https://youtu.be/u8WUnuNOjZs
I read about this as a frothing gremmie in Surfer, so it was cool to see the photos come to life in this video.
Excellent surfing!
It’s almost painful to watch people surfing those old single fins. They were no doubt very competent surfers, but they really were being held back by their equipment. It would be cool to be able to go back in time and give them some modern boards to surf. Even better can you imagine what the reaction back then would have been to someone like Filipe Toledo surfing in that comp on a modern board? Minds would be seriously blown. This is the stuff of daydreams.
Oh that’s an interesting observation! I have the opposite reaction; I’m impressed by how well those talented surfers utilized their boards- squirting turns, pump trims (sounds kinda x rated…) plenty of speed and great turns, all in so-so beach surf- not easy! That’s the key, many of us know how those mini-gun descendent boards surfed average weak CA waves, and these guys I think surfed really well AND made it look flowing and easy.
(this is from the perspective of someone who can’t stand the style imposed by the standard shortboard of the last 25+ years mind you)
I re-rode a 70s single fin, typical CA pintail for a decent number of sessions here in OB a while back, and was struck by how crappy it rode, compared to my Brom fish.
Board wise, Tony Staples seemed to me like he had the most functional, forgiving shape.
Your experience riding one of those old 70’s single fins mirrors mine. I’ve ridden a few over the years and I found them very hard to ride. The main problem that I can see is that they were too thick and heavy, with boxy, chunky rails. Also the 70’s outlines often seemed to involve a teadrop shape with a narrow tail.
Recently I took a modern thruster shape of mine and turned it into a single fin. The board went quite well. Short, light and relatively thin, with sensitive rails. From this I could only conclude that the shortage of fins in the 70’s was only part of the story.
I started surfing in 1987, and the benchmark for high proformance surfing back then for me was Tom Curren, Tom Carroll and Occy. It’s interesting revisiting the surfing they were doing back then with a modern mindset. In bigger, solid waves, their surfing (to me) still stands up to today’s standards, (Occy at Bells, Curren at Rincon and Carroll at Pipe is still a joy to watch) but in smaller surf they seem to be doing a lot of wiggling. Not nearly as good as I had remembered it. There’s the rub; what you thought was good many years ago can get obscured by the rose tinted glasses of time, if you pardon the rather hackneyed metaphor.
[Quote=spuddups] The main problem that I can see is that they were too thick and heavy, with boxy, chunky rails. Also the 70’s outlines often seemed to involve a teadrop shape with a narrow tail.
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That was the result of magazines hyping certain shapes and designs, and the misguided idea that the average Joe could ride what the ‘heroes’ of the day rode. Don’t forget that this was the period when Lopez was king. Along with some other notable guys. The hard truth was that the narrow tailed spear shaped boards only worked in waves with sufficient juice. Mainland guys were sucked into thinking a 7’6" with a 9" tail would work in their average waist high beachbreak mush. Many of my friends in those days rode just that. They bogged and struggled.
As warthawg mentioned, Staples was on a different path. As a protege of Skip Frye in the 70s at Gordon and Smith, he was into wider, thinner boards and the “egg” in particular. While my pals were trying to make their 7’ + semi-gun spear shapes work in waist high East Coast waves, I got wise to the egg thing and Tony shaped a 6’4" for me. One of the best boards I’ve ever had, and a perfect design for my home breaks…points, reefs, and beachbreak.
So, not all single fins were the same. Many actually worked quite well. The number of fins has less to do with it than the actual shape. Wider boards with more curve in the outline will always work best in average, small waves.
Spud… what didn’t work for me on the old single fin (7’4" Eberly Bolt, and like Sammy described it, spearlike) was the way I “had to” ride it- turning from the tail, using the swing weight of the front half to various degrees. Like Paul Gross wrote,
Standing on the tail of a surfboard and weilding the nose back and forth seems stupid to me. I like the “flush” style of wave riding… with the nose down on the water, on the verge of pearling, but not quite.
What little mojo the thing had involved the dubious subtleties of that, and moving a bit forward to trim (but it didn’t trim anything as well as a fish, or hull).
So that’s what impresses me about those surfers in that meet. They surf those boards and waves as well as you can- beautiful!
No doubt they were surfing very well. I was probably a bit careless in my choice of words. “Painful” was probably a bit strong. I agree that a lot of modern shortboard surfing is pretty ugly. That “air stance” (ie poo stance) twitchyness that is on show in the WSL does nothing for me. In saying that there are people who make modern shortboarding look really good, while doing some pretty amazing turns. I’m thinking of Joel parkinson and Tom Curren in particular.
I guess good surfing is good surfing, no matter what the equipment. That said, I reckon a lot of those guys in 74 would have been surfing better on modern shapes.
there were so many guys in the finals make up that still kill it today, Jim Cartland, Rick Rasmussen, Greg Loehr, Charlie Baldwin, all these surfers went to beat Californians and Hawaiians on their turf.
Back in the day, we had to learn how to ride whatever we were lucky enough to ride. Some got really good at it. Once you knew how things worked, you could get into customs and then you’d really start to get better. I still have the step back to make a hard turn and move forward for trimming style. Love that smoother style of the 70’s.
I think the surfers that have to surf crappy waves all the time tend to have a much better time in good surf. People that have perfect waves all the time have a hard time in crappy surf.
when I was still the complete gemmie renting boards from Guy Kamaka at Barbers Point, I could even at that time tell the difference of what I got, some were the total widow makers, a swim on every wave that I tried for. While other boards were so easy to control, it was a bummer when the widow maker was the last board in the rack that day
We stayed on the inside until we learned enough then proceeded to only go out as far as we were willing to swim in. Being a little surf rat about 4’ tall, I could stand up on anything, but we didn’t have much choice back then, and for a long time we rode straight in the way the old timers surfed Waikiki. All us on one wave going straight in. I remember my uncle yelling hot curl when we started riding sideways along the wave instead of straight in.