Gold found on the cutting room floor

This week, “The Josh Hall Story” world premiers at the fifth annual San Diego Surf Film Festival. In honor of this event, SeaLevelTV released two short videos of unseen footage, honoring the wisdom, story, and legacy of Skip Frye.

It’s not that often you that get lucky enough to sit down with a living surf legend. Now throw in a candid discussion on his thoughts about God, the complicated process of passing on his skills and secrets of shaping surfboards. Oddly enough, all these things happen to be intertwined for Skip Frye and Josh Hall.

As a teenager, Josh Hall, a young shaper from Pacific Beach, San Diego had enough vision and moxie to turn his solemn wonder of Skip Frye into his own ethos for carrying forward the astonishingly rich legacy that is San Diego surfing.

Today, business trends encourage us to look at the current landscape and the future to solve for the next big, shiny new thing that will captivate the hearts and minds of many. Sometimes looking back and honoring history can be construed as having a lack of fresh ideas or simply a way to learn from failure — an important box to check in the race to "innovate" — rather than deriving actual value that was hard won on the backs of those that lived in a less connected, simpler world. 

In the case of Josh Hall, he's unapologetically rooted in the past, using the knowledge and craftsmanship of those that came before him to write the next chapter of surfing history.