John Peugh’s roots and history in Encinitas run deep. Both his grandparents settled in Encinitas in the early 1900s, both owning dry good stores on the Coast Highway in Downtown Encinitas.
John, who grew up on the property his father bought on La Veta Avenue where he still lives today recounts, “My Dad bought this property in 1927. He bought the lot for back taxes. I found an old tax receipt and at that time tax on the property was six cents a year!”
During his early years, John recalls, “You could stand on our property and look and see just a couple houses on the bluff and you could look towards town and there was hardly a tree. There wasn’t anything, just open land.”
“On the three lots that my dad bought,” John reflects, “we had a barn, it was fenced with an electric fence all the way around it. My sister had a horse, we had chickens, a cow, and a milking shed. We grew our food out there. We raised corn, potatoes, beans, lettuce and had fruit trees. Everybody in those days was more self-sufficient.”
In 1956 at age thirteen, John began surfing down at Moonlight Beach. Back then there were only a few surfboards, and most of them belonged to the guards. “Few people had their own boards,” says John. “If you did, the board belonged to you, but it belonged to everybody. There might be three or four people waiting their turn to use that board.”
“The first time I went out was with Linda Benson and I borrowed a big old Simmons board that belonged to one of the guards. It took both of us to carry it down to the water and carry it back. Linda was a year younger than me and a lot smaller, but she was a hell of a lot better than me just starting out. She had a perfect knack for surfing. She was born to surf.”
John developed his career into becoming a Carpenter’s Superintendent and a concrete specialist, for a twenty-five-year run. Among his notable accomplishments were building the Shamu Stadium as well as adding on and building out another 18 acres at Sea World.
Today, John a consummate craftsman has immersed himself into his art creating intricate, mind-blowing sculptures from recycled resin.
In the beginning, John began designing and making surfboard fins, first out of wood and eventually using resin, with legendary local underground surfboard shaper, Mike Slingerland. This led to more intricate mid-century-modern resin artwork. “It seemed to me,” John reflects, “that what you could do with the recycled resin… you could make tiles out of them, put the tiles together and make mosaics out of them. You could do just absolutely anything.”
John’s art has now evolved into more complex, wildly colorful sculptures of fish, birds, and his most current project, a mermaid.
Nobody else I know of is actually doing what I am doing with recycled resin or with resin at all.
The recycled resin that John finds reminds one of large pieces of gemstone quality fire opal.
“Right now,” says John, “The resin that I have has come from the old Moonlight Glassing shop, from Bing Surfboards, and from Christianson Surfboards. I’ve got a big block of resin from Christianson that had been poured into a form over time and eventually ended up weighing 500 pounds. I had to get my son-in-law over with a big floor saw and cut it into pieces where I could use it. It’s absolutely beautiful stuff.”
There’s no doubt that John has found his own niche for something very different. “Nobody else I know of is actually doing what I am doing with recycled resin or with resin at all.”
You can learn more at westof101studio.com.
As It Ran in Print
The original spread, Encinitas Magazine, December 2016–January 2017. Click the page to see it full size.
The Story Didn’t End There
I made this photograph at the Stonesteps Surfing Contest in the summer of 1975. I was eighteen years old. John Peugh is on the far right, in the Stretch Mark Beach A.C. shirt, and I had no idea who he was.
Thirty-four years later, in 2009, John came across that photograph on the internet, recognized himself in it, and emailed me asking to meet. That is where this began. The story you have just read came seven years after that email, and it still wasn’t the end of it.
John tells the story of the contest’s early years in his own words — the Stretch Mark Beach Athletic Club out of the Lodge in Cardiff, Ira Black and Clint Johnson on the microphone, and trophies donated by the people who worked in the surf shops, a lot of them made in those shops — in Summer of 1975 — Stonesteps Surfing Contest. Fifty years on, he is still making them, out of what those same shops let fall on the floor.
John is still making the trophies for the Stonesteps Surfing Contest — the same contest, on the same beach. Their plaques carry the tile mosaic set into the wall at the Stonesteps beach access, the same artwork the City of Encinitas put on its sign.
And he is still working. This one has months in it.
The next Stonesteps Surfing Contest is September 19, 2026. There will be new trophies.