GARDEN CITY - It's never been said you need an ocean to surf, but it's not exactly easy without one.
"It's way easier in the ocean but I keep trying in the river wave," says Niko Lach, a 17-year-old foreign exchange student from Germany.
Trying is the best Niko can do on a board he told his mom he bought two weeks ago.
"And she was like, 'What, you bought a surfboard, really?'" he says.
Yes, he did. And now Niko's having a hard time in just his third time at the Boise Whitewater Park.
"That's work," laughs a cyclist who stopped to watch Niko fall off his board several times.
It's not work for Niko, this is fun.
About a stone's throw from the Boise River is where the work is. Here, in a cinder block building in Garden City, Victor Myers is shaping a surfboard strictly for river riding, something he taught himself to do about a dozen years ago.
"It's all trial and error, man," says Victor. "Lots of error."
There was a little of that, too, on the arbitrary avenue Victor took to get here.
He grew up in the middle of Missouri and moved to Alaska after graduating high school. There Victor surfed for the first time and got a job as a guide, which led to a winter gig off the coast of Belize.
"And so I worked on a 13-acre island 40 miles offshore for 10 winters," Victor explains
It was then standup paddleboards became a thing. But not a thing you could get easily on a remote island. So Victor figured out how to make his own. When the sport went from the ocean to the rivers, Victor adapted as well.
"I just started building standup paddleboards specifically for the river," he says.
And that kind of created a path to the Corridor Surf Shop. During the last few years of bumming back and forth from Belize to Alaska Victor would stop his van in Boise. Then six years ago the van, and Victor, stayed put.
"Now I'm a business owner," he says, laughing.
Garden City man finds niche building river surf boards
Victor considers himself a tinkerer, with eclectic tastes and abilities. But with boards he becomes singular.
"Board building is like the thing that I have to just focus and like, kind of channel your ADD and figure it out," he says. "And you just have to get it right or it's just messed up and you don't feel good about it."
Victor works on at least four boards at a time.
"I spend a lot of time alone," he says.
He can make more than 50 in a year from carbon fiber, to fiberglass, to one wrapped in Paulownia wood. So he has a lot to feel good about.
And doing it his way is the only way Victor knows.
"Yeah, it definitely beats wearing a tie," he admits.
A Missouri kid running a surf shop in Idaho, who knows that persistence will eventually pay off.
Kind of like Niko, back on the river, trying to land his first wave.
"Probably, hopefully, I mean, I'm trying, yeah," Niko says. "It's so hard, though."
Victor says after several years of trying to get the business off the ground, he now has a bit more time to devote to board-making. His goal now is to find greener ways to make his boards, by using recycled materials and foam and fewer chemicals in the process.