THE FIRE RACED through Lahaina last August so fast that it killed 100 people and destroyed more than 2,200 buildings, most of them homes. It left more than 7,000 people without their possessions and in need of shelter.
That afternoon, Kalyn Lepre, a 36-year-old nutritional therapist, grabbed her wallet and her grand- mother’s pearls and drove out of town. She lost everything else in her four- bedroom house: clothes, documents, jewelry, GoPro gear, a computer and seven surfboards. Lepre surfed almost every day; surfing was a source of joy and a means to maintain her mental health. Seeing her surfboards reduced to a pile of fibers-especially her prized baby blue Doug Haut custom long- board-was devastating.
“I was so in love with that board,” she says.
Jud Lau understood. The 53-year-old Maui native has been riding the waves since he was a teenager, and he’s been building surfboards for the last 15. He knows the value of a good surfboard. “A surfboard is part of your whole being-especially in Hawaii, where surfing originated,” he says. “Losing a board is like losing a part of your soul.”
So, wanting to help the victims in some way, he started thinking about all the surgeries who had lost their boards. “And I thought, That’s my area of expertise,” he says. “Surfing is a healing thing for surfers-getting in the ocean, connecting to Mother Nature.”
He realized he could give that back to them. Lau started by connecting people who wanted to donate extra boards to those who had lost theirs, about 200 boards total. Friends in Oahu and California collected another 550 boards and shipped them to Maui for Lau to distribute.
But many surfers, like Lepre, use custom boards designed to accommodate their size or the type of waves they ride. So Lau solicited cash donations-raising about $20,000-to cover the cost of materials for shaping custom boards to give away. Donating his labor, he made more than 40 boards that typically would have retailed for $00 to $1,500 each. He also enlisted the other shapers on the island, about a dozen of them, to make at least one board apiece, providing around 20 more surfboards.
Lau shapes the boards in his studio 35 miles east of Lahaina, carefully designing and crafting them one at a time. He cuts each board from a block of polyurethane foam using a computer-aided machine, then takes an hour or two to finish it by hand with planes and sanding blocks. When that’s done, he takes it to the glassing factory next door to be finished with coats of fiberglass and resin.
The recipients of Lau’s efforts include a Lahaina fireman who fought the blaze but lost his home and his surfboards; a man who had worked in a surf shop Lau managed 30 years ago; and Lepre. She messaged him what she’d lost, and he shaped her a high-performance, 9-foot, single-fin board with a sunset fading fro yellow to orange, and “Lahaina” in deep red letters in the middle.
“I cried when I saw it,” Lepre says. “He created an art piece for me, and this tool to help me move forward.”
The new board allowed her to get back in the water and start healing. Her first time out was last September at Ukumehame Beach. She joined hundreds of others in the ocean to honor all that was lost.
“Just getting back in the water was one of the most powerful experiences of my life,” says Lepre, emotion welling up in her voice. “It’s part of the healing you know you need, buy you don’t know how to get. Feeling joy again helps the moving forward. Jud gifted me back a huge part of my mental health.”
PHOTOGRAPH BY Marco Garcia