Building any surfboard, let alone a high-performance shortboard, requires the utmost focus. The shaping bay is a strict TikTok-free zone, where any distraction is felt in the board’s foam.
That’s why 16-year-old Fletcher Whittle’s skills on the tools are a welcome surprise. Hailing from Wilmington, North Carolina, Fletcher not only shapes his own surfboards, he shreds on them, too. He’s ridden his own designs to multiple ESA Eastern Championships, including the Under-14 Shortboard final on a self-made handshape.
The video above comes from Micha Cantor of Erratic Nerve, who filmed Fletcher ripping around his hometown and got him mic’d to talk about his activities in the shaping bay. The son of a photographer and schoolteacher, Fletcher got into shaping after hanging with Will Allison, a North Carolina surf legend who charged the North Shore in the ‘70s, competed with Tom Curren in the ‘80s, and was inducted into the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame in 2006.
Erratic Nerve/YouTube
It would be one thing if Fletcher were making wide fishes with flat rockers. While still labor-intensive, that is a far different enterprise than the high-performance shortboard. At 16, he’s undertaking arguably the most difficult job a shaper can do. The required subtleties in concave and nuances of foil that make a shortboard soar don’t happen by chance.
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Fletcher’s gone from newbie to certified good. He even has his own label for customs, FSW Surfboards. When Micha asked Fletcher what his favorite part of shaping was, he paused before answering, “Being able to do the entire thing myself. Every step of the process, I did. You have to not mess up anything. It’s more of an art, You have to do every single thing yourself. And it’s more rewarding when it’s good, I feel like.”
Who said Gen Z doesn’t have an attention span?
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