Watch: Ian ‘Gato’ Gottron Takes An 80s Campbell Bros Bonzer To The North Shore

Old things don’t stay dead. Not if you wait long enough.

Give it 30 years, give or take, and objects from the past crawl back and return as fashionable for the modern set, ready to be claimed by those who’ve forgotten why they were left behind. 

Maybe it started when Creed McTaggart began digging out sun-fried bananas from the depths of garage sales, or maybe it’s just the way things go, always in circles. But there’s something undeniably satisfying about reviving beaten-up surfboards and giving them a second shot at life. 

Ian ‘Gato’ Gottron knows this game. The Dana Point shredder is a relentless Craigslist scavenger, and he recently stumbled on a Campbell Bros bonzer—faded, forgotten, and more artefact than surfboard, having spent its life nailed to the wall of a restaurant. He picked it up, gave it a few home sessions to break it back in, then took it straight to the North Shore.

“I’m always on the lookout for boards on Craigslist, and I ended up picking this one up from a guy who had never really ridden it. It used to be a wall hanger in a restaurant. So it was really old, but it hadn’t been ridden much.”

“I rode it a few times at home, and then I was heading to Hawaii and thought, ‘Fuck it. I’m just going to bring this thing and see what happens.’ Then I ended up breaking all of my shortboards.”

“Sometimes it felt like a thruster, but then you’d be in the barrel, and it would do these trippy things. It’d slide out where you’d expect it to slow down, and then speed up in weird places. It was really interesting. I never really get waves at Pipe because it’s always so fucking crowded, so I end up just drifting over to Off The Wall and surfing there.” 

Want more from Gato? Check out his surf-media platform, silentrock.tv. And, for more board nostalgia, read our latest interview with surfing’s OG recycling pirate, here.