A Thursday in mid-January: it was the best day of the winter in California. For days rivermouths deposited sand (and lots of hideous human waste) onto nearby ocean floors. The spot where I surf transformed into a mini-superbank: 75 yards of pure highline speed, ending with a 30-yard winding sandbank barrel (and a few used syringes for good measure). If you didn’t go very, very fast, you were not connecting the dots. Many were called, few were chosen. Surfers were wondering aloud why their 18-and-a-half inch wide chip wasn’t making the grade.

User error? Perhaps.

One surfer rode faster than any other. He did so on a unique quad fin Fish. Paddling back out I had to inquire. “It’s a Rainbow…a Pavel SpeedDialer,” the guy yelled and whispered in the same breath, not wanting anyone to know his secret, but desperately wanting me to know. By coincidence, within a few hours I had an appointment with Rich Pavel to talk about his story and his designs.

Rich “Toby” Pavel, soft spoken and covertly cerebral, is driven by unique possibilities and is widely recognized as the man in San Diego for Fish designs–or any design for that matter. His boards are ridden by a variety of stalwart wave riders including Tom Carroll, Dave Rastovich, and Derek Hynd. But, as I witnessed this day, it is the everyday surfer who is benefiting the most from Pavel’s expertise. The following conversation took place at the Green Room in OB.

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