Over the weekend, inspired by that Art Brewer shot of Gerry Lopez I posted a few days ago, I got caught up in looking for more photos and video of super-narrow boards. I also found this quote from an article Corky Carroll wrote for SURFER in 1970:

Everybody's looking for a better trip. What we all thought last year is no longer true. Now, let's see, back in '68, when boards went from 9'6" to 8'6", the whole thing was aggression, dominance, and a lot of semantic sneering. No one hesitated to say that the 8'6" was the ultimate in compact equipment. Light, too, at 20 pounds. Light? Then we went down to 8'0" and the soul thing hit full-on as the Maharishi smiled upon boardmakers in garages from coast to coast.

Then came the 7'6" era, and the narrow board burst upon the scene like a brief dying comet and everyone swore they'd never ride a board more than 13" wide unless they moved to Lake Superior.

Corky was right, in that the super-narrow board flashed by quickly, as did so many other board designs and ideas during the opening of the shortboard revolution. But where Corky I think goes astray (and btw, he was the 

 of the semantic sneerers; I'll post "The High Performers Answer Australia" next month, and wow), is that all that casting about for a next new best thing was both predictable and necessary. When the tyranny of the 9'6" longboard was removed in 1967, nobody knew what was going to happen next. Board design all of a sudden shot off in a dozen, or two dozen, directions. Shaun Tomson was a hot young middle schooler already building Hawaiian cred, and he saw it all happen in person. "I loved the experimentation," he wrote in an email to me this morning. "Hawaii 1969 was all super-narrow guns and side-slippers. Then early '70 was the Aussies and their stubbies; Ted Spencer and his White Kite. May 1970 it was Rolf and his mini-gun. The Aussies again—Nat, Wayne, and Ted at J-Bay riding on keels. I have footage of Wayne out by himself at 8-foot Supers, in June of that year. Huge dunes, no buildings, and just my dad and our family on the beach. June '70. We were too scared of the rocks!"

Shaun goes on to remember that 1970 also brought us the fat-back twin-fin, and ends by saying "Everything I've described here happened in just two years!"

The surfing itself, like the boards, was all over the place. Bringing me back to the narrow-board moment, which goes down in design history as a noble failure—much like Slater-Merrick-Webber blades from the early '90s—in that you needed to go there before you could move on to the next stage. Boards in the early '70s were better for Barry Kanaiaupuni having gone down to 16" wide in 1969, just as mid-'90s boards were better for the Slater's banana-rocker experimentation of '91 and '92.

But still, again, the 16-inch-wide board spawned a lot of unattractive surfing. All of it in fact, pretty much, except for that of Barry Kanaiaupuni, Jock Sutherland, and maybe Tom Stone. The video here in fact really only works in context of how people were surfing the year prior.

Damn, now that I think about it I should have made a before-and-after clip, 1968 and 1969, so you could really see what I'm talking about. Got ahead of myself. Oh well, next month!

[Tiger Espere photo, top of the page, by Mark Sandvig. Barry Kanaiaupuni, above, by Art Brewer]

WATCH: "16 OR BUST! THE NARROW BOARD TRIP OF 1969"

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