A St. Petersburg couple has turned their passion for surfing and skateboarding into a local business.
Craftsman and co-founder of LongLine Skateboards, Nick Lambiase, 30, said he got the idea while hearing comments from strangers while riding around town on his custom made board.
“'Oh, I want to buy one. Do you have any right now for sale?' " Lambaise said he often heard. "And it was always like, 'Oh God, we gotta make something of this one day.'
"People always ask about it, because we’ve always just enjoyed ourselves.”
Kelli Lambiase, 28, said she and her husband are avid surfers, but since the Gulf doesn't have many big waves, they were looking for an alternative.
“If you’re fixing for surf, it totally does the trick," she said. "The shape of the board, they’re almost modeled off surf boards. We add measurements to all the boards and number them, because that’s what they do in surfing and we just wanted to carry that over."
The couple have a promotional video on their website and plan to begin selling their boards in January.
Lambiase said each board is hand-crafted inside their St. Pete home, and they hope to build an inventory of 20 LongLine boards before they offer them up for sale. They're halfway to that goal.
“It’s just a surf-style skateboard,” he said. “A lot of wave-starved surfers out there are trying to get out there and have some fun.”