In a converted two-car garage on Linda Mar Boulevard in Pacifica, Beto Ortiz shapes surfboards by hand. He has shaped, by his count, somewhere over 4,800 boards since 1997. He does about 200 a year now, which is what one pair of hands and one back can comfortably do. The waitlist is 18 months.
Beto is 52. He grew up in the Outer Sunset, the youngest of four. He started shaping at age 17 in his uncle’s garage in Half Moon Bay. He worked for two San Francisco surf shops as their in-house shaper through the early 2000s, then went out on his own in 2011 when his second daughter was born. The garage in Pacifica has been his shop since 2013.
A custom Ortiz board starts at $725 and goes up to about $1,400 depending on the dimensions and the glassing. He does not take a deposit; he asks for payment when the board is ready. He sometimes shapes a board for a longtime customer and delivers it without an invoice; the customer Venmos him later, what they feel is right. He has been undercharged, he says, four times. He has been overpaid eleven times.
His tools are mostly the same ones he has used since his uncle’s garage. A Skil 100 planer he bought used in 2002. Three different Surform rasps. Sandpaper in four grits. A pair of safety glasses his wife replaces every six months because the foam dust eats them.
He shapes by feel. He has a small notebook on the workbench with the rough dimensions for each customer’s board, written in pencil. The notebook is on its eighth volume. The volumes are stacked in a milk crate under the bench.
“You can buy a board online in a week,” he says. “A board that fits you takes a year and a half. The wait is the board.”
About two-thirds of his customers are Bay Area surfers who paddle Ocean Beach or Linda Mar. The other third are repeat customers who have moved away, to Hawaii, to Australia, to Portugal, to Indonesia, and order remotely, shipping out a piece of cardboard cut to the rough outline they want with their dimensions noted in marker.
He has, in 28 years, refused three commissions. Once for a Bitcoin executive in 2017 who wanted a board with the man’s own portrait airbrushed on the bottom. Once for a fashion brand in 2019 that wanted Beto’s name on a board they would mass-produce in China. Once for a hedge-fund manager who showed up at his garage in 2023 and offered to skip the waitlist for $20,000 cash. Beto said no to all three. He did not say it angrily. He said it as if he had been asked the wrong question.
A board takes him about four working days, spread over two weeks because the glassing has to cure. He does the shaping in the morning when the garage is cool and his back is fresh. He does the glassing in the evening when his daughters are doing homework upstairs.
On the Wednesday I visited at 3:18 p.m., he was shaping a longboard for a woman named Inez who had been waiting since June 2024. Inez was 67 years old. She had taken up surfing at 62. The board was 9’6”, a custom round-tail. Beto would deliver it to her on a Friday. He did not know what she would do with it. He did not need to know.
