"And now, in 1935, it is with pleasure I see the surfriders at Waikiki building their own hollow surfboards after my new, perfected riding design. Everyone who tries them is enthusiastic. They paddle so much easier than the solid board, catch a wave so much easier, and the vibration, caused by the wave undulation, reaches the rider fully, thereby giving the surfer a thrill the solid board deadens or kills entirely."

I've always thought that Tom Blake, while protean and adventurous and Clark Gable 

handsome, was in large part unfathomable, a surfing cipher. I still think that. But I've come to recognize that Blake was also one of those sly quiet-voiced narcissists. And I see this most clearly when he talks about his "perfected riding design."

On the EOS "hollow surfboard" page, I write that the hollow, as distinct from the solid-wood plank, was "at best a lateral step in the surfboard's design evolution." That's being kind. Last week I made a pair of short videos, one on hollow boards, the other on planks, and it was so totally obvious that a solid board was the better choice that I started to wonder: apart from Tom Blake—the guy who invented, franchised, and promoted the hollow—did anyone actually enjoy this tippy, water-sucking, amoire-like piece of surfcraft? Was this guy enjoying himself?

Let's drag a line through the 1930s and '40s, when the hollow and the plank were vying for attention and market share, and try to figure out if Blake and his hollow board had us all a bit hoodwinked.

First, some background. Throughout the 1920s, all boards were planks—except they weren't yet called "planks," just surfboards. Single-piece redwood boards were common; most were 10-feet and weighed 60 pounds, or thereabouts. You hear a lot of talk about the 100-pound surfcraft of yore, and yes there were a few real tanks in the lineup, but most boards didn't weigh anywhere near that. Here's a 1927 Waikiki beachboy heading out for a few, and I'll bet 50 bucks that hot-rod under his arm weighs less than 50 pounds.

Blake began experimenting on hollow boards in 1926, and over the next few years worked his way up to a transversely-braced design (think old-timey airplane wing, with battens and ribs and plywood covering). Paddleboard racing, more than surfing, was the real motivator here, and with his new "cigar" boards Blake absolutely destroyed the competition. At a big meet in Honolulu in 1930, he took more than 

 off the half-mile record. So no argument that the hollow paddleboard was a quantum leap forward. At the time, though, Blake was still using a solid redwood "riding" model in the surf.

In 1932, the Thomas Rogers Company of Venice, California, began making a line of Blake-approved hollow boards. Fifteen miles east, the first commercially made pine-and-redwood laminated boards were being built. The brand was called Swastika Surfboard Company—later re-named the Waikiki Surfboard Company, for obvious reasons—and these were the finest planks going, by far.

The Thomas Rogers hollow and Swastika were both soon mildly profitable entities, which meant hollows and planks were commercial and design-choice competitors. Marketing guys were hired. Ads were pasted up, and the plank ones were definitely more fun:

Eighty years later, we might break out the hollow-vs-plank comparison thusly:


Thirty-seven bucks for a 1940 Swastika plank—which means $670 in 2019 dollars, but we're talking the Depression, so it might as well be a $1,000,000. I'm guessing the cost for a shiny new Blake-model hollow was about the same, but I can't find seem to find a price list anywhere. Expensive either way, if you're buying off the rack. Too expensive for most surfers. Hollow boards could be ordered in kit form, which cut the price way down. The plank and hollow could both also be a DIY project, which brought the price down to around ten bucks. (Click 

 for instructions on how to build a plank. Click 


Within the hushed oak-paneled walls of surf academia, it has long been an article of faith that hollow boards were popular because they were light. Source material doesn't bear this out. The hollow "Square-Tail Surfing Board" (No. 5, above), is 12-feet long and weighs 55 pounds. A typical 10-foot Swastika weighed 45 pounds. Not an apples-to-apples comparison (12-feet to 10-feet), but it looks to me like, foot for foot, a balsa plank with redwood stringers and rails was more or less as light as a hollow. (A 1937 

 article on planks and hollows bears this out: "The average person will not be making a mistake if he practices with a surfboard somewhere between ten and twelves feet long, approximately 22 inches wide, and weighing not more than 50 pounds.")


Spar varnish, not fiberglass and resin, was the finishing layer for both hollows and planks, so neither had much of a protective shell. Hollow boards leaked, though—this was literally a built-in feature. Each hollow board had a little brass plug sunk into the nose, and after each surf you'd open the plug, flip your board tail-up, and drain it. Lose a hollow board into a piling, furthermore, and it splintered like a shot-down Fokker triplane. Planks were easily dented and gouged, especially the balsa parts, but they were easy to repair and didn't take in water.


The plank had a "settled" feel in the water. The hollow was all over the shop. Buoyant, corky and tippy, until it took on too much water, which turned it mushy. I've never read anything to this point, but having just a few ounces of water sloshing fore to aft, or rail to rail, during a ride must have felt like walking a rope bridge in a high wind. Rail design was an obvious difference, too. Round rails on the plank, square rails on the hollow. Surfing performance was limited in the 1930s and '40s to a degree that square rails apparently weren't a deal-breaker, but the best surfers must have felt the difference. One photo doesn't make or break the argument, but that's a hollow board on the far right, and a plank in the middle.


Duke Kahanamoku was the big prize, and both sides claimed him:

"The Tom Blake Air-Chambered Hollow Surfboard has been approved by Hawaii's greatest surf riders [and] Duke Kahanamoku rides nothing but a Hollow Surfboard."

"More Swastika surfboards are used at Waikiki than any other professional type. They are preferred exclusively by the most spectacular riders at Honolulu, including the renowned Duke Kahanamoku."

The giant board below is Duke in 1930 with his 16-foot hollow, which he used as a surfboard and paddleboard both. The other two shots ('32 and '43) show Duke with a plank, and that's the case with nearly every other shot I've got of him with a board.

Duke aside, I've looked at a lot of photos and watched a lot of clips, and while I can't offer a definitive list as to who rode what among the great surfers of the period, here's a start. Palos Verdes Surf Club members seemed to prefer the hollow, as did the Hermosa Beach Surf Club. Tom Blake, of course, was all hollow all the time. The great Scooter-Boy Kaopuiki rode a hollow to crowd-thrilling effect at Waikiki, although to be honest I don't know what to make of his Scooter-Boy's act, see what you think:

Australia surfers had meanwhile twined surfing and lifeguarding to a point where the actual wave-riding part—done mostly on 16-foot-long hollow "toothpicks" rescue boards or paddle-driven wave skis—was almost a novelty act.

As far as I can tell, every other progressive Depression Age surfer rode a plank, starting with Pete Peterson, Whitey Harrison, Cliff Tucker and Gard Chapin in California, and the Kahanamoku brothers, Rabbit Kekai, and Wally Froiseth in Hawaii. Up until the late '40s, Hawaiian surfers were still far enough ahead of the rest of the surf world that their choice in equipment counts double, and Scooter-Boy aside it looks like a hard yes in favor of the plank.

To be honest, I have a hard time understanding why anybody rode a hollow in the 1930s and '40s, and I don't know why the design has since been regarded as anything but an oddity and a detour. Tom Blake himself is the only explanation I can come up with. In some respects, Blake, more than Duke, was the magnetic center of surfing during the Depression. He was certainly more ambitious. Blake was a tireless promoter of the hollow board, not just for surfing and paddling (and motorized "aquaplaning," and surfboard water polo, and whatever else Blake could think of), but as a rescue tool. This last consideration meant a lot. The notion that a hollow surfboard could double as a life-saving tool cast the design in a new and ennobling light. Lifeguards worldwide bought hollow boards by the thousands, leaned them up against their beachfront towers, posed heroically with them in photos, made rescues with them. Blake-style boards were stowed on boats, next to the lifejackets, in the event of a capsizing. The hollow, in other words, was allowed a seriousness of purpose that the plank would never have. Up into the 1970s, you could still see a hollow board or two back in the shadows of your local lifeguard HQ.

Blake also seized the promotional offensive for the hollow board with his 1935 book 

, as well as a number of hollow board DIY articles in 

and other magazines. Blake, and the editors who ran his pieces, were zealous in presenting Blake's board as a real breakthrough in design, and I don't know if that faintly bad smell is ignorance or racism or both when I read things like "Native Hawaiians taught Tom Blake to ride the waves, but he wasn’t satisfied with their crude boards" (

) or that "Up pops Thomas E. Blake, a friend of mine, who has improved the water sled until the product is superior, faster, and lighter than the original Waikiki article." There are a lot of comments like these, starting just after the turn of the century, in which Hawaiian surfers are played down in favor of caucasian newcomers. (South Carolina blow-in Alexander Hume Ford deftly blended both his imperialist and racist sides in a 1907 Collier's article, writing "At the recent surfing carnivals in honor of the visits of the American battleship and cruiser fleets, practically every prize offered for those most expert in Hawaiian water sports were won by white boys and girls, who have only recently mastered the art that was for so long believed to be possible of acquirement only by the native-born dark-skinned Hawaiian.")

The hollow, in any event, was the It Board of the Depression, the fashionable choice in surfcraft, and that's what carried the day. Blake never got rich from the hollow, but as a surfboard propigator he was without equal, and my feeling is that the hollow board's over-weighted place in surf history exists mostly because of the star-powered boost it got from its inventor.

Am I being too hard on Blake? Probably. He believed in his design, pushed it with vigor, and we did the rest. I suppose what bothers me is that Blake gets to be surf history's first "name" board designer, while the person who shaped that beautiful 1927 redwood, way up near the top of this article, is anonymous. But if it's plank or hollow—any hollow, the best hollow ever made—you'd chose that no-name redwood board every day of the week. It was born of the 

, and in turn gave way to the Swastika, out of which came the hot curl, which begat the chip, and you can draw a line from there to whatever is under your feet today. Blake's hollow is connected to nothing, and does not connect to anything that followed.

It makes me want to gently remove Blake from his surfboard design pedestal, and build him a new one for achievements in paddleboarding and surf photography, where he really truly was first-rate.

THAT EMPTY FEELING: AN ILLUSTRATED SERIES OF MOSTLY UNKIND THOUGHTS ON TOM BLAKE'S HOLLOW SURFBOARD

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