Here at Whalebone, we really love to surf. It's the backbone of this brand and the reason it exists in the first place.

East Coast surfing is its own thing. Cold water. Thick rubber for most of the year. Hurricane swells, wind swells, beach breaks that change with every storm, and only a few short months when you're lucky enough to surf in trunks. It's unpredictable, nuanced, and endlessly rewarding—but grabbing a random board off the rack rarely cuts it. Around here, the best boards are built for these waves.

We were introduced to Charles Mencel years ago by a former NJ pro surfer turned Montauk local, and we were hooked immediately. His boards are beautifully handcrafted and more importantly, they're built with a level of thought, intention, and creativity that we can actually feel under our feet. Charles has spent the last twenty years shaping boards specifically for the East Coast, and over the years we've worked together on nearly every detail of every board he's built for us. If you peeked inside our personal board shed today, you'd probably think you walked into a Mencel showroom.

"Whalebone, much like Mencel Surfboards, is really a family. It’s a group of friends and community members invested in supporting something grassroots—brands that grow organically and are pushed forward by the people we grew up surfing with.

I think that’s the differentiator: when you build a brand like Whalebone or Mencel, you’re doing it because it’s always been part of you. It’s something you’ve always done, something that’s just who you are. Any brand built that way shines."

In a lot of ways, this collaboration felt inevitable. Not because we already support eachothers craft, but because both brands were built from the same place: a genuine love of surfing, an appreciation for hardwork, and a belief that community matters just as much as the product itself. Charles shapes every board by hand for the waves we surf here in New York, and we've built Whalebone the same way—slowly, organically, alongside the people we've grown up surfing with.

These boards are a celebration of that shared philosophy. They're built for East Coast waves, made by our favorite shapers/humans in the game, and created for the community that's been behind both of us from the beginning.