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Surfboard Quarterly, San Juan Capistrano, CA (2025)

10/01/2023

NON SEQUITUR

Over the past century the sport’s greatest surf spots have been ridden by a methodical evolution of surfboard shapes that have brought us to the boards we ride today.

However. this trio of designs only hints at the wealth of crazy, eccentric, outlandish ideas that have made surfing culture richer as a result.

DALE VELZY BANJO BOARD - 11’0 “ x 24” x 3.5”
The decidedly unconventional outline on this early 1960s board from Dale Velzy, one of surfing’s true innovators, is indicative of the brash out-of-the-box thinking of the sport’s best designers.

BOB HOWARD FLATFISH - 7’3” x 23.5” x 3.5”
From the eccentric mind of casual shaper Bob Howard, the Flatfish was designed to channel prodigious amounts of water to flow over the deck of the tail, holding the back of the board in place for long, stable nose rides.

While originally planned as a single-fin, the board actually sports five fin boxes allowing for a lot of discretion and options for a surfer willing to spend some serious R&D time.

GARY LINDEN MODERN PIG - 5’6” x 20” Pretty Thick and Pretty Light
Known for his magnificent big-wave guns, here Gary Linden briefly changed course, exploring the extremes in small-wave maneuverability with this super small pig concept.

Upon viewing this photo, a friend asked me how many fins this board had. I suggested that my recollection was that it had a deep single-fin like some of Cheyne Horan’s early ‘80s boards. Or maybe it was set up like an early ‘70s Corky Carroll twin-fin. Then again it might have had a mid-‘90s retro period tri-fin setup. Of course, Quads were all the rage going into the 2000s. It could have been a Quad. We then saw 5-fin and even 7-fin approaches going into the 2010s. Seven fins would certainly give that extra wide tail some grip.

Who knows?

I’ll leave the final decision on fin placement, and even how many you want, to your imagination. - Guy Motil

For more information on this and many other great surfboards check out the www.surfboardquarterly.com website and upcoming issues of SURFBOARD QUARTERLY. ©Guy Motil

history

09/05/2023

JIMMY BUFFETT

This weekend I learned that a true friend of the beach, sailing, surfing lifestyle, Jimmy Buffett (1946-2023), had finally lost his lengthy battle with skin cancer. Jimmy’s music shared a laid-back, casual experience through hundreds of songs, and entertained the heck out of millions of us in concerts across the globe.

While not everyone’s cup of tea, a thorough listen to Buffett’s recording catalogue confirms why such great songwriters as Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan consider Jimmy Buffett to be one of the better songwriters of the last half-century.

In early 2002 I flew to Florida to meet with Jimmy about his and the Margaritaville empire collaborating with our crew at Longboard Magazine to establish a US Pro Longboard Surfing Tour.

On arrival, I was immediately conscripted into the Buffett Road Tour Army for an unbelievable week. Sound checks, tailgate parties, strategy conclaves, impromptu backstage jam sessions, and three sold-out concerts with 15-20k really stoked Parrot-Heads gave me just a glimpse of the lifestyle Jimmy Buffett had created for himself and his friends. Back at the hotel pool after the week’s third concert, when the rest of his crew had left, Jimmy and I sat in the dim light, a couple of beers in hand, and talked about the beach, sailing and surfing until well past 2:00 AM.

After that visit, Margaritaville became a multi-year sponsor of the US Pro Longboard Surfing Tour. With Jimmy’s commitment, we were able to establish equal prize purses for both men and women contestants, a first for the sport (15-20 yrs before the WSL adopted the standard).

Over the next couple years Buffett visited us at Longboard’s office in San Clemente a few times, always enthusiastically supportive of the longboard surfing scene. As the tour grew and secured more sponsors, Jimmy moved on to support the start-up of other charities.

Jimmy Buffett was a really special person, a really nice person. He will be missed. © Guy Motil

I’ll have a lot more of the story on Jimmy Buffett and his Longboard connection in an upcoming issue of Surfboard Quarterly.

08/01/2023

1970s Psychedelic Speed Shapes

For many Americans, the zenith of the counterculture revolution peaked somewhere in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district during the summer of 1967, aka the Summer of Love. For others, many surfers included, the events surrounding that time period were merely a spark that ignited much broader and long lasting change.

The Timothy Leary-influenced "tune in, turn on and drop out" philosophy that characterized the era was also being explored by many of surfing’s elite performers. The culture embraced a 'return-to-nature' movement, away from many of the commercial and competitive aspects of surfing, for what came to be known as "soul surfing."

By the end of the decade the shortboard revolution was in full swing—with surfers experimenting heavily with a multitude of different variations in the length, shape and rail configurations of their surfboards.

Aside from the new ultra-short surfboards, the longer mini-guns with hard, down rails first introduced by Dick Brewer, and the other influencers of the Hawaiian braintrust, around 1968-69, carried through to the early years of the new decade. Brewer, one of the forerunners of the shortboard revolution, promoted these design features for their extraordinary ability to sustain speed and control in the curl of the wave. Thanks to these new rail and rocker configurations, surfers were now riding more critical parts of the wave, furthering the spirit of exploration, and mind-expansion, of the time.

In Hawaii “The Need for Speed” was often a bigger priority than maneuverability and island surfers pursued the quest for faster surfboards with a vengeance. Along with the hard rails, boards became narrower. Bottoms became flatter. All in the search of the ultimate in high-speed tube rides on increasingly faster waves.

Imagine a surfer, yourself, substantially chemically enhanced, on a brilliant sunny day, dropping in on a 3X overhead wave at Honolua or Hanalei on one of these boards, the psychedelic deck glistening in the sparkling blue water - does the phrase “COSMIC” come to mind? - Guy Motil

For more information on these and many other great surfboards check out www.surfboardquarterly.com © Guy Motil

07/01/2023

WAYNE LYNCH EVOLUTION
7’10” x 22.875” x 2.625” 14.5 LBS

In Paul Witzig’s film, The Hot Generation (1968), the Australian filmmaker documented the first stages of the Australian shortboard movement in 1966-67, culminating in the classic V-Bottom’s finest moment as ridden by Bob McTavish and Nat Young at Maui’s Honolua Bay in late 1967. Released in early 1968, “HG” got a lot of surfers thinking of alternatives to the straight lines being ridden in the then popular longboard nose-riding period.

Inspired by the breakthrough that McTavish’s new designs were providing, Aussie surfers were convinced that they could continue reducing the overall dimensions of the boards they were riding, and expand on the performance that the V-Bottom encouraged. With the limitations of the deep V-Bottoms becoming apparent, new ideas were being built and tested at an unbelievable pace. Fortunately, Witzig kept right on documenting the progress throughout 1968.

Only a year later, in early 1969, Witzig released the second film of his trilogy, Evolution. This film had a major impact on the future of the sport. For many young surfers (myself included) the surfing of Nat Young and especially Wayne Lynch was mind-expanding, ushering in an almost magical new aesthetic approach to wave-riding.

Back then, of course, most of us had no idea what kind of boards Nat and Wayne were riding, and with the rapid design progression, decent boards could become obsolete overnight.

One of the boards ridden in the film was Wayne’s reassessment of the Velzy Pig shape of the early ‘50s. Shorter, much, much lighter and sporting a Greenough-influenced fin design, under the feet of one of the sport’s greatest surfers, the Pig again took surfing performance to another level.

A number of variations of the design were ridden throughout the film and astute observers will notice the design shown here is also being ridden on Wayne’s iconic cutback featured on the movie’s poster.

Ultimately, Witzig’s three films, The Hot Generation, Evolution and Sea of Joy serve as a great documentation of one of surfing’s most exciting eras. The films are now easily available and definitely worth a serious viewing. - Guy Motil

For more information on this and many other great surfboards check out www.surfboardquarterly.com and upcoming issues of SURFBOARD QUARTERLY. © Guy Motil

06/24/2023

THE TANDEM ADVENTURE

It’s unknown how far back into surfing’s ancient past tandem surfing has been a part of the sport’s culture, but it’s certain that its modern form has origins with the Waikiki beachboys of the 1920s. Photos of the era show the local beachboys with tourist girls cradled in their arms or perched on their shoulders as they surfed the gentle, rolling waves. The beachboys were well aware that their prowess in the ocean, surfing skills and general athletic nature could lead to an irresistible tsunami of grateful admiration.

In the 1930’s and 40’s, mainland surfers visiting Hawaii, many of them lifeguards, military or watermen-adventurers, brought the novel idea of tandem riding back to San Onofre, Doheny, Malibu and the East Coast among other mainland spots. It was, after all, a great way to meet and impress women at any beach.

By the late ’50s, tandem had entered the world of surfing competitions with a more serious, athletic and more organized form of the fun. Tandem soon became a fixture of the annual Championships at Makaha in Hawaii and on the mainland at the U.S. Surfing Championships at Huntington Beach, CA. The shortboard revolution of the late 1960s put tandem surfing on the back burner for a few decades.

The tandem experience saw a brief resurgence with the renewal and subsequent explosion of longboarding in the 1990s, but again lost momentum as the millennium ended.

Not surprisingly, the influx of thousands of large, buoyant, SUP surfboards in the 2000s has given rise to a new 21st century generation of tandem surfing experimentation. In most instances, the motivation is probably similar to those of the beachboys at Waikiki a hundred years ago. - Guy Motil

For more information on these and many other great surfboards check out www.surfboardquarterly.com and upcoming issues of SURFBOARD QUARTERLY © Guy Motil

05/27/2023

THE HAWAIIAN OUTRIGGER CANOE

A few hundred thousand years ago (some experts say a million or two) ancient hominids embarked on the first epic ocean crossings that would eventually lead to mankind’s first true maritime cultures.

The inevitable technological evolution of their watercraft led to development of the great ocean-going double-hulled sailing canoes used for inter-island voyaging, some trips spanning thousands of miles of open ocean. Through their voyages, these early mariners eventually colonized most habitable islands throughout the entire Pacific Ocean. Over time, they established vast trade routes, thousands of years before Columbus first visited the “New World.”

Hawaii’s position as one of the most remote archipelagos in the Pacific required a population that was very comfortable in the ocean. Managing the resources and inherent dangers of the sea was crucial to island life. To the Hawaiian watermen and waterwomen, and their families, the small outrigger canoes they piloted (two to six passengers) were the equivalent of the modern family car. In use every day, there were thousands of them in the islands.

The canoe was at the heart of their culture, and nowhere was this ocean-going craft better developed, more refined and as highly specialized as in the Hawaiian Islands, where dozens of different designs and sizes were used for transport, fishing, racing, recreation and, of course, war. And of importance to this discussion, they eventually began riding waves on their canoes, an activity they termed pakaka-nui (aka, canoe surfing). This activity likely helped establish surfing as an immensely important part of the ancient Hawaiian civilization.

To the pre-contact Hawaiians, canoes (and other various watercraft, like surfboards) were defining components of their culture. - Guy Motil

For more information on this and other great watercraft check www.surfboardquarterly.com and upcoming issues of SURFBOARD QUARTERLY © Guy Motil

05/12/2023

Throughout surfing’s history, the great Hawaiian surfers always seemed to project a powerful, yet elegant component to their surfing, regardless of the surfboards and other trends in each era. First the ancient Hawaiian royalty, then Duke Kahanamoku, George Downing, Paul Straugh, Jr., Eddie Aikau and others - the stylistic thread is unmistakable. In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, Dane Kealoha was probably the best example of the continuation of that classic Hawaiian surfing aesthetic.

By the early 1980s Dane was picked by many, myself included, to someday win a World Pro Tour Championship, In the 1970s, he had already influenced the best surfers on the new World Tour with his phenomenal surfing on short twin-fin surfboards, helping to usher in the multi-fin era, but also, maybe more importantly, as an influentially dominate presence back home in the powerful North Shore winter surf.

Ultimately, Dane was sabotaged in his title quest by the politics of the Pro Tour in those first years of the circuit.

During this “new dawn” of pro surfing, the sport still had some major growing up to do, and the overtly racist treatment of some top competitors at several stops along the Pro Tour, and by the ASP management in general, furthered the decade-long simmering feeling of disrespect felt by the competitors of Hawaiian ancestry. The inequities were further magnified by the simple fact that making it tough for the best Hawaiians forged a little easier path to a world championship for others.

With the proverbial “stacked deck” already established against the locally loyal Hawaiian Ohana, the decision by Pro Tour organizers to eliminate the Hawaiian leg of the tour and to levy monetary fines to any “tour” surfers who competed in those events caused Dane to quit the tour and surf only in the prestigious Hawaiian events at Sunset, Haleiwa and Pipeline, the contests that made up the Hawaiian Triple Crown of Surfing.

For over thirty years I’ve continued to watch and enjoy films of Dane in his prime. Even decades later, his surfing is an inspiration. He will be missed. - Guy Motil

05/06/2023

Women On Big Waves

Women have been challenging big waves going at least as far back as the late ’50s when a 15-year-old Linda Benson rode an 18-foot wave at Waimea on a borrowed board. Over the decades, female surfers have distinguished themselves at places like Makaha, Sunset Beach and Waimea Bay and, now, in the 2000s, the rapidly expanding global big-wave scene.

2000s Maya Gabeira - Pink Elephant Gun
10’0” x 20.25” x 3.25” 16.5 lbs

Recent years have seen a new generation of exceptional female big wave riders. Brazilian Maya Gabeira has consistently been one of the best. Maya’s favorite big-wave spots include the 20-40 foot giants that break at spots like Waimea, Teahupoo and Jaws. A winner of multiple XXL Big Wave Awards, Maya’s success has caught the attention of mainstream media, including Rolling Stone, National Geographic and ESPN.

2000s Sarah Gerhardt - Pearson Arrow Gun

10’0” x 20.125” x 3.375” 14.9 lbs

One of the women leading the charge in big waves is Sarah Gerhardt. With a Doctorate degree in Physical Chemistry from University of California, Santa Cruz, Gerhardt also worked on mastering the giant waves of Mavericks, a legendary surf spot just up the coast in Half Moon Bay. Dr. Gerhardt’s surfing was featured in Stacy Peralta’s film, Riding Giants.

2009 Keala Kennelly - Tow-In Board

5’10” x 17.5” x 2.375” 11.0 lbs

Keala Kennelly is a Kauai-born surfer who turned pro at age 17. An ASP World Championship Tour veteran, Keala was the first female to ever tow-in at Teahupoo. In the 2000s, Keala left competitive surfing for a role in the movie Blue Crush (2002) and then as ‘Kai’ on the HBO series John from Cincinnati (2006).
Keala’s board is a small tri-fin, set up with the fins more parallel to reduce drag for higher top speeds. The stance of the foot straps are set for Keala, who is a goofy footer. - Guy Motil

For more information on this and many other great surfboards check out www.surfboardquarterly.com and upcoming issues of SURFBOARD QUARTERLY. © Guy Motil

05/01/2023

THE HOT CURL

Now, a couple of decades into the 21st century, modern surfers have longboards, shortboards and mid-lengths among other wave-riding craft, but prior to the mid-1930s, a surfer’s quiver was limited to Tom Blake-style, hollow “cigar box” boards or the classic, heavy, solid redwood planks. Each had its fair share of drawbacks that were experienced by surfers from Hawaii, California and Australia alike.

Most importantly, the boards that surfers rode up into the 1930s had no skegs or fins. When racing across the face of a steep wave the boards would unpredictably slip out of control with the back end dropping out of the wave’s face, an effect known as “sliding ass.”

To Hawaiian surfers Wally Froiseth, Fran Heath and John Kelly some new thought on surfboard design was in order.

After a particularly frustrating session near Diamond Head, with several “sliding ass” moments on considerable-sized surf, they went home and reshaped their boards using an ax, a drawknife and probably some lava stone, narrowing the tail by nearly eight inches, tapering to a three-inch stern. The bottom of the tail was a rounded vee that would allow the board to better fit into a wave and prevent the sliding, while the nose was narrowed to more of a point, giving the board a streamlined look, conducive to heightened speeds.

The results were better than they could have anticipated. These “Hot Curl” boards could hold an angle on a high, steep wave and allowed surfers to ride “hot in the curl.”

Hot Curl designs and the concurrent invention of the skeg, or fin, by Tom Blake went on to influence surfboard design worldwide and accelerate the development of the big-wave gun.

Interestingly, Blake’s fins were often added to the later Hot Curls, stabilizing the tail even more. - Guy Motil

For more information on these and many other great surfboards check out www.surfboardquarterly.com and upcoming issues of SURFBOARD QUARTERLY © Guy Motil

04/23/2023

THE WEBER PERFORMER

Dewey Weber was the genius behind a brilliant promotional plan that changed the entire way surfboards were marketed.

The Weber Performer - It was wide and thin with a very full nose and parallel rails. Dimensions typically ran from 8’8” to 10’0" x 22.0” to 24.0”. Designed in 1965, the Performer’s national debut came in 1966, in the form of full-color ad campaigns published in the sport’s then-premier surf publications. The ads, published in almost every issue of Surfer for two years running, helped embed the image of the Performer in the minds of surfers everywhere.

Dewey was a fierce competitor and a perfectionist when it came to his equipment. The Weber Performer was designed to meet the wide variety of wave conditions encountered at most mainland surfing contests and was still adaptable enough to function well during daily sessions on the beaches of both US coastlines.

Always one up on the competition, Dewey devised a special deep cutaway fin for the Performer he called the “Turn Fin.” In common parlance, the unique fin was referred to as the “Hatchet Fin.” This design was such a departure from the fins of the day that copying it would have been blatant piracy, and any other surfboard company who did would be branded as “followers.”

Ultimately the board and fin combination produced an excellent design. The Performer was a great surfboard for its time. That the fin design was functional is evidenced by the strong number of cutaway fins used on longboards even today.

Nonetheless, in early 1968, after an enormously successful few years, the Weber Performer reached the end of its initial production run. The transition to short surfboards was already happening, and by early 1968, the first longboard epoch was approaching its end.
- Guy Motil
For more information on these and many other great surfboards check out surfboardquarterly.com and upcoming issues of SURFBOARD QUARTERLY © Guy Motil

04/19/2023

1950s HOBIE PASTEL EGGS

9’0” x 21.0” x 3.25” 21 lbs
10’5” x 24.5” x 4.0” 32 lbs

In the1950s surfboard building evolved from traditional woodworking to modern composite engineering, from heavy wooden slabs to lightweight, high-tech, foam core, wave-riding vehicles.

Young Hobart “Hobie” Alter and his collaborator Gordon “Grubby “Clark were at the forefront of a youth culture explosion. Hobie enthusiastically took new post-WWII materials and technologies and began to build a business and, indeed, an industry around the sport and lifestyle he had fallen in love with — Surfing.

It was a time of growth and rapid progress in surfing, with new materials quickly being introduced that would soon change the sport forever. Hobie and his friend Gordon were among the very first to adapt the new materials to commercial surfboard production.

Legend has it that they blew up a few garages with their experimental hot batches, but once they got the mixture right, the popularity of hand-shaped plastic foam core surfboards exploded. By 1958, Hobie was making lighter, quicker surfboards out of polyurethane foam and a shell of resin-impregnated fiberglass.

It should be noted that other innovators, especially Dave Sweet in L.A. County and the Larry Gordon/Floyd Smith brain trust (G&S) in San Diego, were also working on foam surfboard technology at the same time. As to who was first, none of the parties was ever certain.

The early foam blanks were riddled with holes and other imperfections, and finished boards were originally referred to as “Easter Eggs” because of the opaque pastel colorization. Hobie shared this insight, “We’d have to putty in all the little air pockets, and most of those boards ended up with some sort of pastel coloration to hide the corrections— pastel because darker colors showed all the problems. But what we ended up with was a better board. Better than balsa. Lighter and stronger.”

Due to the great reduction in the board’s weight that foam core boards introduced, surfing saw an entire paradigm shift toward mass accessibility.
- Guy Motil

For more information on these and many other great surfboards check out www.surfboardquarterly.com and upcoming issues of SURFBOARD QUARTERLY.
© Guy Motil

01/29/2023

1990s Pro Tour Shortboards

Any discussion of men’s professional surfing in the ’90s begins and ends with Kelly Slater; it's simple as that.

Sure, elder statesmen Tom Curren, Mark Occhilupo, Damien Hardman and Derek Ho each captured a World Title during the decade, but no one surfer had more impact on the sport, or had more influence on the equipment people were riding than Florida's favorite son.

In an era that featured a full-on longboard surfing revival, an explosion of hospitable shapes ranging from the big-guy tri to eggs and mid-lengths, as well as a resurgence in modified fish designs, the prototypical Slater "glass slipper" design could be found nearly everywhere.

Typical measurements ranged from 5' 6" to 6' 6'" in length, 18.25” to 19.75” at the wide point, and an astounding 2.0” to 2.5” thick, prompting the "potato chip" moniker given to period shortboards. But of note here is the fact that so few of its owners, sans professional and expert waveriders, could actually ride the things properly, prompting the famous fairy tail footwear nickname.

Not since the ’70s had so many surfers purchased and ridden the wrong board. Slater's boards were thin, narrow and shaped with so much tail and nose rocker that if you weren't constantly driving, constantly positioned in the wave's power zones, the thing simply bogged down. A fairly good surfer in semi-flat, soft waves without a trough or a strong draw up the face - forget about it.

But in Kelly’s hands, and a finite number of other men and women at the WCT skill level, the surfing these boards encouraged became nothing short of phenomenal.

Now two decades into the 21st century the level of surfing around the globe is better than it’s ever been and the boards young surfers are riding makes it all possible. - Guy Motil

For more information on this and many other great surfboards check out the surfboardquarterly.com website and upcoming issues of SURFBOARD QUARTERLY. © Guy Motil

12/17/2022

ASYMMETRICAL SURFBOARD DESIGN
When a surfer jumps to his feet on takeoff, he or she invariably puts one foot forward establishing a regular foot or a goofy foot stance. From our very first rides, few surfers ever alter their lead foot preference.

Leading into the wave with their left foot, a regular-foot surfer on a right-breaking wave encounters a number of advantages and disadvantages based on his preferred stance. The potential pressures exerted by the surfer’s toes is different than that exerted by their heels. The surfer’s vision and body torque are different also.

Due to the asymmetry of the human body itself, we have different levels of control and leverage on our heel side and on our toe side, and we use different levels of power and weight distribution when making both forehand and backhand turns. As a result, the board reacts differently with a surfer surfing frontside versus a backside approach. Asymmetrical surfboards are designed to optimize these differences.

While the logic of asymmetrical surfboard design should be obvious to anyone who seriously studies the physical art of surfing, there are drawbacks. And most of them are commercial.

If the global surf community evolved into riding asymmetrical surfboards, every surf shop and board manufacturer would have to build and inventory two-to-four times as many boards as they do now. One set of boards for regular foot surfers, another for goofy foots. Things get really complicated when you start analyzing each surfer’s aesthetic attack on lefts versus rights. A surfer would need at least two board designs (or quivers) for a weekend at Kelly’s Wave Ranch.

Based on what I’ve been observing, I predict that beyond further advances in materials and construction strategies, asymmetrical surfboard design and full coordinated board (and fin) flex will be the biggest factors in high-performance surfing through the middle of the 21st century. © Guy Motil

11/20/2022

THE 1968-69 WEBER SKI
6’6” to 8’0” x 19.75” to 21.0” x 3.0” to 3.5”
12 to 16 lbs

The SKI - Synthetic Kinetic Instinct - Even now, some 55 years later, I’m still not sure what that means. It was, of course, the height of the flower power, global, hippie cultural movement. The Beatles had just released Magical Mystery Tour (Nov 1967) and the Rolling Stones delivered Their Satanic Majesties Request (Dec 1967). Quickly, everything was becoming a bit psychedelic. A bit abstract. As a result, in 1968, a lot of things were left to interpretation.

The Weber SKI, and its marketing campaign, was created in that environment.

That year, with surfboard length and mass shrinking, surfers approached the upcoming World Contest in Puerto Rico with increasingly radical board designs. By then, the Weber Ski was an evolving series of shapes being developed primarily by Nat Young (with Dewey, Iggy and Mike Tabeling) in an attempt to get even more speed and maneuverability around the tube and take a second world title at Puerto Rico in the fall.

The early SKI models usually ran 7'0" to 8'0" in length, although by late 1969, SKIs were being produced as short as 6'3".

Due to the unique characteristics of the design, for the first time in the U.S., the board-length a surfer chose became based more on the surfer’s experience and ability and less on his or her physical size.

Amazingly, the SKI was pretty down to earth. The board followed the precedent set by the WeberPerformer - kind and gentle to novice surfers and yet a great high-performance surfboard for those at a world class level.

Ultimately, the design variations of the SKI were all in line with the shortboard movement’s new aesthetic goals of smaller, lighter, quicker, and more maneuverable surfboards.

Surf historians consider the late 1960s to be one of the most exciting times in surfing history and the SKI, a great surfboard for the time, had a profound influence on the era’s board designs worldwide. -Guy Motil

For more information on this and many other great surfboards check out www.surfboardquartely.com and upcoming issues of SURFBOARD QUARTERLY. © Guy Motil

11/17/2022

1967 BOB McTAVISH ‘V’ BOTTOM
8’8” x 23.5” x 3.0” 24.7 lbs

In the mid-1960s, influenced by the wave-riding of California kneeboarder George Greenough, Australian surfer/shaper Bob McTavish began experimenting with slightly shorter, thinner, lighter surfboards than were common at the time. With his main test pilot/collaborator, Nat Young, the two had begun exploring designs that encouraged maneuverability in and around the tube. This was in stark contrast to the worldwide emphasis on trim and nose riding that was all the rage in surfing at the time.

But it wasn’t only the equipment that was different, it was the whole mindset. With a new approach to the aesthetics of the art of surfing, the duo sought a more “involved” approach to riding waves that focused on speed and turning in the steepest and most critical sections of a wave.

In the wake of Nat Young’s victory at the 1966 World Championships in San Diego, McTavish unveiled his first ‘V-Bottom’ board (early 1967) that featured a pronounced V-shaped bottom contour under a rather wide 23” single-fin squaretail. In the fast, powerful Queensland point breaks the new ‘V-Bottoms’ offered performance options not seen before. An entirely new style of surfing was being invented.

By late 1967, Bob and Nat took their ground-breaking designs to Hawaii. Yet, as McTavish and Young soon found out, the ‘V-Bottom’ did not work well in large North Shore surf—the ultimate proving grounds of the day. Not giving up on the boards, McTavish and Young took them to Maui’s Honolua Bay, where in perfect six-to-eight-foot waves the ‘V-Bottom’ truly shined.

Within months the radical ‘V-Bottom’ design was abandoned - due to the phenomenal progression of surfboard designs that further defined the ‘Shortboard Revolution.’ - Guy Motil

For more information on this and many other great surfboards check out www.surfboardquarterly.com and upcoming issues of SURFBOARD QUARTERLY. © Guy Motil

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