Surfing waves such as Wategoes, the Pass and Broken Head on a daily basis has helped all of us immensely in our endless search for the perfect board.

I was also lucky enough to have worked along side iconic longboard shapers and surfers Frank Latta, John Skipp and Kevin Parkinson for many years in Wollongong. This experience honed my manufacturing skills and gave me a tremendous awareness of the components needed in relation to successful longboard designing.

The names: Steve Mills, Aquiles Sande, Lee Miller, Martin Maloney, Hayden Swan, Josh Cooper, Kevin Holt, Sam Mahoney and Beau Young are all synonymous with power surfing, style and competitive excellence. They are all outstanding long boarders who have given Ed invaluable help and encouragement in defining and refining his longboard design.

Ed’s fins have all been designed by Phil Way of Fluid Foils who has recently franchised his name to the multinational surf company F.C.S.

The Firehawk

The Ninja

Classic Style. Grannis photo.Leroy Grannis' book SURF PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE 1960s available from www.photosgrannis.com Also available to order instore.

The Easyrider Minimal

LONGBOARD HISTORY

A defining moment in surfings evolution took place at the 1967 World Surfing Championships.

A major event that took place in the USA in 1967, was the winning of the World Surfing Championships in California by Australian surfing legend Nat Young. The contest took place in the city of San Diego at Ocean Beach, and was the largest surf competition ever held in the U.S.A, with 83,000 spectators.

World Surfing Championships 1967 Ocean Beach San Deigo California.

It was the first time the U.S. media had endorsed surfing as a serious sport, rather than a teenage subculture with no substance. Nat Young, with his pig board, made a serious inroad into the fabric of surfing history. His stylish power surfing got him the nickname of the “animal”.

Bondi 1950's

Instead of nose-riding like the other competitors, Nat was carving up the faces of the waves while riding a nine feet four inch surfboard he called ‘Sam’. He was doing powerful roundhouse cutbacks and moves no one had ever seen before.

The legacy that Nat Young left, inspired a whole generation . Longboarding today is imbued with progressive power mooves and classic noseriding. Post-modern longboarding takes many forms and is continually evolving it co-exists with the purists, the recreational, the hardcore elite and beginners.

Everyone wants to carve and noseride. Some with the classic finess of Phil Edwards some with the brutal power of Nat Young, some with the amazing creativity of Kelly Slater.The creative revolution that Nat Young began in California in 1967 opened the doors of perception that classic noseriding could co-exist with contemporary power surfing. Who knows how the future will unfold or what manouvers we will be doing on longboards 200 years from now. Maybe if some of the elite professionals like Slater , Fanning or Parkinson gets on a longboard and shows us now then it could redefine the consciousness of the surfing world. Just like when Nat did it in 1967.

SURF international 1967 edition1

The Duke in Australia

The late sixties when I started my journey into the surfing lifestyle was an era of rapid and accelerated change in surf design.

The Duke Kahanamoku

It was also the era when the father of modern surfing Duke Kahanamoku died of a heart attack. It was January 22, 1968 and at the age of 77 the most famous surfer of all time was gone. He was famous as the man who introduced surfing to Australia at Freshwater beach in February, 1915. There was big surf breaking, and for three and a half hours the Duke never left the water. His surfing prowess basically blew everyone’s minds that were present. No one had ever seen anything like it. He took Isabel Latham, a local girl out with him, and gave a demonstration of tandem surfing.

While in Australia, Duke introduced surfboard riding to the masses. Yet, he did not bring a surfboard from Hawaii. Instead, he made one. Patricia Gilmore, an Australian reporter/historian, described what happened, in a nostalgic look back for The Sydney Morning Herald, in 1948: "Having no board, he picked out some sugar pine from George Hudson's, and made one. This board was eight feet six inches long, and had a concave underneath. Duke purposely made the surfboard concave instead of convex to give him greater stability in Australian surf conditions.

The real huey of surfing 'The Duke'

Before Duke had left Australia, in 1915, he also helped show the Aussies how to build boards. "Nothing would do," he recalled, "but that I must instruct them in board building -- a thing which I did with pleasure. Before I left that fabulous land, the Australians had already turned to making their own boards and practicing what I had shown them in the surf." "Incidentally," added Duke, "forty years later, Tom Zahn came to Australia, found my sugarpine board to be still in seaworthy shape. He took it out into the waters of Freshwater Bay and gave an exciting surfing demonstration."

Duke's impact on Australian surfing was tremendous. He essentially started surfing in Oz. Over twenty years later, in 1939, on the eve of a big Pacific Aquatic Carnival held in Honolulu, then longtime surfboard champion of Australia, Snowy McAlister, wrote: "We in Australia learned the rudiments of the sport from Duke. He gave the boards new meanings. I don't think anybody, Hawaiian or Australian, could duplicate Duke's old time skill."

One instant convert in the crowd was ten year-old Claude West, a Manly beach local. Claude soon became a proficient board rider, and other surfers began to imitate him. Claude proved himself a great surfer: he won the Australian surfing championships from 1919 to 1924. Claude was one of Australia pioneer surfboard shapers and built many boards like the one Duke had given him and was a fine craftsman. Ironically Claude learned the rudiments of fine-planing wood while building coffins for an undertaker. In 1918, dissatisfied with the weight of his wooden creations, West attempted to make it lighter by hollowing out the centre and covering it with a lighter wood. The Australian surfboard evolution had already begun.

Hawaiian surfing roots.

Surfing is one of the oldest practiced sports on the planet. The art of wave riding, is a blend of total athleticism and the comprehension of the beauty and power of nature. Surfing is also one of the few sports that creates its own culture and lifestyle.

This guy was home late for dinner cause the surf was pumpin

The act of surfing waves with a wooden board originated in Western Polynesia over three thousand years ago. The first surfers were fishermen who discovered riding waves as an efficient method of getting to shore with their catch. Eventually catching waves developed from being part of everyday work to being a pastime. This change revolutionized surfing.

There is no exact record of when stand-up surfing became a sport. It is known that during the 15th century, kings, queens and people of the Sandwich Isles were big into the sport of "he'enalu" or wave-sliding, in old Hawaiian,. "He'e" means to change from a solid form to a liquid form and "nalu" refers to the surfing motion of a wave.

A Native checking out the Surf

Early historical records of surfing appear in the late 1700s, when Europeans and Polynesians made first contact in Tahiti. Navigator Captain James Cook described how a Tahitian caught waves with his outrigger canoe just for the fun of it: "On walking one day about Matavai Point, where our tents were erected, I saw a man paddling in a small canoe so quickly and looking about him with such eagerness of each side. He then sat motionless and was carried along at the same swift rate as the wave, till it landed him upon the beach. Then he started out, emptied his canoe, and went in search of another swell. I could not help concluding that this man felt the most supreme pleasure while he was driven on so fast and so smoothly by the sea."

The first Polynesian settlers to land in Hawaii were most likely skilled in simple surfing, and after a few hundred years of riding the waves of Hawaii, the well-known Hawaiian form of the sport emerged.

The Hawaiians who surfed, the ali'i or high class, claimed the highest reputation for skill with boards on waves. They developed their own designs as board shapers, selected their own wood and surfed their own private beaches. No one dared to drop in on their wave in fear of getting punished and possible dying. The surfboards underwent a sacred ritual before construction, prayers were offered and esoteric rituals were performed. Only three types of trees were picked to make a board. The board maker would dig up the tree and around the roots place fish in the hole as an offering to the gods for the tree. The process of shaping then began.

It is interesting to note that Hawaiians had quivers of different surfboard designs that they used for different occasion. There were four basic board types: - The paipo or kioe, a body board, from 2-to-4 feet long, usually used by children. - The alaia (ah-LAI-ah) or omo (O-mo), a mid-sized board, about 8 feet or longer. - The kiko`o, larger than the alaia and omo, but not as big as the biggest boards which were between 12 and 18 feet. These were called the olo (O-lo), a very long surfboard set aside for royalty only. These were good for bigger surf, but required a high level of skill to handle.

Its hard to get your head around the fact fact that the ancient Hawaiians were just as surf stoked as us and lived the surfing lifestyle way before anybody in the western world ever caught on. Seems like they had life wired way back then. All i can say is thank god they did for all of our sake!