It has been a decade since Santa Barbara’s John Bradbury passed away. Taken from his family and friends at too early an age by leukemia, Bradbury was known around the world for being a visionary surfboard shaper and a damn fine surfer, to boot (not to mention an absolute demon on the baseball diamond). His Creative Freedom label enjoyed a practically cult-like following among Central California surfers throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s, before winding up underneath the feet of some of the best surfers in the world, such as Cheyne Horan, Brad Gerlach, and Martin Potter, during the high-performance firestorm of the mid 1980s. To this day, Bradbury-shaped surf craft hold a special status in the quivers of Rincon regulars and international surfboard collectors alike — mystical machines that simultaneously demand preservation and scream to be ridden until they die. As Channel Island’s Al Merrick, arguably the most well-known surfboard maker in the world today, put it recently, “Bradbury was the man!”
A couple of weekends ago at the Ventura County Fairground, the third installment of the Sacred Craft Surfboard Expo honored Bradbury and his legacy. A two-day gathering of the tribe dedicated solely to surfboards and the people who make them, Sacred Craft is a decidedly un-corporate coming together in the day and age of machine-shaped, mass-produced wave riding vehicles. Started by Surfer Magazine editor Scott Bass in 2007, the Expo is a feel-good effort to preserve the soul of a sport that all too often seems to be drowning in a sea of big-business agendas and high-gloss marketing campaigns designed to make you open your wallet more than you paddle out.
Source: SB Indy
Here is Kil's friend Chad gettin' down on The Woodis
Check out Rob Machado a couple years back shapping!
j7 was also holding it down with shapes by Jason Fiest- chek out his boards here
More info here
Can't wait for next year!
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