The Lightning Bolt business plan during the company's early-and-mid-70s heyday was:

2) Free boards for every hot pro surfer on the North Shore, local or visitor.

3) Tagline: "The Most Frequently Tubed Boards on Earth."

Never mind the whirlpool of red ink on Bolt's P&L ledger. As a marketing ploy, this was genius. Magazine covers, posters, surf movies—for 10 years the American surf media was wallpapered with those thin, jagged, impeccably cool bolt symbols. The boards were shaped by Parrish, Abellira, BK, Lopez, Nellis, Barnfield, Eberly, and most of the other ranking North Shore shapers, which meant of course that at any break from Haleiwa to V-land the things handled like Maseratis. That whole part of the Bolt operation was an amazing, totally unique achievement—getting all those blue-chip shapers to participate in what amounted to a boardmaking co-op.

But what really sticks with me now, so many decades later, is how handsome the boards were. Lightning Bolt was the finest-looking surf equipment to ever come down the pike. Those gunned-out pintails, no bumps on the rails, no side fins; nothing but clean parabolic lines. Offset, of course, by the bolt logo—a mark so perfect, so instantly identifiable, that it did the job in silence. No lettering, no words needed. Hobie Surfboards couldn't do that. Jacobs, Bing, Weber—all great logos, but you need the lettering to make 'em work. Channel Islands pulled it off with that triple-hexagon. On the other hand—triple hexagon? A bolt puts you in the tube. A hexagon puts you in chemistry class.

Lightning bolts have been used and commercialized again and again: Gatorade, the San Diego Chargers, Kiss, Zenith, Lightning McQueen, and yes Hitler's SS troops. But never before or since has the bolt found a better design fit than on the deck of a surfboard knifing through the face of a deep blue North Shore wave.

There was luck involved, too. Lightning Bolt's timing was heaven-sent. A bolt logo would have been just okay, not great, on a longboard, and it would have been overwhelmed by the sponsor-sticker outbreak that came with ASP-age professionalism. But right there in the early- and mid-'70s, when all eyes were on the North Shore, and boards were almost all solid-color blank slates? The bolt was a diamond on velvet.

LIGHTNING BOLT: CRAFTED FOR THE GODS OF THUNDER

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