An enigmatic genius, brilliant innovator and test pilot, reclusive outsider…
Who walks in the footsteps of Bob Simmons today?
I don’t know who might be walking in Simmon’s footsteps, but I have attempted to follow some tracks for sure. I have a 9-8 and 10-4 Simmon’s outlines shaped by Paul Gross. The feelings I have experienced riding these boards have given me some insight into what might call a man to live as he did.
Roger
High tide has erased his footsteps, but part of the soul of surfing was left behind in the sands that perhaps only we the old-schoolers can truly connect with. It was a time when there were no shortboards, no leashes, just candlewax, and an adventurous spirit. It was a time when you could park your TR-3 convertible on the street above Windansea and sleep down on the beach (and the camera was still in the front seat the next morning).
Simmons ushered in an era of big-time changes in the sport of surfing and me thinks there are no such changes going on now, though foreign popouts might be considered big-time changes.
Here’s a question for us: Would Simmons have pioneered the whole “surftech” era or would he have guided us around it and on to where we have not yet been?
Renny Yater comes to mine, not as a reincarnation of Simmons, but an original character influenced by Simmons for sure.
Quote:
An enigmatic genius, brilliant innovator and test pilot, reclusive outsider…
Who walks in the footsteps of Bob Simmons today?
That read and understood Lindsay Lord on planing hulls, tried to put mathematics and testing to surfcraft, played with materials, experimented rather than guessed, did tank tests of surfboard hulls?
Good bloody luck. I can think of a few, who would rather not be known. But what’s kinda sad is this:
Understanding of what makes a board work hasn’t really advanced since Simmons. In many ways it’s regressed.
doc…
Aaah, there’s an army: George Greenough, Brewer, Pleskunas and the other tow-in foil brigade, Dale Solomonson, McCoy, Morey, Loehr, the Cambells, those crazy paipo guys, Toby Pavel, Paul Jensen. And those are the guys I can think of…If you want to define those as picking a path less traveled and sticking to it I’d add Greg Liddle and Paul Gross too.
If they are footsteps in the sand then they are long gone, walked in, on, and over by thousands of others, and so on for eternity.
I just clicked on Dale’s link and got suckered into reading that entire page! My thoughts?..
You’d have to go outside of the surfing community to find someone with that much impact. Changes like that might only happen once, if ever.