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Finless, narrow-tailed surfboard used from the late 1930s to the late ‘40s, almost exclusively in Hawaii; invented in 1937 by John Kelly; often described as the first specialized big-wave board. "The essence of the hot curl," surf historian Mark Fragale wrote in 2002, "was its special ability to trim like no other board before it."

Two types of surfboards were in use during the mid-1930s: the block-edge hollow board, sometimes called a “cigar box” or a "kook box," and the heavier (50 pounds and up) solid-wood square-tail “plank.” While the hollow design paddled faster and was easier to carry, the plank allowed a slightly higher degree of control while riding, and as such was favored by the progressive surfers of the age.

In the summer of 1937, Kelly and close friend Fran Heath were riding their redwood planks in overhead waves at a break named Browns, near Diamond Head. Both surfers left the water frustrated by their inability to hold a tight angle on the wave face—the tail sections of the boards kept "sliding ass."

In the yard of his beachfront house, not far from Browns, Kelly used an ax and a drawknife to reshape the back two-fifths of his board, narrowing the tail by about eight inches, as measured one foot up from the back. Heath did the same. That afternoon, Kelly and Heath returned to Browns. The boards floated lower in the water and were harder to paddle, but they did indeed grip the wave better while on an angle. A few weeks later, Wally Froiseth was so happy with his new board—which measured 10’ 11” x 20” and weighted 65 pounds—he shouted out, “Hey, these things really get you in the hot curl!” The name stuck.

Later versions of the hot curl featured a rounded "boat hull" design down the aft section, further adding to the board's trimming capacity.

The surfboard fin, popularized in the late ‘40s, would allow surfers to ride at a far tighter angle, with more control. But the hot curl was nonetheless a huge improvement over the planks and hollows, and was at least partially responsible for a break called Makaha, on the West Side of Oahu, becoming a new surfing hot spot. The hot curl was open to a more challenging wave, and Makaha, which broke at all sizes, served beautifully. Kelly, Froiseth, Heath, and later Woody Brown and George Downing, were among a small group who invented modern big-wave surfing at Makaha in the ‘40s and early ‘50s while riding hot curls.

In waves of all sizes, the hot curl tended to bring out a spare, feet-together posture from the rider and encouraged a high-trim approach to the wave. Waikiki’s Rabbit Kekai is often mentioned as the top hot curl performer. Turning, as with the planks, was still difficult and rare, but changes in direction were made possible by read-weighting, lifting the nose, and swinging it a few degrees in one direction or the other.

The limitations of the hot curl were made apparent when Downing, Froiseth and Russ Takaki toured Southern California beaches in 1948. Surfers at Malibu, they discovered, were riding wide-tailed balsa “chip” boards, covered in a protective layer of resin and fiberglass. The outline on the chip design was wrong for bigger surf, but the fin allowed for riders to maneuver on the wave where the redwood hot curl riders could do little more than hold an angle. The chip boards, moreover, were lighter.

Back in Hawaii, Downing built what was in effect a balsa-core hot curl with a fin—a design that would shortly be known as a “big-wave” gun—and the original hot curl was obsolete.

In 1967, Gordon and Smith Surfboards in San Diego introduced the short-lived Hot Curl model. It was unrelated to the Hawaiian hot curl.

Hot Curl was also the name of a proto-hippy cartoon character created by San Diego beat generation artist Michael Dormer in the late 1950s.

hot curl surfboard

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