  The origins of wave riding date back hundreds,
maybe thousands of years to ancient Hawaii. For much of that time it was a noble
and exclusive occupation. Hawaiian kings and queens rejoiced in being dominant in the
water, like they were on land. They created their own version of 'locals only' by making
it very difficult for commoners to surf. Why? Because they could. Dropping in on a member
of the royal family was sometimes punishable by death. To say nothing of the fact that the
boards were made of solid wood and you had to be pretty dedicated to build one in the
first place.
The Hawaiian royals could afford to do it in style. They had
their own prayers and chanters to call in the big swell, and their own board shapers. The
mammoth beasts they rode (three different styles, depending on conditions) varied in
length from nine to 18 feet and were so heavy they were left by the beach - no one wanted
to carry them home and no one would dare steal them. Contests were held regularly and the
competition was fierce. Spectators in the hundreds would line the shores, betting on the
outcome.
The arrival of white man and an onslaught of puritanical
Christian dogma was almost the death of surfing, as board riding lost its noble prestige.
Surfing was part of the traditional Hawaiian culture which the God-fearing Christian folk
of the time were hell-bent on dismantling. By the early 1900s surfing was virtually
extinct.
But then along came a Hawaiian waterman of the first order. Duke
Kahanamoku was a two-time Olympic swimming champion, beaten eventually by the original
Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller in 1924. The Duke was also an avid surfer at Waikiki. He
came to be a great ambassador for the nation of Hawaii (it hadn't yet become part of the
United States) by taking his people's culture to the world on the deck of a surfboard.
Duke landed in Sydney in the summer of 1915, stayed at Freshwater Beach and rode a
board there he fashioned out of local timber. Having amazed locals with this display, he
then took a woman out with him to ride tandem. Thus Australia's first surfer was a woman -
Freshwater local, Miss Isabel Letham. By this time, surfing had already spread to
California but Duke's noble enthusiasm gave it a huge kick along there too.
Traditional Hawaiian boards had no fins. Any sort of turning, which was tough, required
dragging a foot in the water behind the board. Another bloke named Tom Blake is credited
as the guy who first put a fin on a surfboard. Solid wooden boards were ridden until the
early 1940s, when wartime ingenuity prompted the invention of hollow plywood boards, known
as toothpicks. Still unbelievably heavy, most surfers could only drag them down to the
water's edge. They were laminated with redwood for better floatation and turning. But that
still meant the foot in the water deal.
In the 1950s balsa wood and fibreglass made it easier, with surfing really taking off in
California. It was only a cult sport in Australia at this time. California started the hot
dogging age, with surfers like Phil Edwards, Dewey Weber and Mickey Dora
pulling off turns and walking the nose to hang five or ten toes off the edge. Their boards
were typically 10'6" and still weighed 45-50 pounds (20+ kilos).
In
the late '50s polyester foam turned up, round about the same time as Gidget and Moondoggy.
The Gidget and other teen surf movies went a long way to pushing surfing into the
mainstream. Suddenly it was cool to hang at the beach, even if your parents didn't
approve. Rock 'n' roll was here to stay and kids were starting to taste the pleasures of
rebellion. Off the beach, surfers gained reputations as degenerates.
Australian surfer Nat Young, in his autobiography
Nat's Nat and That's That, recounts a surf trip as a grom in 1961: "I remember
pulling in for petrol at one service station and hearing the owner yelling for his wife to
lock up their daughters because the Surfies were in town." Nat also spells out in
gory details that out the reputation had some basis in fact.
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But
back to the surf - foam boards weren't nearly as strong as balsa and many needed three
stringers and dozens of layers of fibreglass (still the basis of boards today). Surfing
legends in the early to mid 60s included American Mike Doyle, Hawaiian Joey
Cabell and Australia's Midget Farrelly. Midget won the first ever World Surfing
Championship, held at Manly in 1964.
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Around this time surfboard companies began springing up in Sydney and in California - and
business boomed, at least for a few years.
But it wasn't the big board makers who created the innovations from here on. Much of that
came from the desires of competitive surfers to get better and better performance in big
and small waves. |
Nat
won the World Crown in 1966 on a brand new creation. Many of the pro surfers then
were cutting down in length, and altering fin and rail design. Nat's buddies Bob McTavish
and George Greenough played a heavy part in the creation of his 9'4" board called
'Sam', on which he snatched the title in '66. It was a foot shorter than everyone else's
boards. Needless to say, others followed suit.
| Nine feet was standard length until 1968, when chaos suddenly began to
reign. There was literally an overnight revolution. Former world champ Rabbit Bartholomew,
a Gold Coast grommet at the time, remembers it well: "It wasn't one person. It was
spontaneous combustion all over the place at the same time. Communication wasn't that open
then. It was a different world. There was no fax or internet. Information spread much more
slowly. But all over the world, people were doing the same thing. |
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"I was right on the cusp of that. I learnt on longboards and
there was this one particular week when people would go home and chop a foot off their
boards. It was insane. Boards were going from nine foot to 5'2" in a week. It was
ridiculous but it was exciting."
"My first board was a 6'8" cut down from a 9'6"
and everyone thought it was crazy in 1968. I believe that board was a huge influence on my
local town." A year later it was 'how short can you go?'. Rabbit recalls sighting a
bizarre beast at Kirra.
In 1969 Michael Peterson and I were sitting on the beach watching people surf
4'8" McCoy twin fins. The boards were so small they couldn't get to the bottom of a
wave to do a bottom turn. It was a kneeboard. Actually it was a bodyboard. It was
happening in Sydney too. One day they were riding long boards and the next day they were
dinosaurs.
"There were those who didn't want to change. At every beach
there were guys who didn't want the longboard to go. It was partly to do with fashion. The
fashion had moved on. And the guys who didn't make the transition just disappeared."
Surfers at the cutting edge of the transition in Australia
included MP, Rabbit, Wayne Lynch, Mark Richards, Pete Townend and Terry Fitzgerald.
They were determined to take on the world and they did.
The '70s saw the growth of a professional world surfing tour and
Australian surfers came to dominate. Sydney board designer Geoff McCoy developed
the single fin board to its most evolved state.
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In Hawaii, Gerry
Lopez expanded short board capabilities on big waves. Australians created boards which
ripped in small to medium surf -
i.e., most other places in the world. |
Mark Richards made his name on his famous twin fin surfboard, giving himself the ability
to perpetrate deep carving manoeuvres up and down the face with grace and power - and win
four world championships in a row from 1979 to 1982.
But twin fin technology didn't suit everybody. Another surfer of
Mark Richard's vintage, Sydney's Simon Anderson, simply couldn't find enough
stability with a twin fin board, because it had no centre fin. Simon put a fin where his
foot was and invented the triple fin 'thruster', which he surfed to victory at Bells in
1981.
Despite
it being the most important surfboard innovation to date, Simon is very humble about it.
"I was the biggest guy on tour at that stage. I knew I had to come up with something.
A friend of mine had a twin fin and he put a half-moon keel fin in the middle and said it
helped stabilise it. I thought, 'I'll put a bloody BIG fin back there and make it really
stable'. I just used principles which were already in existence. The fin area is what
creates resistance for turning. Less fin, less resistance."
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Rail design, board curvature (rocker) and width are areas which
are still points of conjecture to board makers. Six-time world champion Kelly Slater
works closely with board designer Al Merrick and they've created some of the best
innovations in recent years. Board design has certainly helped in Kelly's incredible
manoeuvring and balance no matter where he's surfing, be it small waves or 15-foot
Pipeline.
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Anderson points out board making will never be an exact science.
" Over the past five years there's been a slow refinement of
design and a standardising. But it's a fully hand-made item. You can't reproduce what
you've done before. That's one of the beauties of it. It's a matter of matching
individuals to boards. Tow-in surfing is probably the greatest new direction we've seen in
recent years. There'll be more happening there in the future. "
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