Serfs Up!

Stylish steering from Alex Knost. Photograph by Grant Ellis.

365 Story: The Beginning of the Return of Transition Designs

What do we mean when we speak of transition shapes? Essentially most of us living and surfing today were first influenced by either the tail end of the longboard period or the early short board era which started with single fin boards and became thrusters.

Traditional long boarding as we understand it today started in 1955 when Dale Velzey’s glasser accidentally put the fin on the tail instead of the nose and created the Pig. That board was easy to turn and nose ride. In December 1967 Nat Young and Bob McTavish rode 9'4" Vee bottom performance boards at Honolua Bay and so amazed the surfing world that longboard surfing became obsolete overnight.

Beginning in 1968 through 1973 was the transition era. This was the period of time where those of us building surfboards figured out how to make a short board work properly. Vee bottoms gave way to round tails with flat bottoms, twin fins, pintails with turned up rails forward, and pintails with natural rocker and down rails. Parallel to this period was the mini-gun which was a short pintail that followed the same progression as the Vee bottom.

By 1974 the only boards in the lineup were now 6'8" to 7'6" long, 19 inches wide with a pintail. This was the end of surfing for fun! There were a few of us who remained interested in these transition boards, myself included along with Gregg Liddle, Skip Frye, and Herbie Fletcher being the others I was aware of before Instagram. By then Kirk Putnam and I had become good friends and both lived in Santa Barbara where the waves were usually perfect small peelers. Kirk rode Liddle’s and was having much more fun than me in small beach break since I was on a 7'6" pintail. Soon I was building re-creations of Double Enders and Vee bottoms from which also led to remaking longboards of the 60’s. We were having so much fun because these boards had more area like the early longboards but also had the speed of a modern board. The best part was that no one else bothered riding waves that were under chest high.