A-frame

Aaberg, Denny

Aaberg, Kemp

Abberton, Koby

Abbruzzi, Sid

Abellira, Reno

Abubo, Megan

academia and surfing

Adler, Tom

advertising and surfing

Aeder, Erik

aerial

Aguerre, Fernando

Aichner, Scott

Aikau, Clyde

Aikau, Eddie

Aipa, Ben

air-drop

airbrush

Airshow

Ala Moana

Alabama

alaia board

Alaska

alcohol and surfing

Alexander, Kala

Allen, Chuck

Alms, Paige

aloha shirt

Alter, Hobie

Alvarez, Pepe

Ancell, Kevin

Andaman Islands

Andersen, Lisa

Anderson, Craig

Anderson, Simon

Andino, Kolohe

Angel, Jose

angle

Angola

Angourie

Antarctica

Apocalypse Now

Arabian Sea

Aragon, Janice

Arakawa, Eric

Archbold, Matt

Arena, Eduardo

Ashton, Juan

Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP)

Atlantic Ocean

August, Robert

Aurness, Rolf

Auster, Ken

Australia

Avalon, Frankie

Azores

backdoor

backside

backside attack, Pipeline

backwash

bail out

Bain, Rob

Baja California

Baker, Bernie

Baker, Grant “Twiggy”

Baker, Tim

Bali

Ball, John “Doc”

Ballard, Bill

Ballard, Rochelle

balsa

Baltic Sea

Banks, Jim

Barbados

Barilotti, Steve

Barland, Michel

Barreda, Sergio “Gordo”

Barry, Michael

Bartholomew, Wayne

Baxter, Jackie

Bay of Bengal

Beach Boys, The

Beacham, Debbie

beachboys

beachbreak

Beachcomber Bills Grand Prix

Beachley, Layne

beavertail

Becker, Phil

Bedford-Brown, Stuart

Belgium

Bells Beach

Bendall, Ma and Pa

Bennett, Barry

Benson, Becky

Benson, Blanche

Benson, Linda

Bermuda

Bertlemann, Larry

for "surfboard": first use of word, according to Patrick Moser, by Ebenezer Townsend Jr, owenr of the sealing shipo Neptune. Arrived in Hawaii in summer of 1798. (See Moser's article "Off Sharkboards and Bone Paper Cutters, under "H" in filing cabinent

The definition of "surfboard" can be expanded to include nearly all types of wave-riding devices, including kneeboards, bellyboards, and bodyboards, but it most often describes only those boards meant for stand-up surfing. Machine assistance comes into play to one degree or another during the board-making process (see surfboard construction), but surfboards as of 2003 are still by and large handmade. Looked upon as a sleek repository of function and design, built to exacting measurements taken from a set of hydrodynamic principles, the surfboard nonetheless continues to have an element of mystery or alchemy; longtime surfers will look back and often pick out just two or three nonreplicable "magic boards" owned over the course of their surfing lives. Molded surfboards, a once-disgraced idea, began gaining popularity in the early 2000s, and may eventually make boards as interchangeable as tennis rackets. But until that time, as California-born surfboard shaper Dave Parmenter once phrased it, "each board is mortal and completely original." Peruvian fishermen as far back as 3,000 B.C. rode waves while straddling a high-prowed, bundled-reed craft called the caballito ("little horse"). Bellyboard riding, too, was almost certainly practiced on temperate coastlines around the world thousands of years ago. But boards for stand-up surfing are thought to have been invented around A.D. 1000 in Hawaii, although the date could be off by hundreds of years, as the first written description of stand-up surfing wasn't made until 1779, and the oldest extant surfboards date back only as far as the early 1800s. Hawaiian stand-up boards came in two basic designs: the popular alaia, ranging in size from seven to 12 feet, and the longer, heavier olo. Both were finless, had a blunt, rounded nose and a squared-off tail, with convex deck and bottom surfaces, and both were shaped from a single piece of koa or wiliwili wood. Board-makers started and finished the construction process with rituals, rites, and prayers; a red fish, for example, as an offering to the gods, would be buried among the roots of the newly chopped-down tree used to make a surfboard. Stand-up surfing all but vanished during the 19th century, as the Hawaiian race was brought down by western-borne disease, and the sport itself was discredited by visiting missionaries as licentious and dangerous. Boards produced during surfing's renais- sance in the first years of the 20th century were almost exclusively made of varnished redwood; in 1910, surfing patriarch Duke Kahanamoku used a 70-pound flat-bottomed redwood board measuring 10' by 23" by 3"—a soon-to-be common design, wide in the tail, known as a "plank" or "slab." Heavier plank boards weighed up to 100 pounds or more. Board styles were virtually unchanged until 1929, when Wisconsin-born surfer Tom Blake developed the square-railed "cigar-box" hollow board, also flat- bottomed, but longer and more streamlined than the plank. The hollow board was light enough (as little as 40 pounds) to encourage hundreds of people to take up the sport in mainland America and Australia. Less popular than the cigar box, but more important from a design standpoint, was the hot curl board, invented in Hawaii in 1937. The hot curl, like the plank, was finless and made of solid wood—redwood or a balsa/ redwood laminate—but had a narrower tail and a rounded yacht-style hull. It was designed to hold a tight angle across the wave face; planks and hollows both lost traction quickly when set on an angle. Because the hot curl was able to handle larger surf, it is regarded as the first big-wave surfboard design. In 1932, the Thomas Rodgers Company in Venice, California, bought Blake's hollow-board designs and produced the first commercially made line of surfboards. In the mid-'30s, the retail cost for a Pacific Homes Systems plank board, made in nearby Santa Monica, was just under $40. A 1935 Popular Science article offered blueprints and instructions for do-it-yourself board-builders, as did a Blake-written 1939 article in Popular Mechanics. Malibu, California, was the primary surfboard design center and test track in the years immediately following World War II, as Bob Simmons, Joe Quigg, and Matt Kivlin collectively invented what was called the "Malibu chip," and Dale Velzy followed with the "pig" design—a prototype for the modern longboard. No other era brought such fundamental change in board design. Balsa was by this time the core material, and boards were wrapped in a hard, brittle, protective skin of resin-saturated fiberglass. Board weight was trimmed to 25 pounds. The biggest design change, however, was the addition of a stabilizing fin, which allowed riders to hold a higher, tighter angle across the wave, and to begin doing turns and cutbacks. In 1950, at Manhattan Beach Pier in southwest Los Angeles County, Velzy opened what many regard as the world's first surf shop; three years later, in Orange County's Dana Point, Hobie Alter opened Hobie Surfboards, the first custom-built surfboard factory/ showroom; an off-the-rack Hobie cost about $65. Polyurethane foam began to replace balsa as the surfboard's core material in 1956, and by 1961 balsa boards were all but obsolete. The American surf craze of the early and mid- '60s was a boom period for Southern California board manufacturers, led by Hobie, Bing, Jacobs, Weber, Greg Noll, and Con, and each produced about 3,000 boards a year during the mid-decade peak. Signature models became popular in 1965, with best-sellers over the next two years including the David Nuuhiwa Lightweight (made by Bing), Mickey Dora's Da Cat (Greg Noll), the Ugly (Con), the Lance Carson Model (Jacobs), and the Gary Propper East Coast Model (Hobie). Nearly all the boards were between 9'6" and 10 feet long, 22 inches wide, and weighed about 27 pounds; average retail price was $150. The Australian board-making industry was doing nearly as well, led by manufacturers Gordon Woods, Barry Bennett, and Joe Larkin; smaller interests were up and running in South Africa, France, Japan, and other emerging surf nations worldwide. Bob McTavish of Australia developed the vee- bottom surfboard in 1967, with assistance from California-born kneeboarder/designer George Gree- nough. The vee-bottom featured a wide tail above a distinct V-shaped double-panel planing surface, and launched what was soon known as the shortboard revolution. Constant design experimentation, some of it innovative, much of it absurd, marked the next three years, and while the field was still unsettled by the decade's end, the newly reduced small-wave surf- board was between six and seven feet long, 18 to 21 inches wide, and weighed between 10 and 15 pounds. The dropped-profile "down" rail, while less celebrated than many other new features, has since been called the most significant board design development of the late '60s, as it offered plenty of traction but also allowed for sharp turns and cutbacks. Surfboard fins, blunt through most of the '60s, were now narrow based and swept back, like the tail fin on a bluefin tuna. Virtually all major board manufacturers were slow in responding to the shortboard revolution design free-for-all, and either went out of business or scaled back their operations. Small labels and back- yard/garage outfits meanwhile offered the latest designs (sometimes crudely interpreted and produced) at below-retail prices. Specialized big-wave surfboards, less affected by fads and fashion, continued to develop at a slight remove from everyday board design, with Dick Brewer of Hawaii taking over from Pat Curren and Mike Diffenderfer as the genre leader. New designs were introduced, modified, and/or discarded in the '70s, including the swallowtail, the split-rail winger (in the tail section) and sting (just below midpoint), and the concave bottom (used years earlier in the nose section of longboards, now installed along the middle and tail section). The twin-fin appeared briefly in the early '50s and the early '70s, and early versions of the tri-fin were introduced in 1971 and 1974, but the multifinned board didn't really catch on until 1978, when Australian Mark Richards began tearing up the pro tour on a swallowtail twin-fin. For nearly four years, the fast but skittish twin-fins were popular in small waves. The workhorse board throughout the '70s and early '80s, however, was the unadorned roundpin-tail single-fin, usually measuring about 6'8" and weigh- ing about 10 pounds. Lightning Bolt was the marquee surfboard manufacturer through the '70s, particularly for boards used in Hawaii, with featured shapers like Bill Barnfield and Tom Parrish. American-made surfboards retailed for about $225. In 1981, Australian pro surfer and board-builder Simon Anderson debuted the Thruster, a new tri-fin design, and within two years virtually every shortboard surfer in the world was on a three-finned board—and the same holds true today. Meanwhile, in the early '80s, California shaper and Channel Islands Surfboards owner Al Merrick, by providing equipment for soon-to-be world champion Tom Curren, established himself as the era's preeminent shaper/designer; Pat Rawson and Glenn Minami, both from Hawaii, were often cited as the best big- wave board-makers. Design changes in the '80s and '90s were largely a matter of shading and detail, with a trend to thinner, narrower, lighter boards. The board Kelly Slater used to win the 1995 Quiksilver Pro in Grajagan, Java, measured 6'5" by 17" by 2 3?4", and weighed just over six pounds. Retail prices went up to more than $400 for a shortboard and $500 for a longboard. Having returned to the sport in the mid-'70s, longboards steadily gained in popularity through the '80s and '90s, and by the turn of the century accounted for half of all surfboard sales. A few longboards were near replicas of boards used in the mid-'60s; most were updated and modified—lighter than their predecessors, and often made as tri-fins. Hybrid boards, including the "egg" and "fun board," were also developed. It was estimated that just over 500,000 new surfboards were sold worldwide in 2002. The 1992-invented tow-in method of big-wave surfing, with the rider getting pulled into huge waves from behind a personal watercraft, brought the single greatest break in surfboard design history. Every surf- board up to this point had in a sense been a paddleboard, as the wave, first and foremost, required a paddle-in entry. The tow-in board was the first to be built solely for wave-riding, not paddling, and is fashioned more after the water ski and snowboard; foot- straps were added in 1993, and by the late '90s the average tow-in board measured about 7'6" by 16". To help stabilize the boards at high speed, extra layers of fiberglass were added, bringing the weight up to as much as 25 pounds. The surfboard has long been recognized as having value beyond its intended recreational function. Peter Max and Billy Al Bengston were among the artists who contributed painted or sculpted boards to a 1990 gallery exhibition in Santa Monica. In Icons: Magnets of Meaning, a 1997 show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a surfboard was included along with an Armani suit, a Kitchenaid stainless-steel mixer, and a BMW, as an example of a mass-produced item that has become, as explained in a New York Times review, "a repository for our memories, inspirations and fears." Surfer magazine meanwhile described the surfboard as "our orthodox religion's primary fetish." Surfboards have also been given a Freudian reading, going back at least to the mid-'60s, with the introduction of the Penetrator model surfboard, and carrying on with Simon Anderson's tri-fin Thruster design. In "Playing Doc's Games," William Finnegan's 1992 New Yorker article, one surfer looks at another board-holding surfer and notes, "Obviously, it's erotic. That big board's his prick." Wealthy surfers in the mid-'90s began commissioning famous board-makers to create "modern classics," or "wall-hangers"— beautifully detailed, fully functional boards, made solely for display and costing up to $7,500. Surfboard collecting and surfboard auctions grew in popularity through the '90s and early '00s, with vintage wooden boards selling for as much as $18,000. "Stick," "blade," "shooter," "cue," "ride," "vehicle," and "tool" are some of the euphemisms used over the decades for "surfboard." See also big-wave surfboards, surfboard construction.

surfboard, the

Subscribe or Login