ET Surfboards
At dawn, the light is still hesitant—an in-between hour where the world belongs to those who rise early enough to seize it. ET Surfboards sits in that pale glow like a shrine, worn but resolute, its neon memories humming beneath the quiet street. The surfer, half-awake and half-dreaming, walks past on the way to the sea.
This ritual—the passing glance at the shopfront, the sound of keys jangling, the whisper of wax against fiberglass—is as much a part of surfing as paddling out. It is in these pre-dawn crossings that the soul makes its ledger: the shop is not just retail but compass, the point from which the day tilts toward salt and freedom.
ET Surfboards, born in 1972 out of Hermosa’s restless surf culture, became more than a place to buy boards or wax. It was an anchor in a town that churned with talent and rebellion, a heartbeat of South Bay surf life. Brothers Eddie and Tommy—the shop’s namesake—built it as a space for groms and legends alike, a place where the community could gather, argue fins, or map out their next strike mission.
Through the 1970s and ’80s, it stood as the backdrop to a generation that produced world-class surfers and shapers, when Hermosa Beach was as important to surf culture as Biarritz or the North Shore.
To walk by ET in the pre-dawn hours is to feel that lineage. The shop’s weathered sign recalls countless summers, endless winters, and the ghosts of contests long since won or lost. Here, surfboards leaned against the walls became totems of identity—short, single-finned blades for carving lines at the Hermosa Pier, or the newer thrusters that revolutionized the sport.
Every surfer who came of age in the South Bay carries a memory of ET: a first board, a last repair, a conversation that unlocked the secret of a wave. At dawn, when the streets are empty, the shop becomes myth, and to pass it is to acknowledge that surfing is not just an act, but a way of belonging.
ET Surfboards
904 Aviation Blvd, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254
