Aftanas Surf Designs-Surfing on Vancouver Island Tofino- Surfboards News about Aftanas Surfboards and the vibrant Vancouver Island Surf Scene On Vancouver IslandSurfboards hand made by Canadian Surfboard Shaper Stefan Aftanas- Tofino B.C. Aftanas Surf Designs team riders surfing custom Stefan Aftanas Surfboards - CanadaLinks to friends and links of and about Aftanas Desigins Surfboar
The history of Aftanas Surf Designs and our custom, hand shaped surfboards - West Coast, Vancouver IslandAftanas Surf Designs partner, Board Medic which specializes in Surfboard Repairs, Ding Repair, Foam Blanks, Surfboard Glassing, Fin Replacement- Tofino, B.C. Canada, Vancouver Island Contact Aftanas Surf Designs at our home near the beach in Tofino B.C., Canada, Vancouver Island

Born and raised on Vancouver Island, Stefan Aftanas started his affiliation with surfing in a manner familiar to many West Coast surfers: with a rented board from Gold Coast Surf Shop in Nanaimo. Coming into the culture in the midst of the consistent south swell season of 1990, he found his “priorities to be suddenly rearranged,” and moved to Australia for a year to immerse himself in the sport. In Ulladulla on the south coast of New South Wales, he was introduced to the arcanities of surfboard shaping and design: “I was trading guitar lessons for the opportunity to hang out and watch the local guys shape.”

After returning home and “doing the Sombrio scene for a while,” Stefan traveled south again, driving a van from Canada to Costa Rica, and, fortuitously, back again: “being in Baja and watching a truck come around the corner in my lane with no shoulder to pull off on, the truck hitting my side mirror and spraying glass in my face, the closest I think I’ve come to death in my life.” Back on Vancouver Island, Stefan was drawn to Tofino by the promise of year-round surf. Settling on the West Coast, he picked up the fundamentals of shaping from long-time Tofino surfer-shaper Jack Gillie.

“Right from the start, the appeal of it to me has been shaping as an art form, grabbing shaped blanks from the nose and looking along the lines of the board at the contours and curves, how they all came together into three-dimensional function. Jack taught me the important parts – how to look for kinks in the rocker, concaves and how they work. I was working for him as a carpenter, and I started using his space to shape and glass boards.”

  

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Through the following years, Stefan solidified his technical skills as a shaper while continuing to push his surfing at home and abroad. Building boards for himself and a number of committed Vancouver Island surfers, he established a reputation as a standout local source for fine-crafted custom shapes. “I set up my own shaping bay when I had a space of my own. I was bargaining with my roommates to give me their garage space, and it evolved over time from there. I’d take a carpet and lay it down for the resin to drip off onto. And then eventually I switched over to UV-cure resins, and got it down to a more effective and productive operation. And over time there was more demand, so I started selling; first as Tribal Visions Surfboards, then Tribal Designs, and then Aftanas Surf Designs when I finally felt that my product was at a point where I wanted to have my name on it and could compete with anything that people were buying off the rack. The cross logo was hand-made too; that was my crap old computer with WordPerfect Autoshapes.”

Through years of applied experience in the challenging surf conditions of Vancouver Island – an environment that includes everything from sloping beachbreaks to slabbing backcountry reefs – Stefan’s shapes became increasingly refined, and he grew his template offerings from standard shortboards to include fishes, longboards, funboards, towboards and a variety of alternative shapes. With the feedback that came from having his boards under the feet of some of Canada’s premier surfers, Aftanas Surf Designs boards became go-to performance equipment; in 2003, Sepp Bruhwiler won the Men’s Pro division of the Quiksilver Surf Jam on one of Stefan’s shapes, and the following year surfers on Aftanas Surf Designs took three titles in the Surf Jam: Peter Devries in the Men’s Pro, Ben Murphy in the Men’s Amateur, and Noah Cohen in the Juniors.

In 2004, Stefan began shaping full-time to meet increased demand, and is currently shaping out of his new shop set into the forest on the inlet side of Tofino. He continues to work with many of Canada’s most accomplished surfers, both as team riders and as sources of design input. Home-grown and hand-crafted, his boards are available as customs or through choice surf shops on the West Coast. Nothing mass-produced, nothing phony, nothing ill-informed or attitude-laden. With 10 years of shaping sticks for some of the hottest surfers on the West Coast, Stefan Aftanas holds a position as one of the Pacific Northwest’s most well-respected surfboard designers, producing a full range of performance and everyday equipment for Vancouver Island and all points beyond.

-Malcolm Johnson

 

"I don’t want people to buy my boards because of advertising, but because they see other people surfing them well, and because they have total confidence that their boards will be what they wanted. So that’s my mission now; just to make beautiful, functional boards, and to see how far the designs can go.”