tells me. “To know what that means, you just have to understand that all any surfer is ever thinking after a day on the water is this: ‘When can I get back out there?’”
But building a business, he found, took much more than a desire to chase waves. A combination of luck, location, and acquired business skills has brought True Ames to its current profitability and –just as gratifying to Ames – a deep connection to those in the serious surfing community.
Here’s the luck part: in 1979, he and Cate classmate Kenji Webb ’76 were in the parking lot at Rincon Point one afternoon when they found a flyer on a car windshield advertising a fin business for sale in Oxnard – for $2000. “Kenji and I each put up $1000,” says Ames. “The guy who sold it to us spent about two days showing us how to make fins – he had some resin, some fiberglass, and a little space in the bean fields of Oxnard, and then it was ours. He was totally thrilled to get the cash.”
Webb was already adept at shaping surfboards and Ames had some business experience in paint contracting, so they put their skills together – but only briefly. Ames bought out Webb six months later and has been on his own since. (Webb is now a sculptor in nearby Ventura.) At the time, Ames found that partnerships worked best when they were less formal as he forged connections with surfboard shapers up and down the Central Coast – and that’s where the location part comes in. “I’d make some fins and bring them up to Santa Barbara, which was really the hub of surfboard makers at that time. You had Al Merrick at Channel Islands, and Rennie Yater…and they’d say ‘make it like this. I’d bring it back to them, and they’d say "Yeah, that's it – can you make me a bunch more like that.’ I’m a self-taught guy, but I've been helped out a lot by pretty much the best teachers in the business.”
Still, Ames wasn’t sure his business would fly, so he kept his “day job” in the restaurant business while gradually building a product line until the company became self-supporting about three years later. Eventually he moved it to Santa Barbara, closer to the companies that were buying increasing numbers of fins. “It was like, wow, I was really starting to make some money,” he recalls.
And finally, for timing: The earliest surfboards were simply flat, with no fins. The sport was revolutionized in the 1930s when fins were first added to boards, but for True Ames, growth really took off in the early ’80s, when surfers began to add multiple fins to their boards. Twin fins, triple fins, quads, thrusters… a whole new language and science developed around the dynamics of multiple fins, which meant only one thing: True Ames was making and selling more and more of them.
Add to that, says Ames, the fact that surfers started to need more than one board. “It used to be that you had just one board, and you used it until it wore out.” But as the sport grew, surfers felt they needed a short board, a long board, and more for varying conditions and locales.
True Ames also rode the windsurfing wave for a solid ten years too, up and down, Ames recounts. It was a period of phenomenal growth for the company – more employees, specialized equipment, and a lot of overhead. When the bottom fell out of the windsurfing market, Ames cut back and simplified, concentrating mostly on surf fins, and outsourcing production to China. He kept design, specification, and prototyping in-house: When I arrived for my interview Ames was wearing a mask and holding a sander. “I’m still a craftsman,” he says. “I develop everything right here,” referring to the Goleta facility where he’s now located.
As surfing has grown, Ames has benefited from his alliances with well-known professional surfers, with whom he teams up to sell fins. A single George Greenough 4-A fin, for example, invokes the legendary surfer of the same name and retails for $51. It’s marketed to those in the surfing know with these words: “…a unique understanding of his aquatic fish friends is the foundation here. Install the 4-A on any performance surf vehicle and you will find instant bliss.” Timmy Patterson fins “excel in the rippable waves of Trestles” and the classic Rennie Yater’s “upright template, combined with minimal flex, creates a fin that has stood the test of time.”
Ames’ memories of Cate have endured too, mostly people – “incredible friendships” he says, and teachers, like Paul Denison Sr., who took Ames under his wing. “There were a lot of great, late-night conversations with him,” he recalls.
But again, location was key. Ames remembers his parents discussing the boarding school options with him and telling them, “Cate – that’s the one near Rincon. That’s where I want to go.”
Saturday morning surf outings, according to Ames, were a ritual. “The alarm clock goes off at 4:40 a.m. Me and a bunch of other guys get up and make a beeline across the avocado fields with our boards. And I’m not just talking a few times. We did this every weekend – it was a core group. Afterward, we hitched back to Carpinteria for breakfast.” He asks me: “I don’t imagine it’s like that these days?” already knowing the answer.
Times have changed for Ames too, and with 35 years of fin making behind him he runs a tight ship in his Goleta facility. Throughout the afternoon, a series of local customers come in and out, and he engages in some casual banter. “But don’t be fooled,” he warns me, “just because this is a surfing business doesn’t mean it’s not serious. Things still have to get done on time.”
True Ames’ online business is robust. The company’s website touts a display of fins for surfboards, stand up paddleboards, and windsurf boards in a dizzying array of sizes, shapes, textures, materials, and colors, offering the customer advice on how to choose the right set-up. “No surf store can stock all these items,” says Ames. “The website is very successful.”
The company has just a few employees now, and, not surprisingly, most of them enjoy a life on the water as much as their boss does. A collection of surfboards, tricked out in True Ames fins, stands ready in a corner of the shop. “Sure, I encourage them to get out there,” says Ames. “It’s surfing season. But get your work done too.”
