Mike Hall, the surfboard maker at the helm of Blackfern, creates boards specifically for the region’s waves.
Text by Travis Hancock
Images by Ashton Morgan
Surfboard shaper Mike Hall starts with a slab of snow-white foam. To the untrained eye it might appear that he has little work to do; the foam already bears the trademark look of a surfboard. But its edges are jagged, its middle thick, and its surface rough. So, like a sculptor removing marble from a hidden form, Hall begins drawing, carving, sanding, white powder gradually coating his hands and shop floor.
Blackfern founder and shaper Mike Hall enjoys conversations with customers who ride the bigger winter waves, which require him to visualize what qualities their boards will need to get through such conditions.
Where other shapers might sand further, pushing their foam to the thinness of a shark fin, Hall stops, leaving it a bit thicker toward the nose and foregoing any excess “rocker,” or lengthwise curvature. That’s because, unlike most other shapers, Hall is not making surfboards for the waves of California and Hawaiʻi. In the garage of his suburban Portland home, he shapes boards under the company name Blackfern that are perfectly suited to Pacific Northwest surf. “We have a very long continental shelf,” Hall explains, “which saps the waves of their energy. So it’s not as if they don’t have any power, but just compared to Hawaiʻi or some sort of open-ocean setting, they don’t have as much push.”
Maybe it’s because Hall is also a junior high science teacher, or maybe it’s his experience as a snowboarder, but he felt intuitively when he started shaping that a flatter board with more forward weight would make for a better glide on the rolling waves of the Oregon coast. “My first board surfed surprisingly well. It surfed better than the Hawaiian board I was riding,” he says. “I still had a little ways to go in terms of tuning my craft, but just the basics were there right away.”
In the early days, Hall bounced his surfboard business through friends’ backyards. Over time, he honed his craft, adopted an odorless, eco-friendly epoxy, and landed the ideal workspace. Unlike other rising shapers, he has not shifted to automated cutting machines. “It’s 100 percent hands-on all the way through, which is kind of unique,” he says. “For me it’s like, what’s the point if you’re not actually handing the customer something that you made?”
Hall’s purist approach has earned the respect of devoted customers, who come to him for bespoke shapes and hand-crafted color schemes. “They want something that has a bit more story behind it, or they have this vision of what they want it to look like,” he says. “I think it just adds a richness to their experience.”
In addition to custom builds, Hall stocks the burgeoning Northwest surf community with Blackfern surfboards via core Portland surf shops and Moment Surf Co. in Pacific City. As he cuts, shapes, and glasses each new board to perfection, he likes to imagine two proud Blackfern board owners meeting at the beach. “It’s not like they’re going to become best friends or anything,” he says, “but just having a little bit more community involvement, community connections that get established based on that is awesome.”