Earlier this week I posted about a group of Northland New Zealand teens who, in 1959, not really knowing what surfboards were supposed to look like, decided to build their own equipment and—surprise! What they came up with was incredibly if accidentally anti-longboard. Very 1971, in fact. After a couple of years, when the outside world intruded and Northland boys found out they were doing it "wrong," they switched over to riding regular logs.

That one was unique in terms of how the boards were conjured almost in a vacuum. But the false-start shortboard event is actually a pretty common up and down the surf history timeline.

First, and to establish a baseline of sorts, let's quickly run our eyes over a set of longboards. Here we see, left to right: a 1938 solid redwood (11' x 23"), a 1952 Simmons (9'8" x 23.75"), a 1957 Velzy-Jacobs (9'7" x 22"), a 1960 Hobie (9'5" x 22"), and a 1967 Surfboards Hawaii (9'6" x 24").

, suggests that a surfer weighing 155 pounds would be best suited riding a 10' x 21.5" board, weighing about 35 pounds. "It's no use a tall heavy man trying to ride a short, very light board," Farrelly says, a remark that only seems hidebound in retrospect, and was in fact standard longboard-age doctrine. In passing, Farrelly also mentioned "misfit" boards; those that didn't fall within the usual specs.

Bob McTavish, with George Greenough as muse, shaped the first Plastic Machine in 1967, and that board is rightly viewed as the opening shot in the shortboard revolution. I wonder if maybe the time dictated the event. In the West, in nearly all things, surfing included, 1967 was the most flux of years; everything seemed negotiable, and change in one field encouraged change in others. In other words, maybe we needed drugs, Hendrix, long hair, and 'Nam sweat in order to burn the old models down.

Or maybe 1967 was simply the year that our noseriding fever finally broke. Once you get to David Nuuhiwa you've reached the top of the mountain; time to find a new challenge.

Nevertheless, as Farrelly noted, there were always misfits out there—boards and surfers both. McTavish and Greenough just happened to be the right misfits at the right time and were powerful enough to overthrow the old order.

1948: HOT CURL, 8'8" x 20", SHAPED BY MATT KIVLIN

Craig Stecyk wrote about this board in a 1996 issue of 

 "Around 1948, Kivlin and Quigg were building some hot curl demonstration boards to help convey what was going on in the Islands. An old plank was recycled by Kivlin into a replica of Rabbit Kekai's board. It was a sinker and the boys put it aside and moved on. Later, when a trophy was required for the two-mile Big Rock Race to be held on Sunday, September 11, 1949, the abandoned hot curl was requisitioned. Quigg carved the 'Malibu Perpetual Surfboard' inscription and thusly turned it into a trophy." So this board was a failure, in other words, but it was modeled on a board that was very much a success. In a different issue of the 

, Rabbit Kekai told Stecyk that his boards of that period were "pointers, like the modern-day gun. We brought them into like 18 or 19 inches wide . . . my board was 7' or 7'6"."

1954? MIKI DORA, MALIBU, SHAPED (PROBABLY) BY EITHER JOE QUIGG OR MATT KIVLIN

, Joe Quigg says he sold Dora an "all-balsa pintail with rocker [and] low rails. It was 9'6" and very light, at least half the weight of other boards." That was in 1953, when Miki was 18, and the board show here might be the one Quigg is talking about. But I'm guessing it's a Matt Kivlin shape, smaller than the Quigg board, and built a year or so later.

Cut off from the rest of the surfing world, this Northland crew picked up a rough idea on board design and construction from a 1958 issue of 

, but decided to trim the specs way down. Many of the boards they made in 1959 looked as if they'd been lifted straight from 1971. Click 

 to see more about this odd and wonderful moment in surf history.

1959: 6'6" (BEST GUESS) SHAPED BY JIM FOLEY, SANTA CRUZ

To my eyes, this is the real missed opportunity. Jim Foley was a very good surfer, and rode these self-made boards for years, and was almost literally surfing circles around his pals out at Steamer Lane, Pleasure Point, and the Rivermouth. Of all the stand-up surfers featured here, Foley was the only real pre-'67 shortboard zealot. The boards themselves look awful in every way except their length. Unless I'm mistaken, the board you seen in this clip is a stock 9'6" with 3' whacked off the tail. Even so, Foley is getting in twice the turns, riding higher and tighter to the hook, and is just (to use the McTavish buzzword of 1966) getting way more "involved." The cutback at 1:49 looks VERY Nat Young.

Foley started making short surfboards in 1956—using EPS foam, no less. "It was so cheap to build these boards," he later wrote, "that I could experiment with practically any shape I could think of. I sometimes showed up at the beach with three or four experimental boards to try out. I felt that for my style, and for my enjoyment, a board should be as short and light as possible yet still long enough to catch a wave. I once tried a six-foot board with only one layer of four-ounce cloth. It weighed about 10 pounds. It was what I'd always dreamed of, [but] I was only able to ride two waves on it before it broke in half."

1959: 7'10" RIDDEN BY DEWEY WEBER AT MANHATTAN PIER, SHAPED BY EITHER DALE VELZY OR GREG NOLL

Greg Noll's voiceover says he made the board we're looking at here, but Dewey was Dale Velzy's #1 test pilot around this time. Also, Velzy's 7-11 model was a hot seller in 1960. This short and wholly unimpressive clip from Noll's 

 video is the only mention I've seen of Dewey riding a shorter board during this period. Noll's quote that "there weren't enough guys capable of surfing a shortboard at that time" is interesting. "Short" is relative, and less-experienced surfers (who were flooding the sport in that post-

 era) could have managed on boards like the one Dewey is on here—except when everybody else is riding a 9'6" or bigger, that is what seems right and proper. Surfing's herd instinct is strong.


Greenough was a standup surfer before he dropped to his knees and belly to get closer to the wave. But, no surprise, even as a teen was already breaking convention. George was still in high school when he made this spud-like six-footer. "I wish I'd ridden this board with a narrower fin," he later said, "because it probably would've been a little ripper, but it broke in half before I got into designing fins."

 article, editor Dick Graham wrote about a camping trip the summer prior to K-39 in Baja. "One of the highlights," Graham wrote, "was watching Mickey Munoz surf his 6' 8" board." Munoz made the board for his four-year-old son, but took it for a test run and ended up keeping it for himself. 'You need a wave that is still curling," he said, "and won't section out on you. I use it when I feel like goofing around, and it makes an easy day difficult."

1963: 7'0" RIDDEN BY STEVE PETTY AT HALEIWA

I've never heard of Steve Petty, and don't know who made the board. Like a lot of other boards featured here, it's just a scaled-down log. What caught my eye is the way Petty, although not in the same league skill-wise, handles his seven-footer in much the same way Nat Young and Bob McTavish would ride their Plastic Machines five years later: turning from the middle of the board, and taking advantage of being able to get higher in the pocket and closer to the curl. For comparison, that's Rusty Miller at the end of the clip, on the same day, riding (I'm guessing) a ten-footer. No knock on Miller, but he spends most of the wave on his back foot, just to keep the nose and rails from digging. Again, as with Jim Foley in Santa Cruz, it amazes me that other surfers could watch Petty and not see the advantage of riding a smaller board. Paddling horsepower, or lack thereof, maybe? That might have been one reason. But I'll default to what I said above. We ride what they're used to riding, and are innately conservative in our design choices. Steve Petty, even with a really eye-catching performance at a break like Haleiwa, with cameras on the beach and peers riding in slow-motion by comparison, wasn't going to change anybody's minds—he didn't have the juice. It needed to be Nat Young. The reigning world champ arrived in Hawaii in 1967 with more juice than anybody in the sport, and when he rode Haleiwa, in conditions similar to what you see here, everybody took notice. Then ran off and ordered a new board.

[Photos and video: Tucker Stevens, Dick Graham, Guy Motil, John Severson, Dale Davis, Greg Noll, George Greenough]

FAILURE TO LAUNCH: SHORTBOARDS BEFORE THE SHORTBOARD REVOLUTION

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