NEW HATS!
It has been a long time coming but we are excited to announce that we have finally produced new hats! The staff members weeded through several different designs, colors, hats, etc. but we feel that these new hats are off the richter scale! Grab one while you can before they are sold out and your left in the dust before they are back in stock.
Rich has been a busy man the past couple months shaping boards. He has been recreating boards from the 60′s for special wall hangers. The seal beach barber shop and Seal Beach Electric have some amazing boards on display that everyone should go get a look at! Rich spent countless hours with the planer shaving all these stringers down!
The annual Harbour Board swap this year was a great hit. We decided to move the location of the event to the Canvas Shop which is located just north of us on PCH. They allowed us to use their big backyard space which allowed for more boards, people, music and all out fun. We had Cameron and Jim playing some jams, Todd was feeding everyone on his amazing grill, The boys from hinano and destination surf were also on hand to show support. Many boards were sold and lots of stoke filled the air. Until next year!
We are very excited to announce the arrival of RAEN Optics to our sun glass family.
RAEN Optics is an independent, classics driven brand, aimed at bringing quality and authenticity to the boutique eyewear market.
Our goal is to provide timeless, tangible, quality items that function within our active lifestyles and those of our consumers. We are designers who are determined to continually bring new and innovative products to the marketplace, created for and inspired by the lives we live.
We are proud to announce the arrival of Thule Racks at Harbour Surfboards! Thule is one of the leading rack companies around and we are very excited to be carrying them.
The Thule brand was established in Sweden in 1942. Thule is a premium brand used globally for a wide assortment of products with a focus on solving the problem of how to bring equipment with you when using a car (roof racks, bike and water sport carriers, roof boxes). There are also other product areas such as accessories for recreational vehicles, trailers for active life (horses, boats, etc), snow chains and luggage.
Thule is the largest brand in the Thule Group.
With its origins in Sweden, Thule is now a truly global brand
In 1942, Thule was founded by the Thulin family, when Erik Thulin, a true lover of the outdoors, put the Thule name on a Pike Trap that he designed and began selling to the fisherman of Scandinavia. It wasn’t long before he added other practical things to his company’s portfolio. Business boomed, gaining profitably year after year.
By the 1960s, the company began to concentrate its business on car-related products, and before long the first roof rack was born. New product categories were added in the ‘70s and new markets were opened worldwide (e.g. US, Japan).
The Thulin family sold Thule to the publicly listed company Eldon in 1979. It continued to grow both organically and through acquisitions (trailers and rooftop box manufacturing), and Thule has been in growth mode ever since. New markets have been opened, product categories have been launched and several companies have joined.
In 2004, the Thule Group acquired Italian snow chain manufacturer König. An ensuing close collaboration resulted in a series of Thule branded snow chains for passenger cars. A year later, in 2005, RV Accessories company Omnistor was added to the Thule Group portfolio and integrated with Thule.
By acquiring towing systems company Brink in 2006, Thule Group added yet another product range to its portfolio. This integration has resulted in a series of towbars and bike carrier solutions.
Since 2007, Case Logic has been part of Thule Group. As a consequence of the collaboration between Thule and business area Carry Solutions, a range of Thule branded luggage, bags and cases was launched in 2010.
Staff member Shane Bowman really got the ball rolling recently with the new T shirt Design. We have a bunch of old magazine ads in our hallway at harbour surfboards and he decided to put the retro back in our name. The banana surfboard has been in our surfboard line since the break of dawn and we decided it needed to be on the back of a t shirt so we hope you enjoy it and wear it with pride!
http://www.shopharboursurf.com/shop/harbour-banana-tee/
thanks to shop grom for being such a fantastic model. Zico rocks!
Rich Harbour has had pneumonia the past few weeks but the good news is he’s feeling better and back in the shape bay! Check out these recent photos staff member Brian Kucera took of rich shaping Todds new plantain:
Sean Collins was a hot little gremmie surfer from Surfside when he first got on my surf team in the seventies. Sean’s dad had a sailboat and he and Sean would sail together, many times along the Baja coast. Sean would talk him into investigating possible surf spots that looked good on charts. Sean ended up surfing spots that were basically inaccessible by car and obviously, all to himself. But looking at charts was not the only thing he did. He figured that the best swells in the summer came from the southern hemisphere and he spent endless hours on the short wave radio trying to get information. He finally figured it all out and was able to predict when a south swell would arrive.
He also mastered when the swell would arrive whose origins were in the ocean off of Alaska. I’ll never forget when one winter day early in the week, Sean came by the shop. He said that a huge swell was on its way and would hit Seal Beach around noon on Friday. So typically, we surf hungry surfers got up at dawn Friday morning to be the first ones out. But it was flat as a lake – not a wave in sight. Everybody split grumbling things like, “Sean doesn’t know crap about wave forecasts.” So I was going home for lunch, and this Friday I just happened to take the long way home and check out the surf anyway. And what I saw was HUGE. Sean predicted it to the hour of arrival. I was so impressed and stoked. I got my board and got some big South Side waves in Seal Beach almost to myself.
Sean turned this talent of forecasting into a very successful business. Some people credit today’s crowds in the water that no one likes to Sean – too bad. Forecasting was inevitable, and I feel it’s stupid to blame him. He was just the Maverick that blazed the first trail and I admire him for this more than words can say. There were no books or knowledge about wave forecasting. He figured it out all by himself.
His passing on Monday, the day after Christmas was a great shock to the entire world of surfing. He was too young and athletic to succumb to such a sudden end to his life. I will miss him greatly. – Rich Harbour
Sean Collins, who created Surfline.com, whose forecasts and real-time views of beaches reach 1.5 million surfers a week, died on Monday in Newport Beach, Calif. He was 59.
While playing tennis, he had a heart attack, his business partner, David Gilovich, said.
Before Surfline, dedicated surfers would hang out on the beach for weeks at a time, dropping everything, including work and relationships, when the surf came up. Mr. Collins’s forecasts meant surfers could use their time more efficiently. It allowed them to continue to chase swells through what he termed “the responsible years,” and gave rise to a breed of plugged-in surfers who make their living through high-dollar contests or by chasing monster swells.
“Sean was a renaissance man,” said Bill Sharp, director of the annual Billabong XXL Big Wave Awards and a longtime colleague. “He could see something that was needed long before anyone else. From looking at an isobar line on a weather chart to having a sense of how people would want their information delivered decades down the line. He was surfing’s Leonardo da Vinci.”
Mr. Collins’s forecasting prowess was self-taught. He scrupulously logged daily surf conditions, studied obscure National Weather Service archives and used a short-wave fax machine — stringing antenna wire across Baja cactus plants — to receive weather reports from New Zealand and understand how Antarctic storms could send waves across the Pacific. His predictions astonished friends.
He joined a telephone forecast venture called Surfline in 1984, and two years later began a rival service called Wavetrak. He bought out Surfline in 1990 and five years later started Surfline.com.
Forecasts were refined with the help of Jon Chrostowski, a NASA scientist who hacked into data streams broadcast by weather buoys, and William C. O’Reilly, an oceanographer with the Scripps Institute who modeled the interaction of waves with the sea floor.
Mr. Collins was born on April 8, 1952, in Pasadena, Calif. He sailed the coasts of California and Baja, Mexico, with his father, a Navy lieutenant, and developed into a talented competitive surfer, following waves to Hawaii and financing his surf addiction through magazine photography.
He explored the Mexican outback extensively. “We’d spend months camping out and waiting for swells,” he said in an interview in 2002. “You can’t do that and live a normal kind of mainstream life.”
He is survived by his wife, Daren; two sons, Tyler and A. J.; his mother, Gloria; and his siblings, Whitney Jr., Gloria Burdette and Robert.
The way Mr. Collins’s friends and colleagues relied on his forecasts could be stressful — particularly when he became a go-to forecaster for California lifeguards, Navy Seals, the Coast Guard and major surf competitions.
In 2008, Mr. Collins phoned his friend Mike Parsons to demand that he and five friends abort an attempt on Cortes Bank during one of the worst Pacific storms on record. But Mr. Parsons had already left on an expedition that found waves a hundred feet high.
“Sean worried about us,” Mr. Parsons said. “If you were a loyal friend, there was just an incredibly strong bond. I learned so much about the ocean from him, but he was the authority. Now when we launch a mission, we’ll just sort of never know for sure.” – Taken from NYtimes.com
Happy Thanksgiving from all of us over at Harbour Surfboards. Just a reminder that we will be having our black friday sale from friday november 25th thru sunday the 27th. Everything online will be 20% off and in store 20-50% all items excluding surfboards.
We officially received our go pro HD2 cameras this past week. The improvements on this camera are insane! They give you double the mounting accessories, a floaty backdoor incase your go pro camera were to ever fall off your surfboard, it shots twice the megapixels, and the go pro shoots double the amount of photos per second. The staff is really excited about these and we took out our gopro the other day to bolsa chica state beach. The waves were very small around 1-2 feet, cloudy and cold but we all had fun and got some funny clips. 
