“When I turned 18 years old I got my first job at a hardware store and I use my first paycheck to buy a surfboard. I’d always been fascinated by surfing growing up and was never able to go out and do it so I told myself that once I get a job I’ll buy a surfboard and teach myself. Even in middle school and high school I had always looked at videos of Surfing and I found Roxy and loved all the girls who surfed for Roxy and I saw the movie Blue Crush and Blue Crush is what really got me wanting. After I got my first paycheck I found this guy on Instagram and asked him if he can make me a board and I had no idea what I wanted because I didn’t know anything about the sizes or shapes of boards so I just told him to make me a board I wanted it to look like a pointy surfboard with one Fin and he told me that it would be a hardboard to learn on but I was up for the challenge and boy was he right because it took me four years to finally get it down and I didn’t have a swimming background really growing up I had a running background and I thought surfing would be all legs but is actually all alarms so they had to learn how to swim well and gain arm strength so is a long time coming but now I know so much about surfing. I’ve surfed probably over 50 different spots and I like to surf longboards and shortboards and now I feel like I’m at the point where I could teach people about it and how to be better about it. Now I have a lot of friends in the surf community and it’s nice to just be a female and especially Mexican someone whose first generation grew up in East LA and I love surfing” -Isabella Quintero