Edge Boards and the Mysterious Mr. X

Edge boards were ridden for just a few years, primarily on Oahu’s North Shore, in Kauai, and in San Diego at Sunset Cliffs, by a core group of outstanding surfers. The design was originally made for steep, powerful waves and was first ridden at Pipeline and Pipeline Rights in the fall of 1968. The original edge board crew contained surfers and designers spread across Hawaii and California, including “Mr. X,” Vinny Bryan, Rick and Todd Value, Dana Nicely, Eric Gross, Robbie Cushnie, and Bunker Spreckels. 

The design was arguably the first true shortboard. Through rail modifications and bottom contours, the craft’s proponents pioneered “on top of the water” surfboard theory. They also made breakthroughs with the down rail concept that over the years has led to the progressive tucked under rails of today. Before edge boards, surfboard rails were relatively soft, even in the tail. Edge boards, on the other hand, had hard down rails and mostly flat bottoms. They were ridden with a variety of fins, including small keel fins, reverse keels, vertical fins, finger fins, and occasionally were surfed finless.

While the idea sprang from many minds, “Mr. X” conceived the first edge boards. His desire to fly fast over the water drew him to explore “low drag” and in doing so he designed thick, down railed boards with flat planing surfaces and razor sharp edges from nose to tail. “He experimented with different rockers, templates, and bottoms,” says Ben Ferris, who was part of the Cliffs and Kauai edge board crews. “He had designed boats and understood water flow. The whole shortboard evolution was helped by the edge boards—these short, thick, down rail boards helped everything go shorter.”

“Of all of the people I’ve spoken to about edge boards,” confirms Nat Young, who was on the frontlines of the Shortboard Revolution, “Mr. X is known to be the father of the edge board. Yet no one has ever heard of him.”

A.K.A. Bob Smith, Mr. X was born Robert Imhoff in 1945. He grew up in Los Angeles and continues to use “Bob Smith” as his nom de guerre today, primarily because this was the name he went by during his early North Shore surfing adventures. His interest in wave riding began in 1960 in the South Bay. By the summer of 1961, he was embarking on quests as far south as Ensenada, and as far north as San Francisco, camping in his panel truck. He was always interested in how things worked. The very first board he made was an experimental finless with a deep concave that ran one quarter the length of the board from the tail. “I built stuff,” he says, “fixed most everything, and tried to improve things. I consider myself to primarily be an inventor and that’s how I approach any area. I ask, how can I understand this, and what can I do to improve it? Currently, I’ve been developing an exotic high-speed sailboat and have one patent on it so far. I always fixed my surfboards and started making my own in about 1965.” 

In the summer of 1967, Smith decided to “drop out” and go to Hawaii. This was when he changed his name to Robert Smith, commenting, “How ya gonna drop out if you take it all with you?” He took his surfboard and suitcase to LAX and jumped on a one-way flight. Pipeline was high on his list of places to explore. 

He made his first North Shore board in the winter of 1967. It was a very thin, 9’6″ semi-gun with down rails. Paddling it was challenging because it sat submerged in the water like a modern shortboard. “I broke it twice at Pipe,” he says, “but did get some good rides on it.”

Australian surfer and design pioneer Bob McTavish was at Pipe in 1967 with Dick Brewer and Mike Hynson and observed Mr. X flying on his 9’6″. “We saw the first down rail board, produced by an unknown guy,” recalled McTavish in Tracks magazine in 1980. “And do you know how the three leaders in design from California, Hawaii, and Australia at that time reacted? We laughed! Then the guy proceeded to paddle out at Pipeline on his knife-edged down railer and to our shock and amazement, it didn’t dig in. It just flew across the wall. Two years later, Joey Cabell had his rails down, nose to tail, like Midget in Australia, who was big-wave ripping like never before. Significantly, in Honolulu at Surfline [Surfboards], [Gerry] Lopez was doing shorter, wider, down railers with a small round in the bottom edge. They were very nice, and handled Town surf like nothing before.” 

Mr. X made a 9’4″ semi-gun next and had a major breakthrough. He’d heard a rumor about shorter boards and wondered if cutting the nose off would help. He sawed it off to 8 feet and the board was transformed. It was crude, with its rounded, glassed-over front end, but it rode better than anything he had experienced to that point. He also decided that he wanted to “ride the tail of a gun.” His next shorter board was 7 feet and it rode even better. This was early 1968.

About this time, Mr. X met Vinny Bryan, a respected surfer and shaper who’d grown up in Ewa Beach. When the two met, Bryan had been experimenting with short egg shapes. “Vinny was a mind-bogglingly good surfer,” Smith says. Bryan was a regular foot, however, and preferred surfing rights like Laniakea, which was too soft for Smith’s tastes. Smith had been riding Pipe Rights on his edge board, so he invited Bryan to join him. During one of these sessions, Bryan rode Smith’s 7-footer. Inspired to seek less drag, he decided to trace the outline onto a blank. He then added 6 inches to the nose, making himself a 7’6″, to which he added Smith’s hard down edges through the mid-to-aft section.

Bryan would go on to make himself a thick 5’10” egg and add Smith’s sharp down rails to his shape. “The addition of the added thickness and hard down rails all the way around allowed me to decrease drag even more,” says Bryan. The board was 4 inches thick, with slight rocker. “If you made it too flat, you couldn’t turn on rail,” Bryan remembers. “Bob was extremely intelligent, and dedicated. He figured out how to go fast on the water.” 

It was the spring of 1968 and Pipeline Rights became their home break. “We had it all to ourselves,” Smith remembers. “Gradually we added our friends, some of whom I made boards for.” Bryan, who would later experiment with jet chamber concaves and asymmetrical plan shapes, mentioned to Smith that he had been thinking about making a vee-nose board, similar to a powerboat hull. “To this day, I do not know what his idea was really about, but it provided the key I needed,” says Smith. “I previously had belly in the nose and a vee allowed me to keep the belly but also make flat sections forward. My next board was 6’8″, with vee in the front third. The vee allowed me to get edges all the way around without changing the rocker, so I had pretty much the same board with edges. I also went to steep down rails in the back, because, since the board was planing, the water wasn’t touching the rails anyway.”

This 6’8″ was made in August of 1968 and was the first true edge board. Smith initially rode it at Ala Moana and found he could now bury the whole rail, nose to tail, and accelerate the board, which was just what he was looking for. “It felt like I was riding a bar of soap with edges,” he reflects. “The board and fin were also designed so I could ride the tail, from the sweet spot.” 

Essentially, Smith had made the board so he could stand in one location on the deck and control it, which was an extremely forward concept for August of 1968. Back on the North Shore, with his new board, he experienced the “pure vortex of speed.” Bryan also rode the design and agreed it was a breakthrough. Subsequently the board floated among many of the Pipe Rights crew. “Herbie Fletcher rode two waves on it at Pipeline,” says Smith, “and he said it was the fastest board he’d been on.” Bunker Spreckels joined the crew around this time and also rode Smith’s designs. 

The Shortboard Revolution was gaining momentum and it was becoming hard to get blanks in Hawaii, so for his next project, Smith stripped down two old longboards and used the foam to make a 5’10” and a 6’0″ for Pipeline. “With the short mini-guns, the thickness was to improve paddling so that we could catch waves on boards with such a small amount of area,” he says. “After the first edge board, my next board had even sharper rails. When I sanded it after glassing, I had to dull the edge a bit so it wouldn’t cut me. My second edge board was not a gun, and had sharper edges than the first. Even though the plan-shape was not as good, the board was much faster. I had been riding Sunset Point a lot in the fall of ’68 on the original edge board and switched to my new board. My friends chided me about the new one, saying I was going so fast I was now outrunning the tube, whereas the other board kept me in the tube more. Well, there was no way I was going to slow down. So I was just going to have to learn how best to ride the new board and decide what the rest of the elements should be to optimize the design for max speed, max power, and max control.”

It didn’t take long for Smith to realize that he had designed himself out of the majority of the waves in Hawaii, at least in terms of his mini-gun edge boards. “You had to be precise,” he says. “There was no margin for error.” The approach required by the design was to takeoff as deeply as possible, with the most wall ahead as possible. This was ideal for Pipeline and Pipeline Rights, but without perfect, hollow waves, some critics argued the boards were finicky and un-maneuverable. 

“If you rode them from too far forward,” Smith admits, “they did not turn quickly. Also, the faster you go, the harder it is to turn anything. Try making a 90-degree turn into a side street while your car is going 100 miles per hour. It isn’t going to happen. An edgeboard is a lot like driving a racecar with the gas pedal stuck to the floor and no brakes.”

In December of 1968, Bunker Spreckels—who had become an enthusiastic edge board acolyte—invited Smith to go to the mainland. They stayed at Bunker’s mother’s house, the Gable Ranch in Encino. While there, Smith made Spreckels a red 5’6″, which was about 18 inches wide, 3- to 3.5-inches thick, with a flat bottom, hard edges, and a slight vee in the nose. At Spreckels’ request, Smith included handles of rigid fiberglass, with scooped hand wells. Bunker wanted to ride it standing or kneeling, he said. “He told me he showed that board to Greenough and also to Steve Lis,” says Smith. 

The two traveled up and down the California coast and surfed together. They spent a day surfing at The Ranch, and also went south to Sunset Cliffs. Spreckels arrived in San Diego with two Smith boards—the 5’6″ and also a 6’0″. Ben Ferris and Jon Riddle were early backyard board builders in Point Loma during this period and, after surfing with Spreckels, were inspired by the speed in Smith’s design. “The first edge boards that Bunker brought to San Diego were built by Mr. X for riding in the islands,” says Ferris. “And the tail rocker was very flat, with a subtle continuous rocker curve.” 

Ferris copied the rocker, and later experimented with a bit more rocker to fit into the curves of the waves at Sunset Cliffs. “The rocker on the best edge boards was a continuous, accelerated curve,” says Ferris.
“The foil was thick in the tail and thinner in the nose. The outline was wide in the nose, and narrower in the tail. They had concave and their own fin-box system—a dovetail style box. The fins were made from foam and glassed if a thick foil was desired, or they were made from fiberglass.” 

When Bunker returned to the North Shore, he rode his Smith 5’6″ and his 6’0″ at Pipe. George Greenough also remembers seeing Spreckels riding his red 5’6″ in the late 1960s in the Santa Barbara area. “Bunker’s board needed high quality surf to perform,” he recalls. “It was unforgiving in choppy surf, like Rincon with southwest wind on it, and worked best in pristine, lined up waves.” Greenough’s solution for handling average or choppy surface conditions was to add “higher rails” to a bottom that had an “edge panel” for planing. 

Further edge board experiments filtered into the design work of shapers like Skip Frye and Steve Lis, as they each respectively incorporated and adapted aspects of the feature into various fish and Shortboard Revolution concepts. Lis, for example, surfed with Spreckels and explored hard, down edges all the way around on his twin-fins. He found that for him, the razor edge in the nose area could catch in slower waves, so he softened it in the most forward rail.

Smith meanwhile also discovered that if he “detuned” the boards by slightly softening the hard edges, the design would be more forgiving in average, or textured surf. “I don’t usually go out when the waves are bumpy,” he says of one particular beachbreak session. “But there was no one around that day except for a couple of friends. So I took my trusty 5’10” rocket out and made a fool of myself. But I happened to have another board with me, which I’d made for my girlfriend.

The Kauai Period and Beyond
By Nat Young

I had my suspicions about the tiny red spaceship tucked under Bunker Spreckels’ arm. It looked weird—super low rails, handles in the deck. I figured it was some kind of kneeboard. Apparently he surfed it both ways, standing up and on his knees. The handles were for steering deep in the tube. I saw him surfing Tunnels on Kauai that afternoon. 

It was perfect, 4 to 5 feet, glassy, not a drop of water out of place. When Bunker paddled out, I remember thinking that his board looked too short. He was almost fully submerged and I couldn’t imagine he would ever catch a wave. Then he took off deep, emerging right from the face. He was way behind the curl when he pulled in, exiting a few seconds later at lightening speed. 

That was almost 50 years ago. For a good portion of that time, I’ve wondered about the linage of edge boards. As with many breakthroughs, it seems the core of the design sprang from more than one person. A lot of people found the keys simultaneously. The first surfboard with a chine or edges that I saw was one of George Greenough’s hulls. That was 1968. I remember George saying the board needed perfect waves to work, then sanding the chine off the bottom.

Until recently, I had believed the edge board that Bunker rode that day was shaped by Vinny Bryan, but I was not correct. Bob Smith designed it. The board was nicknamed “Alma” and was built on the Gable Ranch in Encino, California, in December of 1968.

I had the opportunity to ride a few waves on Bob’s 6’8″ earlier on the North Shore. I recall it was extremely fast and very maneuverable and I could hardly keep it in the water. Bunker’s 5’6″ was a shorter version. Smith and Vinny Bryan were the main visionaries behind the design, backed up by the Pipe Rights crew. Vinny was keen to point out that they explored design as a group, often combining intense yoga, and always including heavy surf sessions. Most of this took place on waves that no one had dreamed could be surfed. 

By the time I ran into him, Bunker had moved into a spacious house on Kauai. He’d been back in California for a while and had hooked up with Ben Ferris and Jon Riddle, two local kids from Ocean Beach, who were already into shaping. The house had an elevated common and sleeping area. Underneath, they’d converted the space into a surfboard factory—everything from a shaping room to a glassing and polishing room. Bunker provided as many blanks and as much resin and glass as the boys desired and they were in heaven. Word is that shaping legends Dick Brewer and Mike Diffenderfer worked on a few of their semi-guns there, along with Gerry Lopez. The master of the fish, Steve Lis, also made a trip out to compare notes. 

It was the perfect environment for experimentation. Everyone living there was a dedicated disciple of edge boards and the test wave was Tunnels. The conclusion was that they definitely had a design breakthrough on their hands. The boards worked well in perfect waves when ridden by talented surfers, but they were not for everyone. 

Wayne Lynch, Ted Spencer, Paul Witzig, and I rented a house just down the road. After that first glimpse of Bunker, I was fascinated and ended up hanging out with him at every opportunity. Part of the attraction, I’m sure, was his pillowcase full of Peyote buttons. We digested the tea on many mornings before going surfing.

I had one thing on my mind after Kauai—to get back into the shaping room at Keyo Surfboards and shape edge rails into my next board. I made a longer version of what Bob Smith and the crew were making on Kauai: 7 feet by 21 inches, with a soft squaretail. I surfed that board on the northern beaches of Sydney. It was super sensitive, not forgiving at all, but very fast. 

I made several more during the next few months, getting smaller in length, stopping at 5’10”. I won the 1970 New South Wales State Titles at Narrabeen on that board. I’d used a hard pad to shape a more-forgiving rail, tucking the edge further back under the bottom. This slight change stopped it from biting during a turn. McTavish had shaped one with a similar tucked under edge and he clued me to this subtlety. 

The benefits of low rails spread around the surfing world like a wildfire back in 1969, tracking alongside the Shortboard Revolution. Every shaper in the world was trying low rails. Every top surfer I knew was discovering the benefits of this design. Most of the competitors in the 1970 World Championships in Victoria had low rail boards. American goofyfoot Rolf Aurness whipped our Aussie arses on a 7 foot Bing down railer. It was poetry to watch. He was so smooth and strong at both Bells and Johanna, gliding through the flat sections, turning hard back into the pocket. He was the best surfer in the contest. He also had the right board. Rail shapes haven’t changed much since.

It was quite similar in size, 6 feet, and similar in shape, except I had purposely detuned it by rounding the rails some in order to slow it down so she would be able to ride it. I believe I had only ridden that board once before, at night, so I had little experience on it. When I paddled out and started riding, though, the difference was huge. I could do nothing wrong. The fast, hard-edged board slammed into the chop and lumps on the wave and lost all control. On the other hand, the slower, detuned board moved along the wave in harmony with the dips and lumps. It was perfect. I was astounded at the difference between the two.”

Further experiments and cross-pollinations with edge boards came in the fall of 1970, when Spreckels invited Ben Ferris and Jon Riddle to visit him in Hawaii. The two would eventually go to Kauai and live with Spreckels in a rented home/design studio, four or five blocks from Tunnels [see sidebar]. “What we came away with from the edge board era is the tucked under edge, or today’s modern rails,” says Ferris. “Now you have the down railer with the crisp, tucked under rail. That was the evolution.” 

As the down rail concept was refined, down railers gave surfers more control. Prior to the down rail, many of the best surfers were getting in deep at Pipeline, but often not making it out. Then Mike Hynson made two down rail boards in February of 1969 for Gerry Lopez and Reno Abellira. According to Lopez, his 7’6″ Hynson allowed him to achieve more control in the tube. “The down rail was the breakthrough that made it all possible,” Lopez says.

To this day, Bob Smith, or Mr. X, still rides edge board designs. His current edge board is a tri-fin, with vertical fins, measuring 6’6″ by 19 inches wide. The rocker is more or less a continuously decreasing radius curve. “I try to make no detectable changes to the curve flow,” he says. “The idea is to make the water passage as smooth as possible. The rails are steepest at the front and gradually transition to less steep going aft, where they are abruptly cut off in a hard edge. The bottom has a broad shallow concave full width gradually flattening out near the tail. 

“In my surfboard R&D,” he continues, “I explored the extremes—ultra-thin and ultra-thick, drawn-out ‘straight’ rails and very curved rails, lots of rocker and very little rocker, round rails and hard edges, swept fins, including forward sweep, and vertical fins, narrow fins and keel fins, flex fins and stiff fins, wide point at the nose and at the tail, etcetera. It is my view that you will never know where the midpoint is unless you explore both extremes. Once you know the extremes, you can ‘feel’ if you are a bit to the right or left of your desired center or neutral point. If you don’t have the courage to explore the extremes, you’ll never quite know where that center is.”

Edge boards were ridden for just a few years, primarily on Oahu’s North Shore, in Kauai, and in San Diego at Sunset Cliffs, by a core group of outstanding surfers. The design was originally made for steep, powerful waves and was first ridden at Pipeline and Pipeline Rights in the fall of 1968. The original edge board crew contained surfers and designers spread across Hawaii and California, including “Mr. X,” Vinny Bryan, Rick and Todd Value, Dana Nicely, Eric Gross, Robbie Cushnie, and Bunker Spreckels. 

The design was arguably the first true shortboard. Through rail modifications and bottom contours, the craft’s proponents pioneered “on top of the water” surfboard theory. They also made breakthroughs with the down rail concept that over the years has led to the progressive tucked under rails of today. Before edge boards, surfboard rails were relatively soft, even in the tail. Edge boards, on the other hand, had hard down rails and mostly flat bottoms. They were ridden with a variety of fins, including small keel fins, reverse keels, vertical fins, finger fins, and occasionally were surfed finless.

While the idea sprang from many minds, “Mr. X” conceived the first edge boards. His desire to fly fast over the water drew him to explore “low drag” and in doing so he designed thick, down railed boards with flat planing surfaces and razor sharp edges from nose to tail. “He experimented with different rockers, templates, and bottoms,” says Ben Ferris, who was part of the Cliffs and Kauai edge board crews. “He had designed boats and understood water flow. The whole shortboard evolution was helped by the edge boards—these short, thick, down rail boards helped everything go shorter.”

“Of all of the people I’ve spoken to about edge boards,” confirms Nat Young, who was on the frontlines of the Shortboard Revolution, “Mr. X is known to be the father of the edge board. Yet no one has ever heard of him.”

A.K.A. Bob Smith, Mr. X was born Robert Imhoff in 1945. He grew up in Los Angeles and continues to use “Bob Smith” as his nom de guerre today, primarily because this was the name he went by during his early North Shore surfing adventures. His interest in wave riding began in 1960 in the South Bay. By the summer of 1961, he was embarking on quests as far south as Ensenada, and as far north as San Francisco, camping in his panel truck. He was always interested in how things worked. The very first board he made was an experimental finless with a deep concave that ran one quarter the length of the board from the tail. “I built stuff,” he says, “fixed most everything, and tried to improve things. I consider myself to primarily be an inventor and that’s how I approach any area. I ask, how can I understand this, and what can I do to improve it? Currently, I’ve been developing an exotic high-speed sailboat and have one patent on it so far. I always fixed my surfboards and started making my own in about 1965.” 

In the summer of 1967, Smith decided to “drop out” and go to Hawaii. This was when he changed his name to Robert Smith, commenting, “How ya gonna drop out if you take it all with you?” He took his surfboard and suitcase to LAX and jumped on a one-way flight. Pipeline was high on his list of places to explore. 

He made his first North Shore board in the winter of 1967. It was a very thin, 9’6″ semi-gun with down rails. Paddling it was challenging because it sat submerged in the water like a modern shortboard. “I broke it twice at Pipe,” he says, “but did get some good rides on it.”

Australian surfer and design pioneer Bob McTavish was at Pipe in 1967 with Dick Brewer and Mike Hynson and observed Mr. X flying on his 9’6″. “We saw the first down rail board, produced by an unknown guy,” recalled McTavish in Tracks magazine in 1980. “And do you know how the three leaders in design from California, Hawaii, and Australia at that time reacted? We laughed! Then the guy proceeded to paddle out at Pipeline on his knife-edged down railer and to our shock and amazement, it didn’t dig in. It just flew across the wall. Two years later, Joey Cabell had his rails down, nose to tail, like Midget in Australia, who was big-wave ripping like never before. Significantly, in Honolulu at Surfline [Surfboards], [Gerry] Lopez was doing shorter, wider, down railers with a small round in the bottom edge. They were very nice, and handled Town surf like nothing before.” 

Mr. X made a 9’4″ semi-gun next and had a major breakthrough. He’d heard a rumor about shorter boards and wondered if cutting the nose off would help. He sawed it off to 8 feet and the board was transformed. It was crude, with its rounded, glassed-over front end, but it rode better than anything he had experienced to that point. He also decided that he wanted to “ride the tail of a gun.” His next shorter board was 7 feet and it rode even better. This was early 1968.

About this time, Mr. X met Vinny Bryan, a respected surfer and shaper who’d grown up in Ewa Beach. When the two met, Bryan had been experimenting with short egg shapes. “Vinny was a mind-bogglingly good surfer,” Smith says. Bryan was a regular foot, however, and preferred surfing rights like Laniakea, which was too soft for Smith’s tastes. Smith had been riding Pipe Rights on his edge board, so he invited Bryan to join him. During one of these sessions, Bryan rode Smith’s 7-footer. Inspired to seek less drag, he decided to trace the outline onto a blank. He then added 6 inches to the nose, making himself a 7’6″, to which he added Smith’s hard down edges through the mid-to-aft section.

Bryan would go on to make himself a thick 5’10” egg and add Smith’s sharp down rails to his shape. “The addition of the added thickness and hard down rails all the way around allowed me to decrease drag even more,” says Bryan. The board was 4 inches thick, with slight rocker. “If you made it too flat, you couldn’t turn on rail,” Bryan remembers. “Bob was extremely intelligent, and dedicated. He figured out how to go fast on the water.” 

It was the spring of 1968 and Pipeline Rights became their home break. “We had it all to ourselves,” Smith remembers. “Gradually we added our friends, some of whom I made boards for.” Bryan, who would later experiment with jet chamber concaves and asymmetrical plan shapes, mentioned to Smith that he had been thinking about making a vee-nose board, similar to a powerboat hull. “To this day, I do not know what his idea was really about, but it provided the key I needed,” says Smith. “I previously had belly in the nose and a vee allowed me to keep the belly but also make flat sections forward. My next board was 6’8″, with vee in the front third. The vee allowed me to get edges all the way around without changing the rocker, so I had pretty much the same board with edges. I also went to steep down rails in the back, because, since the board was planing, the water wasn’t touching the rails anyway.”

This 6’8″ was made in August of 1968 and was the first true edge board. Smith initially rode it at Ala Moana and found he could now bury the whole rail, nose to tail, and accelerate the board, which was just what he was looking for. “It felt like I was riding a bar of soap with edges,” he reflects. “The board and fin were also designed so I could ride the tail, from the sweet spot.” 

Essentially, Smith had made the board so he could stand in one location on the deck and control it, which was an extremely forward concept for August of 1968. Back on the North Shore, with his new board, he experienced the “pure vortex of speed.” Bryan also rode the design and agreed it was a breakthrough. Subsequently the board floated among many of the Pipe Rights crew. “Herbie Fletcher rode two waves on it at Pipeline,” says Smith, “and he said it was the fastest board he’d been on.” Bunker Spreckels joined the crew around this time and also rode Smith’s designs. 

The Shortboard Revolution was gaining momentum and it was becoming hard to get blanks in Hawaii, so for his next project, Smith stripped down two old longboards and used the foam to make a 5’10” and a 6’0″ for Pipeline. “With the short mini-guns, the thickness was to improve paddling so that we could catch waves on boards with such a small amount of area,” he says. “After the first edge board, my next board had even sharper rails. When I sanded it after glassing, I had to dull the edge a bit so it wouldn’t cut me. My second edge board was not a gun, and had sharper edges than the first. Even though the plan-shape was not as good, the board was much faster. I had been riding Sunset Point a lot in the fall of ’68 on the original edge board and switched to my new board. My friends chided me about the new one, saying I was going so fast I was now outrunning the tube, whereas the other board kept me in the tube more. Well, there was no way I was going to slow down. So I was just going to have to learn how best to ride the new board and decide what the rest of the elements should be to optimize the design for max speed, max power, and max control.”

It didn’t take long for Smith to realize that he had designed himself out of the majority of the waves in Hawaii, at least in terms of his mini-gun edge boards. “You had to be precise,” he says. “There was no margin for error.” The approach required by the design was to takeoff as deeply as possible, with the most wall ahead as possible. This was ideal for Pipeline and Pipeline Rights, but without perfect, hollow waves, some critics argued the boards were finicky and un-maneuverable. 

“If you rode them from too far forward,” Smith admits, “they did not turn quickly. Also, the faster you go, the harder it is to turn anything. Try making a 90-degree turn into a side street while your car is going 100 miles per hour. It isn’t going to happen. An edgeboard is a lot like driving a racecar with the gas pedal stuck to the floor and no brakes.”

In December of 1968, Bunker Spreckels—who had become an enthusiastic edge board acolyte—invited Smith to go to the mainland. They stayed at Bunker’s mother’s house, the Gable Ranch in Encino. While there, Smith made Spreckels a red 5’6″, which was about 18 inches wide, 3- to 3.5-inches thick, with a flat bottom, hard edges, and a slight vee in the nose. At Spreckels’ request, Smith included handles of rigid fiberglass, with scooped hand wells. Bunker wanted to ride it standing or kneeling, he said. “He told me he showed that board to Greenough and also to Steve Lis,” says Smith. 

The two traveled up and down the California coast and surfed together. They spent a day surfing at The Ranch, and also went south to Sunset Cliffs. Spreckels arrived in San Diego with two Smith boards—the 5’6″ and also a 6’0″. Ben Ferris and Jon Riddle were early backyard board builders in Point Loma during this period and, after surfing with Spreckels, were inspired by the speed in Smith’s design. “The first edge boards that Bunker brought to San Diego were built by Mr. X for riding in the islands,” says Ferris. “And the tail rocker was very flat, with a subtle continuous rocker curve.” 

Ferris copied the rocker, and later experimented with a bit more rocker to fit into the curves of the waves at Sunset Cliffs. “The rocker on the best edge boards was a continuous, accelerated curve,” says Ferris. “The foil was thick in the tail and thinner in the nose. The outline was wide in the nose, and narrower in the tail. They had concave and their own fin-box system—a dovetail style box. The fins were made from foam and glassed if a thick foil was desired, or they were made from fiberglass.” 

When Bunker returned to the North Shore, he rode his Smith 5’6″ and his 6’0″ at Pipe. George Greenough also remembers seeing Spreckels riding his red 5’6″ in the late 1960s in the Santa Barbara area. “Bunker’s board needed high quality surf to perform,” he recalls. “It was unforgiving in choppy surf, like Rincon with southwest wind on it, and worked best in pristine, lined up waves.” Greenough’s solution for handling average or choppy surface conditions was to add “higher rails” to a bottom that had an “edge panel” for planing. 

Further edge board experiments filtered into the design work of shapers like Skip Frye and Steve Lis, as they each respectively incorporated and adapted aspects of the feature into various fish and Shortboard Revolution concepts. Lis, for example, surfed with Spreckels and explored hard, down edges all the way around on his twin-fins. He found that for him, the razor edge in the nose area could catch in slower waves, so he softened it in the most forward rail.

Smith meanwhile also discovered that if he “detuned” the boards by slightly softening the hard edges, the design would be more forgiving in average, or textured surf. “I don’t usually go out when the waves are bumpy,” he says of one particular beachbreak session. “But there was no one around that day except for a couple of friends. So I took my trusty 5’10” rocket out and made a fool of myself. But I happened to have another board with me, which I’d made for my girlfriend.

(Continued on page 95)
(Continued from page 91)

It was quite similar in size, 6 feet, and similar in shape, except I had purposely detuned it by rounding the rails some in order to slow it down so she would be able to ride it. I believe I had only ridden that board once before, at night, so I had little experience on it. When I paddled out and started riding, though, the difference was huge. I could do nothing wrong. The fast, hard-edged board slammed into the chop and lumps on the wave and lost all control. On the other hand, the slower, detuned board moved along the wave in harmony with the dips and lumps. It was perfect. I was astounded at the difference between the two.”

Further experiments and cross-pollinations with edge boards came in the fall of 1970, when Spreckels invited Ben Ferris and Jon Riddle to visit him in Hawaii. The two would eventually go to Kauai and live with Spreckels in a rented home/design studio, four or five blocks from Tunnels [see sidebar]. “What we came away with from the edge board era is the tucked under edge, or today’s modern rails,” says Ferris. “Now you have the down railer with the crisp, tucked under rail. That was the evolution.” 

As the down rail concept was refined, down railers gave surfers more control. Prior to the down rail, many of the best surfers were getting in deep at Pipeline, but often not making it out. Then Mike Hynson made two down rail boards in February of 1969 for Gerry Lopez and Reno Abellira. According to Lopez, his 7’6″ Hynson allowed him to achieve more control in the tube. “The down rail was the breakthrough that made it all possible,” Lopez says.

To this day, Bob Smith, or Mr. X, still rides edge board designs. His current edge board is a tri-fin, with vertical fins, measuring 6’6″ by 19 inches wide. The rocker is more or less a continuously decreasing radius curve. “I try to make no detectable changes to the curve flow,” he says. “The idea is to make the water passage as smooth as possible. The rails are steepest at the front and gradually transition to less steep going aft, where they are abruptly cut off in a hard edge. The bottom has a broad shallow concave full width gradually flattening out near the tail. 

“In my surfboard R&D,” he continues, “I explored the extremes—ultra-thin and ultra-thick, drawn-out ‘straight’ rails and very curved rails, lots of rocker and very little rocker, round rails and hard edges, swept fins, including forward sweep, and vertical fins, narrow fins and keel fins, flex fins and stiff fins, wide point at the nose and at the tail, etcetera. It is my view that you will never know where the midpoint is unless you explore both extremes. Once you know the extremes, you can ‘feel’ if you are a bit to the right or left of your desired center or neutral point. If you don’t have the courage to explore the extremes, you’ll never quite know where that center is.”

[Feature image: Pipe Rights pioneer Mr. X flying on his third edge board in the fall of 1968. This version was 6 feet long with hard down rails all the way around, a mostly flat bottom running edge-to-edge, and subtle rocker. “A surfboard is a planing device,” relates Mr. X. “It rides on top of the water. The less you disturb the water, the less drag you’ll have and the more speed you’ll have. Zero drag equals unlimited speed.” Photo by Bill Romerhaus.]