San Diego has a long history of colorful characters and misadventures, but what is not well known is how much the surfers and surfboard designers of San Diego have contributed to the development of surfboard design world-wide dating back from the late thirties to today.  From the booming outside peaks of the Tijuana Sloughs to the world-class high-performance point surf of Trestles, the rich variety of surf here in San Diego has been a major factor in surfboard design breakthroughs that have come out of San Diego over the last fifty years. 

 

Surfboard history is rich in San Diego starting back in the late thirties with a world record holder glider pilot that just happen to be a surfer named Woody Brown.  He was a good surfer that had moved to San Diego for its favorable flying conditions and discovered surfing the good waves in San Diego had the same sensations and highs he got flying gliders.  As with most of the pilots of that time period, he was also a designer and recognized that the dynamics of flight were very similar to surfing and the interactions of surfboards and water. The surfboards back then were very heavy and extremely difficult to handle in the challenging surf at Windansea where he and the small group of surfers in La Jolla usually rode. The boards were around 10-13 ft and over 100 lbs and offered little maneuverability; he wanted the same freedom and performance he got in his gliders in his surfboard so he set out to build a board that would give him the same type of performance he felt flying. 

 

Without any references and about forty years ahead of anyone in surfboard design, he decided to build a surfboard based on the aerodynamics and construction of the wings on his gliders. 

This was an amazing surfboard, even by today’s standards.  It was 8’6” and basically the first performance short-board ever built.  It was lightweight and hollow using wing-spar construction with a modern looking balanced template that featured a pulled in nose and tail.  He based the rails on the shape of a wing which meant the rails were low and tapered then added a fin as a stabilizer just like his glider he reasoned.  You have to remember the boards didn’t have fins back then so he had no referenced except his glider and decided on his own it needed a fin to stabilize the board!!!  This was a truly breakthrough design and it exceeded his expectations in every way! It was light and maneuverable and he was able to turn it with ease, he rode the board mostly alone in the San Diego area until a family tragedy forced him to abruptly depart leaving his glider and surfboard in a back garage lost forever and surfboards staying in the dark ages for another decade or so. 

 

Woody eventually settled in Hawaii and became a catamaran designer and one of the best big wave riders at Makaha in the fifties and early sixties.  In 1996 he came back to San Diego and built a replica of his Aero-board and rode it at Windansea in front of an amazed gallery, he was featured in a documentary riding the board and not only was he still a good surfer in his early 80’s, you could see just how well his Aero-board worked that day.  At 90 he lives on Maui and continues to surf today.

 

With innovations such as Bob Simmon’s light balsa and fiberglass twin-fin “Machine” in the late forties, Pat Curren guns in the fifties, Carl Extrom’s Asymmetrical, and the Mirandon brothers twin-pins in the sixties, surfboard design was continuously developing then spiked with the breakout designs such as the Hyson Down-railer and the Lis Fish that really pushed the experimentation of the shortboard revolution to its peak in the early seventies.

 

Larry Gordon of Gordon and Smith led the way in the seventies with a crew of world-class shapers and designers and arguably one of the best surf teams ever!  Led by who’s who of the shaping world, G&S built some of the most practical innovative surfboard designs anywhere and its influence, although not universally recognized, is still being felt today!  All you surfers riding post-modern boards today owe a great deal of gratitude to G&S and its crew.

 

When the twin-fin area exploded in the late seventies several San Diego shapers were already well versed in building twin-fins  because of all the fish-style boards that were built here in the early-mid seventies.  Rusty Preisendorfer led the way with his amazing twin-fins at Canyon Surfboards and by the early eighties was recognized as one of the top shapers in the world. Shaun Thompson and Peter Townend were his early disciples and when the tri-fin came on to the scene, Simon Anderson came to San Diego to work with Nectar Surfboards fine-tuning the tri-fin and within months, the Nectar and Canyon crews were building some of the best thrusters in the world.

 

When the Longboards became popular again in the mid-eighties, it was led by North County ’s Steve Walden and Donald Takayama both who put modern design features and redesigned longboards to be performance-driven surfboards that brought a lot of people that had given up surfing back in the water.  Bill Stewart in San Clemente took it the next step with his innovative Hydro-hull design that took the world by storm with Bill winning pro contests and selling more longboards than anyone thought possible.

 

The early nineties saw the Twinzer emerge when Will Jobson moved down to San Diego to work with Rusty Surfboards developing many new innovative Twinzer models including adapting them to the modern longboard and a revitalized Lis-style fish. This lead to the innovative C-5 five-fin program that put more power and drive into the boards and allowed the tails to widen which was the opening for the post-modern revolution in board design that is so popular today.  Also the first shaping machines were developed lead by Ray Baum and Tony Channin and his crew at the Channin factory that changed surfboard manufacturing forever, this allowed surfboard companies and shapers to build consistent quality shapes which increased their ability to build more quality boards than every before.

 

The new millennium emerged with a small group of designers and shapers modernizing the Lis-style fish and adapting them with modern twin keels, twinzers, and four-fins.  These boards were not just small fish designs but the designers also took a serious look back at Bob Simmons 9’ to 11’ ft wide-tail twin-fins and how they worked, and then adapted some of his design features to mid-length and Longboard fish-style designs.  This opened the door to the post-modern movement and the current development of performance four-fins in every shape and size.  Right now San Diego is at the epicenter of innovation that has never been as prolific as it is today. 

 

San Diego has the industry base, great designers, good surfers, and diverse quality waves that make it such a rich environment for experimentation and new ideas.  We have big outside outer reef surf, Hawaiian style hollow reef waves, world-class point surf, open face performance reef breaks, powerful world-class beach-breaks, secret spots, soft beach-breaks, and beginner waves.  All this diversity of surf allows us to build surfboard designs that work in a wide-range of surfing conditions which in turn gives our surfing friends a better board. 

 

A great board makes your session just that much better and puts that spark back into  your surfing.

 

Keep Surfing!