How Did Dave Rastovich Become Our 2024 Electric Acid Psychonaut?
Reintroducing ourselves to surfing’s reluctant messiah.
Over the past couple years, we’ve asked 11 of surfing’s top filmmakers and photographers what the best surfing they’ve ever seen is.
Three of them told a story involving Dave Rastovich.
In fact, the reclusive regular footer from New Zealand appeared more in our Best Surfing I’ve Ever Seen series than anyone else — including John John or Kelly. The Rasta sessions spanned from the early 2000s to COVID, and ranged between pointbreaks, heaving tubes, and perfect beachies.
As one Premium commenter put it, “Rasta’s reclusiveness seems to be making surfing’s collective heart grow fonder.”
To say we’ve been dreaming of doing a project with Dave would be an understatement… but he’s not always the easiest to track down.
“Sometimes I find it easier to put a message in a bottle and throw it into the ocean,” laughs his longtime friend Sean Doherty. “That might reach Dave before a phone call or an email did. There was always a joke that people would use smoke signals to try and summon him. If you’re working with him from the capacity of a brand or a magazine or whatever, he definitely presents some unique challenges. The last few years though, he’s been dragged kicking and screaming into the modern world a bit. He has a phone and occasionally he will answer it.”
And answer it he did, when Sam McIntosh called him to propose the concept of joining us as our 2024 Electric Acid Surfboard Test pilot.
Upon presenting him with the idea, however, we quickly realized that Dave had never watched a single Stab film. Hell, he hardly knew we weren’t a print magazine anymore.
Heartbreaking? Maybe a little.
In line with his mythical off-grid ethos? Absolutely.
Though Dave later admitted to us that he has an intrinsic distrust of surf media — and was no doubt wary of our proposition — he also has a remarkable desire to amplify the search for solutions to surfing’s consumption problem. Namely, that of polyurethane and foam.
So, after watching through a collection of our films, he returned with a proposition.
If he was going to do it, he wanted the film to be a proof of concept for sustainable surfboard constructions — and he wanted to prove them in proper waves.
We’ll dive more into exactly what the construction alternative looks like over the course of the series’ release (though the more astute among you might have already guessed.)
“I think the sustainable aspect needed to be there, to get him over the line to do it,” says Doherty. “I think he’s got a growing sense of his own influence, and if he champions some of this sustainable stuff, he more than anyone can help make it a reality.”
A cornerstone of our Electric Acid series is friction. Through its duration, we’ve used the series as an opportunity to pull three-fin minded, performance inclined purists onto unfamiliar safaris of unconventional design. Our hope has always been to challenge the periphery of the surfer, while at once challenging the performance efficacy of each shaper’s design.
With the unexpected chemistry between Dane Reynolds and Ryan Burch, Stephanie Gilmore and Simon Jones, or Coco Ho and Matt Parker, we stumbled upon spontaneous marriages of traditional talent and left-field hydrodynamics.
Dave Rastovich however, will be our first test pilot who actively spends his surfing days atop a variety of ‘alternative surfboards’ — and his enthusiasm for the evolution of design theories cannot be overstated.
“I think probably the guy almost solely responsible for Dave’s interest in alternative boards was Dick Van Straalen,” continues Sean. “They were working on boards together in the early 2000s, and I feel like that was when Dave got kind of serious about fun boards.
“Dick is a really abstract thinker and a fun guy, they were really zigging while everyone else was zagging. It’s hard to think now when you paddle out and it’s a full fruit salad of every fucking board style under the sun. But 25 years ago that didn’t exist. Everyone was on the same kind of white rice thrusters. Dave broke away from thrusters pretty early on, even if he was just dabbling with new ideas. He was still riding thrusters through the early 2000s in proper surf. But those kinds of alternative designs increasingly became a part of his surfing from there.”
Over the past six months, Dave has immersed himself in the process of testing, understanding, and becoming physically intimate with our collection of psychedelic creations.
In fact, he’s been far and away the most enthusiastic participant we’ve ever had for a board test.
He’s painted pictures describing how the boards feel, he’s painted on the boards, he’s snapped them, he’s fixed them, he’s gone back and forth on which ones to eliminate, and he’s spent hours on and off camera attempting to develop a genuine understanding of the theories behind each design.
“He’s in his sweet spot,” says Sean Doherty, who has corresponded with Dave through the entire process. “He’s still in prime condition. He’s got this window where he can still surf at his best, and then we’ve had a year where the surf’s been incredible, and then he’s also had your project to push him along. It’s another reason to go surfing and try different boards and keep him interested and engaged. He’s had a pretty huge year in the water.
“I haven’t seen him this motivated to surf in a long time. Truthfully, the big kind of mainstream rollout isn’t really the Dave thing, but I think it’s been a good exercise for him. He has surfed so much for this project and he’s so jazzed on surfing at the moment.”
The first episode premieres live in California on September 28th, 2024 — and will be on site for our Premium audience on October 3rd.
