During the transition era, Jimmy Lucas stayed under the media radar, but a few images of him surfaced...not to mention raves from surfers who saw his laser beam runs across Hanalei Bay.
Here's some grainy footage of Lucas on a narrow hull at Haleiwa. It's from Fred Windisch's The Natural Art. A few nice bursts of tracking speed.
This balsa Channin/Diffenderfer island hull may be the most beautiful surfboard ever made!
Larry Gordon was one of the two most sophisticated marketing minds in surfing history. (The other being Tom Morey.) Larry had respect for the demographic he was speaking to, and that attitude was reflected in the ads he generated. Projecting a "hipster image" was a distant second to conveying what G&S boards were like, and why.
This collection of ads from the late 60's is nearly 50 years old, and they still resonate.
(I love the way the size charts top out at 185 lbs !!!)
This 'two page spread' ad ran in Surfer Magazine in 1969. The brain trust at G&S sawed one of their first-gen shortboards into segments, then photographed the individual slices to show the transition of the rail line.
The hull scheme - high to low rails, nose to tail -- turned out to be a winning combination that's still in use by hull shapers nearly 50 years later.
G&S came to that design conclusion thanks to the work of Skip Frye. He built three identical 7'6'' boards, each with a different rail line...
High rails all the way around.
High in the nose to low in the tail.
Low rails all the way around.
After riding them, he concluded that the high-to-low combination worked best...for his trimming-oriented riding style.
What's more, pioneering East Coast surf filmmaker Bill Yerkes had the foresight to film one of Skip's testing sessions at good ole' PB Point. (If you've ever surfed PB Point, you can appreciate how well he's riding...it's one tired wave!)
Post Script:
A few years later, I went to work at the G&S factory as a fin grinder. One day while eating lunch, I looked up, and saw the board from that ad stashed up on a high shelf, collecting dust. To this day, I regret I didn't liberate it for historical purposes. They probably would've given it to me if I had asked!
Sea Of Joy (1971) was a cryptic film, to say the least. Even today, the displacement hull cognoscenti have trouble separating the signal from the noise. Super short stubby hulls and early low railers share the lineup, with mixed results on both fronts.
But...the surfers seem willing to try new ideas without fear of failure. Along with some hull-ish surfing in this trailer, at the 1:31 mark there's a shot of Nat Young riding a bizarre down railed blunt at Jeffrey's Bay...
The yellow shape Young is riding is unique by any standard, in any era. Insanely narrow and parallel, with a full nose and what appears to be a soft squaretail of some kind. The board has a flat bottom, and resembles a waterski more than anything else.
Nat's feet are almost as long as the board is wide in the tail area!
He's probably the only person who could have ridden something that radical. It's as if he took one look at the wave at Jeffrey's, and decided to build a board totally committed to getting down the line.
Did Nat Young design the board? Did he build it? Was it a success? Who knows? I've never seen or heard of him riding it anywhere else.
Here's another Sea Of Joy trailer, also with some interesting hull surfing. There's a quick shot of Ted Spencer on a less radical waterski board at the 2:30 mark, followed by a different ride of Nat on that yellow board at 2:35...
That means you! Help to compile a definitive resource of sorts for anyone interested in "hulls", in the form of articles, experiences, pictures and video.
