The story behind the noodles.

In 1989, back when I started surfing, the dark days of the thruster were at their peak. This was a few years beofre Joel Tudor came along and the surf film Litmus opened people's eyes to the possibility of riding something other than a 6 foot shortboard. All I was interested in was long boarding. Which meant not only was it nearly impossible to find a board over 7 feet, but even if you did, you were viewed as some kind of freak, expected to surf at obscure out of the way spots away from the frantic ass wigglers.

As someone who grew up inland and had come to surfing relatively late (20) I hadn’t been indoctrinated into the southern California shortboard cult and just wanted to follow the path of my heros from the glory days of years gone by. Men like George Downing, Dale Velzy, Greg Noll, and Hobie Alter. 

I would see the stories of simpler times, people camping along the California coast, living off the sea, building their own boards and basically, unbeknownst to them, creating what is now the surfing lifestyle. Somewhere I scrounged up a triple striger 9'6" and began my journey of trying to create my own version of the old days. 

Fast forward. Martha’s Vineyard, 1995. 

One cold December afternoon after surfing for several hours in the snow, we were sitting around the woodstove eating Vietnamese food that we had prepared and riffing on surfboard building. Eventually we started tossing around name ideas and when I looked over at the package that the noodles we were eating had come in, there it was "BANH PHO".
Somehow Banh Pho' Surfboards & Crispy Noodle came to mind and that was it. I had a name. The crispy noodle aspect came from one of my favorite restaurants, Tu Lan, on 6th and Market in downtown San Francisco where Julia Child had visited in the 70's and made semi famous. The Crispy Noodle dish is one of my favorites.Now I needed a logo. Once I decided that I was going to create my own brand of surfboards, It was only right to look to my hero’s for inspiration. Many of my favorite shapers from the 50's and 60's had logos that were based around an oval. Others, including two of my favorites, Reynolds Yater and Hobie Alter, had a modified oval on the top of a tapering base. This would become my foundation.