Prescribing medications isn’t much different than shaping custom surfboards, really. People come to you with ailments, you listen to the problems they’re having and send them along their way with the cure for all of their woes; simple as that. OK, maybe it's a bit more complex than that but I digress.

Enter surfing’s primary care physician: Jeff Lausch, or “Doc” as everyone in the surfing world knows him. Doc has been a Huntington Beach resident all of his life and has been shaping for 34 years, or about a decade under the aptly named Surf Prescriptions label. The Surf Prescriptions label has been one of Orange County’s hottest for over a decade and grown to worldwide popularity and with good reason. The highly refined and totally progressive shapes are a joy to marvel at out of the water and an absolute dream to ride in the water. The small shop located several miles inland Huntington Beach is where every Surf Prescriptions board is shaped, painted, glassed and finished. No out of house 3rd party hands in the mix ensures a very solid, reliable and consistent board that keeps customers coming back for years to get prescriptions filled. Doc’s team over the years has been a solid surfing roster filled with mostly under-the-radar talent and free-surfing prodigies that flat out rip. No ‘CT guys surf for DOC and no soon-to-be ‘CT chargers on the ‘QS tour ride Doc shapes. But, the surfers that are on the team are some of surfing’s biggest and brightest from Donovan Frankenreiter, Timmy Turner, Jay Larson and Coco Nogales to super groms Taylor Pai and Chase Newsome to name a few. We caught up with our first über-shaper Doc after a quick morning session in Huntington Beach to get his thoughts on surfing, shaping and Christina Aguilera…don’t ask, just read on.

- by Bryan Mills

How did you get into shaping?

My older brother worked in a surfboard factory- Plastic Fantastic - in downtown Huntington as the clean up kid. I used to go there and check it out and then I don’t know…I got the planer and got a blank and just went for it. I was 15 at the time and I’m 49 now, so that’s 34 years.

So just a few boards the first year?

I don’t even know. I could never put a number on any of them anymore. I’m really not good about good at keeping track.

What were your inspirations starting out?

Back then was right at the beginning of the short-boards. It was a cool time in surfing because the big brand longboard companies…their stuff didn’t look that good, so it was a wide open time to figure what a short-board was supposed to be like. There were a lot of no-name guys that became names at the advent of the short-board. Dick Brewer was like the Al Merrick of that era.

Do you ever see a day you’ll start shaping logs?

I do them now! You have to be careful about what you want to be and how you want to be perceived. I don’t want to be perceived as a good log guy.

Who’s shapes and designs out there right now do you like?

Everybody is a good shaper. Maybe not every board or every style of board, but anyone that’s done their share of boards is a great shaper.

Compared to the shapers back in the day, do you consider yourself and modern-day shapers to be more “engineers” opposed to the traditional “shaper” that takes the blank to finished product all by hand?

There’s different styles; different styles of how you use the computer. There’s some guys that are good shapers that have a good name that don’t even have a planer; they do it all on computer. I have a computer and I’ve done some designing, but I’m super non computer guy. We use the computer a lot for reproducing. I still grab a blank and shape it from start to finish and I still do some designing that way. I’m not like the guy that doesn’t own a planer; I’m a lot closer to the guy that hand shapes every board.

Every board comes through this factory?

Every Surf Prescription.