Brodie Chaboya Spreads His Love of the Sport With Launch Wakeboarding School
There are two words that come to mind after getting to know Sacramento-based wakeboarder Brodie Chaboya during a recent interview that went into the wee hours of the night at Kilt Pub: passion and dedication. Not only has Chaboya spent half of his lifetime pushing himself to progress in the sport he so desperately loves, he’s also spent countless hours teaching and coaching others, spreading his infectious joy for wakeboarding. Simply put, he is an ambassador of the sport. A self-proclaimed “31-year-old kid,” Chaboya is living the dream, despite getting the occasional, “When are you going to get married?” or, “When are you going to buy a house?” from family members. He’s part of the national-level Hyperlite Wakeboards Legion Team, he manages the NorCal Hyperlite men’s team, he gets to wakeboard behind crazy-awesome boats every day and just last year he purchased the company at which he had previously worked for years, Launch Wakeboarding School. “One of my buddies told me, ‘It’s the American dream, you’ve been working for the company for so long and now you own it. How much more perfect could it be?’” Chaboya smiled, sipped his beer and said, “At this point I really can’t complain, it’s everything I ever wanted to do and so much more.”
Chaboya grew up in San Jose and was bitten by the wakeboard bug early in life. What started out as recreational skiing, kneeboarding and tubing with his family on local lakes quickly turned into an obsession. “I was probably about 16,” Chaboya remembers, “And I saw somebody go by on a wakeboard one day, well, back then it was called a ‘ski board,’ and this guy came by and did a back roll or something, just right in front of us. He was just full-on inverted, landed, rode by and I was mesmerized. I said, ‘Mom, I want to do that! I want one of those!’ So the next year I got a wakeboard for Christmas.”
That same year, Chaboya’s father bought a Mastercraft tournament ski boat, a huge step up from the runabout family-style recreational boat he had been riding behind. Now he had the board and the boat, but one critical piece was missing: the inspiration and motivation that can only be brought on from watching professional athletes at work. If you’re going to go skateboarding, you watch a skate video; if you’re going to go snowboarding, you watch a snowboard video; if you’re going to go wakeboarding, you watch a wakeboard video. It’s a ritual. So, Chaboya bought the “most hardcore” video out at that time, Gravity Sucks, which is, to this day, considered a classic among wakeboard enthusiasts. “So I got that video and I watched it every day, I was all stoked and fired up,” remembered Chaboya.
“I still have it to this day on VHS,” he said with a laugh.
From there his passion for the sport skyrocketed–and no longer was it just weekends that he was itching to go out and ride, it was all the time. Chaboya and one of his closest riding buddies even went all the way to Florida for an intense weeklong wakeboarding camp. “It was a big deal to go to a camp and ride our butts off for a whole week,” Chaboya said. “We had our own private coach, and it was just me and my buddy and our private coach just riding all day, every day. By the third day we were just dead tired. We could barely move. But we came back and we had learned a ton of stuff.”
Photo by Riley Bangerter
Through being an all-around ripper on a wakeboard and his job working the pro shop at Cope and McPhetres Marine in Santa Clara, Calif., Chaboya was introduced to a bunch of industry connections, including an HO Skis/Hyperlite Wakeboards rep by the name of Joe Sassenrath. “I met him while working the shop,” Chaboya said. “He would come in and he was the total cool guy. He’d do demos and stuff, so I’d get to go on those.” Chaboya recalled one particular day where he was riding a board with “the hot new technology at the time” behind Sassenrath’s boat. “I threw down a decent set, rode pretty good, and I get back in the boat and he goes, ‘Hey, you rode really good on that board!’” Impressing Sassenrath with his skills was one thing; impressing him with his work ethic was another. “I started off riding for him and Hyperlite as a local and regional rider. It was basically just getting hooked up with product here and there and I’d go work sales and stuff, whatever I could do. You kind of earn your keep by helping out. If Joe needed help, I was there.”
Chaboya moved to Sacramento in 2001 to attend Sacramento State and kept in close touch with Sassenrath, who lives in Rocklin. Again, the young wake-rat showed his enthusiasm. “I just started working and doing everything I could,” Chaboya said. “I’ve pretty much been his right hand man since then for all the boat shows, wakeboard clinics, demos, sales, everything.” Also while at Sacramento State, Chaboya was re-connected with an old mentor of his, Ryan Fraser, who had helped teach him how to do one of his first inverted tricks way back when Chaboya was coming up. Fraser had started Launch Wakeboard School and was running lessons out of Folsom Lake. Naturally, Chaboya got a job as one of his coaches. “It was a killer gig while going to college, you know, making $12 an hour coaching wakeboarding. I couldn’t have been happier, it was a summer job and I got to ride every day. I was like, ‘Does it get better than this?’” The days were long and hot, though, as the company was booming, being among the top wakeboard schools in the region, maybe even the state. Twelve-hour days in 100-degree heat were commonplace in peak season and eventually it wore Chaboya down. “It was out of control, it was just crazy,” Chaboya remembered. “I couldn’t believe it. It was all day, every day.”
Eventually the two had “a little bit of a falling out” and Chaboya left the company. While he was gone, Fraser sold Launch to another one of Chaboya’s long-time riding buddies, a guy by the name of Ryan Ash, and according to Chaboya, “He just kind of let it go downhill. He just didn’t know what he was doing. He wasn’t the type that would be at the boat shows; he wasn’t in the industry.” Over the years, Ash would hit up Chaboya here and there to teach lessons, and he did, but eventually the company, much like the economy, started tanking and Ash just wanted out. “So last winter he was like, ‘Hey man, I’m done. This company fits you perfectly. You should just take it over. I’m done with it, I’m ready to throw it away.’”
Chaboya with a young student
Chaboya deliberated and eventually used every dollar he had saved from a gig working for the census and flat-out bought the company, the rights to the website (Launchwakeboarding.com–a site that Chaboya admits is outdated and “old-school”), and the company phone number, (916) 532-WAKE, a number that tends to ring all day as soon as the sun is out. “By the time I took it over it was mid-June last year and Ash goes, ‘I’m getting calls all day, every day, you can make your money back, it’s ready to go.’” Without regular access to a good boat to coach on, Chaboya spent last season doing private lessons on clients’ boats. “It went great,” Chaboya said of his first summer teaching lessons for the company he now owned. “I was getting busy, but not crazy busy. Busy enough to make my investment back, it was a crazy return on investment. I was stoked. I was just missing the boat thing.”
This year is different thanks to the folks at MB Sports Boats out of Atwater, Calif. hooking up Sassenrath and Hyperlite with a 2011 F21 Tomcat (sounds like some sort of jet but it’s really one helluva wakeboarding boat) that Chaboya has frequent access to. “I told them what I was doing and that I was fully insured as an instructor and MB was like, ‘We want that boat on the water every day.’” Now Launch Wakeboard School students will not only ride behind a state-of-the-art MB boat (if the Tomcat is preoccupied Chaboya has access to a number of other quality boats), they’ll also receive top-notch instruction from someone who’s been there, done that.
Brodie Chaboya teaching a student
“It’s a whole new level now,” Chaboya said of his recently rediscovered motivation to teach the sport now that the company is his. “I thought I was putting so much into it before, but it was kind of like, after that tenth hour of getting burnt out I probably wasn’t giving it a full 100 percent. Now, it’s like I’m giving it 110 percent every second. I pour my heart and soul into every lesson.”
One of Chaboya's students, Ty Piearcy, throwing a tantrum
Most recently, Chaboya has been impressed with two 16-year-old students from Elk Grove, Frank Schultz and Ty Piearcy. Both are progressing at a fast rate and are competing regionally. “Every time I’ve gone out with them, they learn something new. For me, it’s like I’ve just been getting this huge over-enjoyment out of it.” He pointed out that the week he spent in Florida with a personal coach when he was a youngster still to this day plays a role in how he teaches others. “I kind of attribute a lot of the stuff I coach these days to that, like how to break things down for people and whatnot.”
The majority of Chaboya’s lessons are with beginners, and he says that he’s fine with that, to him there’s nothing like getting someone standing up on a wakeboard for the first time and getting them hooked on the sport. But, when he does get the opportunity to work with young, advanced riders, like Piearcy for example, he can have a larger impact on their riding. “He’s right at that level where he just needs one little turn of the wrist this way, or to look forward instead of backward, or to get his shoulders squared up, and then boom, he sticks it. I’m always the guy that’s like, ‘OK, you’re right there, one more, one more!’”
Chaboya killing it on the Delta / Photo by Andy Guillinta
Whether you’re a beginner trying to get up for the first time on a wakeboard or you’re an experienced rider and are trying to get inverted (and land on your feet, the most important part), Chaboya is your guy. Age doesn’t matter either, he has already taught 7-year-olds to 63-year-olds this summer. With a most certain determination to get Launch Wakeboarding School back to where it once was when he was just an employee there, Chaboya acknowledged how much things have come full circle for him. “It’s been a roller coaster ride, ups and downs, but it’s just been totally cool. It’s been a joyride!”
Contact Brodie Chaboya for more information about Launch and to learn how you can get out on the water and ride with him by either calling (916) 532-WAKE or by emailing him at bchaboya@gmail.com. Find him on Facebook by searching for “Launch Wakeboarding School.” Also, on the first Saturday of every month this summer you can find him at Swabbies on the River doing board demos all day. Summer is here, get out and shred!
Church Underwater
The ocean is home to the world’s largest creatures. One of the most fascinating of these mammoth beasts is the giant squid. Rarely photographed, its elusiveness belies its ponderous size. As a result, the mysterious creature has inspired folklore, myth and art worldwide. It is fitting that such a beast would serve as the moniker for San Francisco-/Sacramento-based metal band Giant Squid. Titanic in sound, Giant Squid is difficult to categorize. Though the band leans heavily on the tenets of doom/stoner metal popularized by groups such as Isis—riffs are heavy, thick, slow and hypnotic and paired with wailing vocals laden with despair—Giant Squid pushes the avant-garde metal envelope even further, tossing in atmospheric keys, horns and strings into the mix. This strange sonic brew made the group’s debut full-length, 2006’s Metridium Fields, a noteworthy release for underground metal fans. On Feb. 3, Giant Squid may extend its reach even further with the unveiling of their latest album, The Ichthyologist.
Weirder, heavier and deeper than the group’s previous efforts, The Ichthyologist is a sort of heavy music kaleidoscope. Considered separately, the songs seem to share little in common with one another: The jazz-y “Sutterville” sways like a drunken zombie lounge singer; while the opener “Panthalassa” starts with a sinewy, serpentine guitar line that snakes into a wall-squalling metal noise. Yet, when listened to as a whole, these disparaging colors form a mesmerizing picture.
A portion of the album’s success should be credited to the man turning the knobs. In-demand heavy music producer Matt Bayles, who has worked with the aforementioned Isis as well as Mastodon in the past, served as producer for The Ichthyologist. According to Giant Squid singer/guitarist Aaron Gregory, the band, without the backing of a label, pooled its resources to pay Bayles’s considerable price tag.
“Everyone in the band chipped in their savings and then some,” Gregory says. “We sold some gear, and we finally got around to putting the rest of our Monsoon EPs online, and made some money off of those real quick. We managed to do it somehow. We put together a really large sum of money and hired him.”
It was money well spent. During our interview, Gregory refers to Bayles as a “taskmaster,” but says he appreciated the producer’s strictness.
“He really whipped us into shape, and made us make sure we play every note to the best of our ability, or he wouldn’t let it go,” Gregory recalls. “It’s one of the first records I’ve walked away from and said, ‘I’m pretty much OK with every single thing I did on that record.'”
The Ichthyologist‘s cohesiveness may also be attributed to its concept. The album coincides with Gregory’s first, yet-to-be-completed graphic novel by the same name. Gregory says that the comic book version of The Ichthyologist is, in part, inspired by The Swamp Thing. “I love the idea of a man becoming something so much more than a man, and yet kind of less than a man, and the spiritual heaviness of Swamp Thing, especially when Alan Moore started writing it,” Gregory says of the classic DC Comics character.
Gregory, a professional SCUBA diver working at San Francisco’s Aquarium of the Bay, discussed the audio, visual and philosophical aspects of The Ichthyologist in a recent interview.
You’re self-releasing The Ichthyologist in a limited run of 1,000 copies. What made you decide to take that route with the album?
We spent an incredible amount of money to work with Matt Bayles, and we’re maybe not the caliber of band yet that could get a label to pay us right upfront enough money to hire Matt Bayles. Honestly, I doubt most labels would be able to give us half of the advance we would need to work with Matt. Because we did it for ourselves, we wanted to make sure that we didn’t give this album away to a label for nothing and we all kind of lose our ass. In all reality, you don’t see hardly any money back from small labels. That’s just part of it. That’s fine too, because they work their ass off and they have bills to pay too. In this way, if we sell a thousand of them at 12 bucks a pop, we get all of our money back. We get to break even. We’re at the level that we can do that on our own, for sure. The pre-sales are already exploding. We sell a shit-ton of them every day. Hopefully when all is said and done, we would have signed a new label deal or two, six months after the release, it’s our goal to find someone to put it out on vinyl and put it out on CD.
I’ve read that The Ichthyologist is based on a graphic novel that you’re working on. Would you like to talk about that?
Yes, the album is based on a graphic novel I’m writing that goes by the same name. The protagonist has lost it all in haphazard ways and takes on the abilities of a sea star to survive it, and thus begins this huge journey, that no matter what happens he ends up healing, because sea stars have this regenerative ability. The album is basically the poetic description of my character’s origin. It’s the poetic downfall from the beginning to the end of his origin. The graphic novel goes much, much more past that.
Did you know that you wanted to tell this story both musically and as a graphic novel, or were you not sure?
I came up with the album title first. I thought that would just be a great album name, The Ichthyologist. It’s perfect for me—perfect for Giant Squid. Then I was talking to someone in the comic book industry, a good friend of mine, about some ideas to pitch for the company he works for, which led me to this concept, under the same name. The songs had already been written, and I worked the general themes of those into the story. There’s a song on there called “Mormon Island,” which is a very old gold mining town in the Sacramento area that’s long since gone and is now actually sitting at the bottom of Folsom Lake. We were writing this very creepy song, and someone said that it sounded like a church underwater, and I was like, “Shit, I know where there’s a church underwater. There’s a church at the bottom of Folsom Lake, a town called Mormon Island. We’ve got to call this song ‘Mormon Island.'” Then I was like, “How can I work Mormon Island into the story?” And by doing so, it opened up all these different angles into my story. So, as I’m writing the graphic novel, writing the album helped inspire a lot of different things, and vice versa. There would be ideas, right from the get-go, like, “I have to write a song about this moment in the dude’s creation, this moment in the guy’s downfall,” and so on.
Looking at the other titles on the album, there’s one that mentions the Donner Party; and Ernst Haeckel, whose image you used on the cover, has a peak named after him in the Sierra Nevadas. There’s also a mention of the La Brea Tar Pits. I don’t know if it was intentional, but the album seems to have a very firm sense of place. It’s very Californian.
Absolutely. I’ve always been obsessed with California history, and have incorporated it in a lot of ways, sometimes more subtle than others, in all our albums. We also had a 7-inch called “Sutter’s Fort,” and there’s a sequel to “Sutter’s Fort” on The Ichthyologist called “Sutterville,” which is more or less about Sacramento refusing to give up its capitol-ship. Sacramento kept flooding in the 1800s, and people kept saying, “You need to move your capitol. This is a pretty shitty fucking place to have a capitol.” And Sacramento refused to give it up, and after huge bouts of cholera and death and that kind of shit, they just raised all the streets 10 feet in the air. The actual story of The Ichthyologist is time-hopping as well.
There’s a mix between the human history of California and the natural history as well. Does working in marine biology allow you to see the scope of both? I would imagine being underwater, you can see how the Earth grew up out of it.
You know, not to get too heady, but when you’re 40 feet down at the bottom of the ocean in Monterey and you’re surrounded by kelp and a rocky reef and tens of thousands of fish swimming around”¦you are basically staring right at the godhead. You’re staring at the spiritual center of it all. As far as our planet goes, it all came from right there. You also never have felt like you belong as much as you do when you’re down there. It’s a very strange and surreal sense. It opens up a lot of spiritual thought and philosophy, and who we are in the grand scheme of things. The album is a little heady in some ways, because it does touch on stuff like that. The grand result of the graphic novel kind of deals with that—God being underwater. People go into the seas to talk with God.
