When Tom “Pohaku” Stone builds a surfboard, he’s actually recreating a piece of surfing history. That’s a pretty unique perspective to giving life to a brand new board – as if this new particular piece of wood is its own surfing time machine. And if one man is qualified to build such a craft, it’s Stone himself, collecting three masters degrees in Polynesian Studies and now teaching at the University of Hawaii. “I wanted to know if some things were fallacies in the surfing world. How much had been made up and what part of our known history was the truth or not,” he says. So he set out to build boards that taught him Hawaii’s and surfing’s history. He wanted to remember what it was really like to ride a wood board. He wanted to know just how magical it must have looked to Captain Cook when he showed up on shore to see people gliding on Omos. He wanted to recreate these and many other things that flashed back to how his ancestors. It turns out that infatuation with digging up ancient Polynesian history has created a collection of boards larger than his collection of graduate degrees.
