“For me, surfing is kind of a hidden pleasure, and I just enjoy the feeling of being out in the water, alone, with a salty taste on your mouth and your skin,” says Gonzalo Aixa, a surfer and indie surf book publisher from Barcelona, Spain. For the ongoing interview series “When I Grow Up” I explore multiple possibilities where the sea can take you professionally.

This time it’s an editor of a niche publishing house with a goal to introduce the Spanish reading community to the best surf books out there. The Fishbone Project is a passion project pursued for more than a decade and flooded with the one-of-a-kind philosophy towards life and things you do that every surfer somehow inhabits and splashes onto others too. “At Fishbone we are not going anywhere, we are just enjoying the journey,” goes one of 10 commandments for this small indie surf book label. “The mere fact of searching makes us happy”, “Fishbone doesn’t owe anyone anything”, “Fishbone is free to do whatever he wants”, “improvisation is guaranteed” and “bad vibes are prohibited”.

I got to know The Fishbone Project thanks to the Sea Library. Gonzalo, who owns not only a sea book collection of his own and a versatile quiver of surf boards, but also a small traditional wooden catamaran typical from Barcelona shores known as Patin Catalan (which means Catalonian Glider), has gifted some of the Spanish titles to the Sea Library’s collection: George Orbelian “Essential Surfing”, Jordi Vila Magrané “The Pájaro Azul”, Bob Smith “The Basics of Surfboard design” (dedicated to all surfers who know how to laugh) and others. Please, check The Fishbone Project’s catalogue for all its released titles.

“Please don’t take us for what we are not,” goes another truthful and fun publishing commandment. “We are little things, treat us with kindness. Our financial lung has chronic emphysema, our operating muscle is sore and our understanding is leaking from the humidity and salt.”

Gonzalo was kind enough to tell me more about the publishing label, his love for surfing and books and found time to wrote this amidst packing for a surf trip to The Côte des Basques in France.

Tell us about the Fishbone Project. How did it start?

I have always been an avid reader, and since I started surfing, I tried to find and read as many as books as possible regarding to the topic. 

In this search, specially boosted after the Amazon boom in early 2000’s, I found that all interesting books were written in English, and there was nothing in Spanish. Being myself fluent in English this was not a problem for me, but sure it was for a lot of Spanish speaking surfers, both in Spain and Latin America, and I thought that there was a gap here that I could cover. 

I thought that creating a publishing label that could spread some interesting stuff about surfing in Spanish, could be my way to bring back to the cosmos some of the pleasure I have been taking from surfing during the years.

Nowadays, after fourteen years, I am proud to see that my small independent project has done its part, and has been able to sell some thousand units of pretty nice selected surf books that were relevant for me as a reader. 

How long have you been surfing and what do you love most about it?

As a kid born and raised in the Mediterranean, the sea has always been there, with family summers in the beach, in the islands, playing in the sand, and when surf was up, in the waves. We are talking about 80’s boogie boarding, cheap skateboarding and little more. No equipment, no information, just instinct…

But at mid-nineties, with some surf shops already available, and once I was able to drive and acquire some stuff, I finally ended up surfing, and from the very first time I had a session, I got stoked from life. It was something that was inside of me and ready to pop out.

For me, surfing is kind of a hidden pleasure, and I just enjoy the feeling of being out in the water, alone, with a salty taste on your mouth and your skin. I have never been attracted by competitive surfing, surfing brands, and the “cool urban” surfing aesthetics. I think I have tried to display it in our surfing books.

In the Mediterranean, waves are scarce, we do not have oceanic consistent swells pumping regularly, so surfing sometimes could be a masochist activity that requires lots of patience and effort to get into the water in the right time and place. If not the case, with the midday thermal winds of our shores, you can always hoist up a sail or jump into any other artifact to keep yourself offshore.

Now, it’s almost 30 years of surfing in my back, and I am still anxious to get into the water whenever I feel the sea is pumping.

What challenges are there in being an editor of an independent surf book publishing label? And what’s the sweetest part of it?

As you can imagine, as a small independent publishing brand, completely funded by its own means, the lack of resources is always a challenge that we must face, and I have tried to solve it in each project using imagination and creativity instead of money. 

In my case, even that my label could take the form of a small business, it is not at all, and I have always tried to keep any typical business bad mood away from the label. Some wise man said to me one day, “May your passion not become your poison”, and I am stuck on it, and since I said to myself that no income of the label would be used to pay my mortgage or any expense of the rat-rate modern city living, I have always been free to do the projects I loved, event they do not sell, at my own pace.

After fourteen years, I can only say that my balance is ultra positive, and I am pretty happy that my books have achieved the recognition of the readers, some of them, have got nice sales, even abroad, and have got some attention from time to time of the critics and even some relevant media.

And this project has given me the opportunity to meet some fantastic characters that reside, more than in surfing world, in its surroundings (shapers, artists, authors, musicians…).

Tell us about your craziest (scariest!) surfing moment!

I have a ten stitches scar in my face that tells the story of a bad session in a March winter swell in Barcelona beaches, but I specially remember one day when I was drifted away from the beach by the currents, and had to go out from the water jumping over a sharp cliff of rocks and mussels, breaking the board and with several important cuts and wounds on the soles of the feet as a result. 

And from time to time, you get hit by a wave or a board, cut by a rock or violently sucked by a rogue wave. It’s just the sea reminding you who is the boss.

What inspires you?

The good stories, originality, individualism, creativity, and those personalities that you find off the beaten path. And always longing for lost paradises, the nostalgia of golden eras that never will come back, or maybe never existed…

Is there a book about the sea or surfing that you would suggest reading? 

Hard to pick only a few from my shelves… 

Related to surfing, I especially enjoyed and recommend the biography of Miki Dora, the book written by David Rensin, “All for a few perfect waves”, “Big Wednesday”, from John Milius, and many others… 

And related to the sea, lots of them… I recall “Eloquence of the sardines”, from Bill François, absolutely a hidden gem, super instructive, funny and easy to read.

Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels use to take place in the sea too, and if you are able to distract yourself from the author’s misogyny and violent scenes, you can find several attractive descriptions and seawater adventures, like in “You only live twice”, where Bond ends living on an island of the ama Japanese pearl hunters (and has a kid, sorry for the spoiler), or “Octopussy”, which describes a nice underwater stroll in Jamaica with reef creatures that ends bad.

I can think about a lot of world circumnavigation diaries too (Bernard Moitissier, Joshua Slocum, Sir Francis Chichester…), some tales from Jack London (“The Cruise of the Snark”, “Tales of the South Seas”), “Lord Jim”, from Joseph Conrad (in my humble opinion, forget about “Heart of Darkness”) and one of my favourites books ever, “The Navigator”, from Morris West, for everything, for its characters, the scenery, the ancient history, and the shocking ending. 

What does the sea mean to you?

Home, where I belong, where you always come back, something that is always there… My family use to say that someone can know I’ve been surfing that day just looking the bright in my eyes.

Thank you, Gonzalo!

www.thefishboneproject.com