Orange County's Endless Summer Podcast: Peter Hamborg Transcript

Orange County firefighter Peter Hamborg is a longtime Huntington Beach resident who has created a surfing and skating hybrid simply called the "Hamboard." Hamborg, along with his five boys, build the Hamboards, a nearly-seven-foot-long skateboard, out of the family''s garage. The Hamboard gives riders the sensation of surfing coolness without ever getting wet, making hanging ten or walking the nose possible. Hamborg talks specifics about the Hamboard and how he came up with this innovative OC original.

AOCVCB:

I’m Paul Lasley and we’re here talking with Peter Hamborg. You may remember Gus Hamborg from an earlier podcast. Gus is one of Peter’s five kids and Gus grew up surfing and is a lifeguard and does all these great things. And Peter is a surfer and Peter has created great products. We’re going to get to that in just a minute. What makes Orange County special for you?

Peter Hamborg:
Well for me, well, gosh, it’s got a flow to it. So for me especially, it’s about the beach. The beach for me is the reason why I live in Orange County. I got a lot of family connections and friends but I’ll tell you what, the way the beach affects my lifestyle, it gives me opportunity to recreate, to contemplate, to be creative and just enjoy myself. The beach, the ocean, the sand, is just a place that’s just a magnet for me.

AOCVCB:

And you’re a firefighter in Orange County.  So having to be on call at least once every what, two or three days is sort of ideal for this kind of lifestyle.

Peter Hamborg:
Yeah. Truth be told. Even though I think I might have said during my interview at the fire department some altruistic things about serving my fellow man it really was I wanted a schedule that would allow me to enjoy the beach and go surfing as much as I could. And it’s actually turned out pretty well.

AOCVCB:

You and your kids are lifelong surfers here in Orange County and of course, Orange County has some of the world’s great surfing, there’s no doubt about that. You’ve sort of taken a concept to a whole other level and I want to go back, a few, well, probably, I’m probably a might bit older than you, not a lot but a might, and my first skateboard was a two by four with two metal skates nailed to each end and we used to take that up hills and go straight down at suicidal levels. Later on, skateboarding became a little safer and a lot more maneuverable. And of course, the skateboard, as we all know it has evolved now and you see these unbelievable athletes on skateboards. But the idea was to sort of replicate surfing but skateboarding and surfing are really two different things. You’ve combined the two in a remarkable project called the HAMBOARD. And you’ve got to tell me about this because this allows somebody who might be in Kansas to actually experience what surfing is like without water.

Peter Hamborg:
Yeah. You know it’s great. We stumbled upon it. And skateboarding is so neat in it’s own right. Like you said. Amazing athletes doing amazing things, but it was frustrating for me because being a surfer, skateboarding never really felt like surfing to me. And so, I wanted to make something that felt like surfing. I wasn’t designing a product. I was trying to make a trainer for my sons. I wanted, when they were little guys, I wanted to get them to have the feel of what it was like to be on an unstable surface that moved side to side when it turned. I went about it in a way where everyone was going “you can’t make a skateboard that big,” “it won’t turn right,” “it won’t feel right,” and I knew they were right. But the bottom line was we violated so many well-known design parameters that you’re supposed to follow when you design a skateboard, we violated so many of them that we actually coalesced into something completely different and it turned into the Hamboard. And it started off as just something that we were playing with for ourselves and low and behold we actually had something that other people wanted to buy because it did emulate surfing so well.

AOCVCB:

Well that’s sort of the surfing tradition in Orange County and elsewhere is that you take one design and you make it better. You think about it otherwise we would all be surfing on long boards, carved out of redwood trees that are about forty feet long.

Peter Hamborg:
Yeah. And then there was one guy that said “hey, we ought to try foam.” You know and put this stuff called fiberglass on the foam because the foam keeps on crushing and then one thing led to another. Yeah. Exactly.

AOCVCB:

And you can carry your board. I always marveled at Duke Kahanamoku.  My gosh. The board must have weighed one hundred pounds.

Peter Hamborg:
It did. It weighed over one hundred pounds. If it was me, I would’ve designed some type of wheel to put on the corner so I could drag it. But yeah, those guys carried those boards around.

AOCVCB:

Well the Hamboard is a lot lighter and much more portable. But it’s really, I guess for someone who’s never seen one, and we will put up a photograph up on the podcast, it’s really a long skateboard but it’s a lot more than that because you can do things on a Hamboard that you can’t do on a skateboard.

Peter Hamborg:
Yeah. You can. Because it’s like, it’s taller than me. I’m six foot tall. It’s six foot, eight inches long. It’s fifteen inches wide. It’s this big thing. It looks like a huge ironing board painted like a surfboard although it’s shaped just like a surfboard too. And you’re looking at it and you’re going “Wow, that is neat looking” but your sense of it is that’s going to turn as nimbly as a couch. But in reality, because of the technology that’s available, and the wheels and what they call the turning mechanism, which is the truck, the darn thing turns on a dime. It will just snap a turn. You’ll be able to carve it around stuff. And like I say, somebody in Fort Worth can throw it down in a parking lot, give it a couple of pushes and suddenly they feel like they’re in a famous surf spot riding a wave.

AOCVCB:

Well, we should say, surfing, for someone who hasn’t seen a wave, but most people in Orange County and Southern California have, but the fact is, surfing is not just sitting on the face of the wave and going down straight. You do things like carving, you come off the crest and you make this long sweeping turn to get into the wave.

Peter Hamborg:
You know what. Yeah. The classic maneuver, the Hang Ten, the Hang Ten, curling your feet over the nose of the board, is just one of the favorite things to do, for me to do on a Hamboard. And you do the thing where you’re kind of walking the nose and doing the back step and the drop knee turn. A lot of the classic maneuvers where on a regular skateboard you don’t have anywhere near enough room to do that. And so with the Hamboard you’re able to do these carviey, flowie classic maneuvers that everybody, most people when they think of surfing and those classic movies like “Endless Summer” and “Five Summer Stories,” that’s what they’re thinking about.

AOCVCB:

Or shooting the Bonzai Pipeline.

Peter Hamborg:
Or shooting the Bonzai Pipeline, which you can do, you just find a sidewalk with an overhanging palm tree or boganvillia bush, and you get in your tube crouch position and boom it’s just right there for you.

AOCVCB:

Well the Hamboard is destined to be one of the great innovations to come out of Orange County and I think you are to be commended for taking surfing to a whole new level and showing people who have never seen a wave how to surf.

Peter Hamborg:
Well thank you very much Paul. This has been a lot of fun.

AOCVCB:

Well tell us how to get a Hamboard. You have youTube video I know so you can look up Hamboard on youTube but you have a website.

Peter Hamborg:
Yes, it’s hamboards.com. And so if you can just get to hamboards.com you can check it all out and give you some information, you can order from there. And you know we ship for free anywhere in the U.S. so that’s a plus.

AOCVCB:

And it’s backed by the reputation of a great Orange County firefighter.

Peter Hamborg:
Oh, thank you very much Paul. That’s very gracious.

AOCVCB:

And to find out the latest happenings in and around Orange County, make sure to check in with OC’s official visitor site AnaheimOC.org. That’s AnaheimOC.org. I’m Paul Lasley. And I’m Elizabeth Harryman. Join us next time for another look at Orange County.