Encinitas Surfboards

Sep 28

The night softens the edges of Highway 101 as it slides past storefronts and palms, and there it is — Encinitas Surfboards, glowing faintly against the dark. The sign hums its promise: surf, wax, boards, legends. It feels like a portal into another time, a time when surf culture was still raw, when the wind smelled like salt and stories were spoken in board lengths.

The shop began in 1975, when two craftsmen — Marc Adam and John Kies — who had cut their teeth at Koast Surfboards, decided to take a risk. With tools in hand and salt in their veins, they opened a place of their own. Not much in the spirit has changed since then — the door still exhales the scent of wax, the walls still echo with surfers trading swell forecasts, and the boards remain sacred objects. Marc still presides over the store, and John still shapes — his Kies Custom Shapes line tying the present to the shop’s earliest days.

Step inside and you find racks of wetsuits, stacks of fins, deck pads, wax — but also history. The grain of the old wooden boards, the tears in T-shirts hanging on the walls, the marks worn into the counter where locals have leaned for decades. Encinitas Surfboards has resisted the drift toward chain stores and polish. It has stayed true, one of the last remaining “core” surf shops around, still as much gathering place as retail outlet.

And all around it, the town breathes. Swami’s reef looms to the south, a point break with mythic weight, while Leucadia’s shoreline stretches north. Against that backdrop, Encinitas Surfboards plays its part quietly but firmly, holding the line between past and present. For nearly fifty years it has anchored the culture, a place where old souls and new wave riders alike find what they need before stepping into the sea.

In the pre-dawn hush, before traffic stirs and the Pacific unfurls into sound, imagine a surfer stopping by, grabbing a bar of wax or a new fin, carrying forward a tradition that is as much about belonging as it is about riding waves. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s living culture — still breathing, still here.