Don Koplien Lightning Bolt 1974 Big Wave North Shore Surfboard - $2300
Don Koplien Lightning Bolt 1974 Big Wave North Shore Surfboard. Signed under glass by Don Koplien and is board number 823.This was made for the North Coast BIG waves. Overall length of the board is 7'6", width of swallow tail 6 3/4", width at mid board 20", and it is 3.5" thick at the center of the board. The original leash is still attached. Board is beautiful and has been stored for the last 40 years. I have taken photos of the board and have provided images of the very minor issues on the board edge. Please take a look and email if you have further questions. If you are looking at this auction you know the importance of this board. Don made less than 1500 boards during the day and this one was made while he was doing boards for Lighting Bolt.
Some History:
Kimo Wilder McVay, founder of the Duke contest teamed with Hobie Hawaii, hired shapers Don Koplien and Ryan Dotson on the North Shore trying to change the Hobie Image from old to new school. Hard to pull off with the old time DUKE logo in 1969.
Gerry Lopez had just started shaping at Surfline just before Don started consigning his boards. After two weeks Don and the owner of Surfline are having problems agreeing on the selling price of his boards. He was at a stand-still and told the owner he would give it some thought. Jack Shipley, who was the shop manager at Surfline, was aware of the problem Don was having. Jack pulls Don to the side and tells him that he and Gerry were starting a new surfboard company called Lightning Bolt and would like Don to come with them. When the owner of Surfline inadvertently found out about Jack and Gerry's plan, he fired Jack immediately and tried to pressure Gerry to stay. Gerry being at Surfline was a definite draw for them. When Gerry said he'd made up his mind and he was leaving with Jack, some subtle threats from Surfline were made.
So Don is now with Lightning Bolt and the rest is history. He produced six boards a week, shaped and glassed them all. Don's glass jobs were probably best known for there rich even colors and the fine pin line work. At that time the colors were tints mixed in the laminating resin and the trick was to squeegee it out evenly to avoid streaks. Pin lines were done by taping off both sides of an area and applying pigmented resin with a brush. There were no airbrushed colors at the time. Don was making Bolts along with about three or four other shapers that would eventually join Lightning Bolt.
so, fairly pristine era Lighting Bolt. Worth $2300..? Sure, to some upper income hipster who needs a wall hanger. Personally, think it would be hella more fun to take that speedster out for a spin somewhere walled up and down the line...
Eliminate the silly butt crack, square it off, and the outline is very close to what I’ve ridden 15’ Sunset with. Trust me, 15 foot Sunset is a big wave in anybodies book!
I buy and sell vintage stuff. Have been doing it for years. My specialty is furniture.
This is what I call “googling for justification”. This guy spent a lot of time scouring the internet for this info and cut and pasted it into a Craigslist ad. He arrived at the price by looking at other boards that he considered “similiar”.
This is very common nowadays. I go to auctions every week and I see huge numbers of people with smart phones trying to find values. It’s a hoot because most of them don’t know squat and will pay way to much because they found one similiar on some website.
what you would call 15’ Sunset is indeed a big wave…know how challenging it is (and the beatings to be had) just to surf it at 8’ to 10’ (double to triple overhead). But when you make one from outside all the way through the bowl…yow!!
Yea, asking price on supposedly ‘collectible’ boards never fails to amaze…and way too often, such boards are just worn out run of the mill rides from back in the dayz…just because it’s many decades old doesn’t mean it’s particularly more desirable then when it was new…
Real Sunset will always be the ultimate performance big wave. Just to figure out its moods take years, and to have the skill to out wit the crewds, takes brains, but when its real, above all, it takes big brass balls.
You want YOW? Go left, on a 15 foot day! Now that's a yowie!!!
[/quote]
You go left on a 15 footer, you may not come back! The only guy I ever saw go left on a day of consequence was Charlie Walker.
Talk about sh%ting four leaf clovers, I was lucky enough to live right across Kam Hwy. from Sunset. Got to see it every day and surf it most days. Learned it from guys older than me that grew up there. It can get huge fast!! If it wasn't for that aloha (and the little yellow house) I wouldn't have known where to be. When you pick the wrong spot, you don't forget. But for one exceptional day at Laniakea with good ol' Bobby O. Sunset is the most thrilling wave I've experienced. Big or small.
Don’t know if you surfed with him, at Sunset, but Kealoha Kiao would go left frequently. Other guys too. Even so, the left was never crowded! On a long ride, you’d kick out 100 yds from shore, only to find yourself standing in chest deep water! It was a sobering experience. Winter of 1963, I heard tales of guys going left at Waimea, on a twenty foot day!!! That is something I could never imagine, much less do. That winter I went right at Pipeline a few times. (A big deal, then.) Now it’s ridden on a regular basis. Go figure. I know what you mean about big Laniakea. Argueably the best big wave, on the North Shore. Never gone so fast.
If you trust my local pawn shop - a “vintage board” is anything with a famous shapers name on it, regardless of the condition. I once went there looking for any “throwaway” boards they had that were just super beat up and unsellable, to strip and reshape or salvage foam from. After digging through their pile I came up with a gem - a longboard that looked like it had been fed through a woodchipper! The thing was missing 90% of the glass, the surface foam was completely rotten (some missing) and it was all but snapped in half… Guy looked at it and went “ahh no brah - that guy is getting really famous with his designs now, that board was would be at least $600” - needless to say I laughed and said “even in this condition? Because I would give you maybe $20”
I think at some point, a board stops being valuable simply because it’s old, and starts becoming nothing more than a pile of scrap with someones autograph on it. That board you found looks to be in good condition, but I would never pay over $1500 for a board regardless of how famous the shaper is - and at that price it better be a beautiful solid rare-wood long board at least 12’ long and brand new
Mr. Thrailkill, I knew Kealoha's cousin Russell. He was one that helped show me the ropes. I've seen guys make the drop left at Sunset but on a "big" day, I can't remember seeing any lefts taken. Had many unforgettable days there but Lani's still stands out as an all time session. Two freckled haoles and the rest Braddahs.....what a day.
re: “vintage”. I was looking at Ebay last night and that word gets thrown around so much it has become nearly meaningless. Since when is a board from 80s or 90s considered vintage? Not in my book. Also, reproductions done very recently are being touted as vintage. Such as Reno Abellira Bolts he’s carved in the last year or two. Then, there’s a supposed Hobie noserider the seller claims was inspected by Terry Martin. It is so obviously a new board, even Ray Charles could see it (or Stevie Wonder).
Plus, it has become difficult to wade through ebay listings for surfboards with the glut of SUPpositories being listed. They are a nuisance in the water, and on the web, it seems.
Hold on…
OK. This guy wants 3000 dollars for this board. Calls it a vintage Hobie noserider.
Ad copy: "I
decided to speak with Terry Martin (board shaper for Hobie for 45
years). He looked over the board very carefully and was in awe of this
board. It is in beautiful condition and has a unique shape. He thinks
that is was made between 1963 to 1965.
He believes that Phil Edwards was the shaper of this board. (Phil Edwards is one of the top surfers and shapers of the world).
Terry
seemed to think that with the concave and shape of this board that it
had been used strictly for a noseriding contest (example: Tom Morey
Noseriding Contest). Terry specified that most of the Hobie boards were
made without the concave nose. This board would have been something that
Corky Carroll may have ridden in a contest. I know that Terry had
spoken about the Hobie Noserider that came out a few years later. Hobie
made the board that Mickey Munoz surfed for the first time in the movie
“Surfing Shorts” by Bruce Brown. The board was made for noseriding
contests. My Hobie was made way before the Hobie noserider."
What a load of BS!!
Two problems. 1 There was no such thing as a Hobie noserider in 1963… 2 the photos tell the story.
Sammy - couldn't agree more on the state of ebay (and Craigslist is probably worse) listings. The internet is full of spammers and scammers, and any site where money changes hands is going to attract its share. Then there are those sincere but ignorant folks who watch the semi-truthful inflated claims of tv shows featuring huge profits from rare "finds", and think that every old board is a big bucks collectible.
Buyer beware is the best policy, and due diligence is required for any online purchase. Things like the reputation / track record of the seller, the provenance (comparable to "chain of evidence" in legal terms), researching the accuracy of the description, etc. Read the fine print. One seller on ebay was selling what looked like brand new x-box games for a very low price - it turned out the fine print in his listing said you were purchasing the package only, not the game.
I have had some experience with the antiques / collectibles business, and I have found that most of the really high prices that get press are due to unusual rarity combined with exceptional condition, and often, some well-documented historical tie-in. So the prices that make the news are far from representative of an old but common item in flawed condition.
I feel like people think the words "vintage" and "retro" are synonymous (damn I wish spell-check worked on this site)
[/quote]
Its not just that. Search engines work on key words and phrases, so savvy but unscrupulous sellers have learned to include a barrage of marginally related terms to get searchers to land on their listing. Thats why you see wordy descriptions like...
"old vintage antique collectible surfboard longboard (like seen in the surf film Endless Summer and featured in other memorabilia) or possibly high performance shortboard maybe a Gerry Lopez (who autographed many boards but not unfortunately this one) lightening bolt gun and maybe shaped by Rory Russell who surfed Pipeline with Owl Chapman and Dick Brewer at other North Shore Hawaii beaches like Sunset Beach in the days before Kelly Slater and Rob Machado bla bla bla yada yada yada."
It becomes an exercise in frustration to try to find a listing directly related to the term you are searching.
Yup. I don’t get the pinlines/stripes over the stringer. Plus, the board is far too white to be from the early/mid sixties. I think the Terry Martin story is fiction and the board is less than ten years old. A lot less.
Of course, there’s no way anyone can check with Martin now, can they?
Yeah... that Hobie Noserider looks to be a redo to me. Fake t-band, fake side stringers and the blue 'noseguard' thing is likely an attempt at covering up something gnarly. A ding repair is obvious just outside of the blue nose guard but the rest of the board could have been painted white or reglassed opaque. The shot of the logo is definitely showing some mysteriousness.
Also, I don't really like it when people post a long list of keywords in their ads like this one found recently on Craigslist...
word: rusty brewer andreini linden joel tudor skip frye michael miller mike hynson gato heroi harbour al merrick cooperfish wayne lynch takayama nuuhiwa kookbox lost js bing lopez gerry shrosbee patagonia fcd fcs true ames rainbow walden murphy simmons hobie hap jacobs lance carson christenson pavel eric christenson hanes moonlight glassing bonzer cambell brothers mast mctavish knoll dano junod mandala yater jim phillips longboard short board egg retro richard kenvin vintage eaton nose rider josh hall john peck surftech firewire becker shimbawa hamish graham greek tyler warren ryan burch tyler stewart tom wegener von sol infinity third world exotic larry mabile timmy patterson phil edwards micah wood fineline bahne stu kenson hynson aipa
