The Surfers Journal
Light / Dark
For a filmmaker and renaissance surfer plying his trade in the digital age, Andrew Kidman keeps his cards close to his chest. I recently saw him several times down on the inside section of Lennox Point, on a pink board that seemed to float over the wave like a hovercraft.
“What are you up to, Andrew?” I asked.
“Not much,” he said. “Just messing around with Greenough on a few boards.”
Knowing Kidman, that response could translate to anything, from a movie project to a book to a new board design. In the most recent case it was all three. I guess his vagueness is a protective mechanism in this age of Internet overload, when the power of the artist is fundamentally weakened by the dissemination of a million scattergun ideas.
Maybe it’s a method inspired by Greenough. He can be pretty cagey too. His specialty is an ability to hide in plain sight while he designs, tests, and redesigns his ventures. I caught the first whispers of his edge board project, which Kidman has documented in his latest book and movie, On The Edge of A Dream, when Greenough asked to borrow my friend’s 10’4″ Brewer gun. He wanted to test it against a prototype big-wave edge board he’d designed in an A/B comparison paddle-speed test. Over the next couple of years, it became increasingly obvious there was something much heartier being cooked up.
Australian surfboard designer Maurice Cole refers to the common shortboard model of the last 20 years as a mono-hull—essentially a single planing surface anchored by a fin cluster. The Greenough edge board, by contrast, is best understood as a multi-hull with multiple planing surfaces. The heart of the board is a central, scooped-out area (the center plane) circumscribed by a raised edge, which forms an interior outline of the board. Surrounding the edge is another concave surface that joins a rounded rail, forming the outline of the deck.
The first impression upon handling one is of a dizzying array of planing surfaces and rocker curves. As test pilot, shaper, and protagonist of On The Edge of A Dream, Ellis Ericson told me: “There are essentially three rocker curves—the deck curve, the edge curve, and the center-line curve.” You can see why surfers would balk at the complexity of the hull. It requires, as Greenough said, “a higher state of consciousness” to ride. Building and dialing in the design is no task for beginners, either.
*
It’d been a toxically hot summer in subtropical northern New South Wales when I paid Greenough a visit. The garden around his tin and cinder block pyramid house looked parched and stressed. At 75, he seemed weathered but impervious, still vital and surfing everyday. He gave me the overview of the theory while reclined on an old couch on his veranda. The spoon begat his edge board design in 1967, he outlined, a child of both the boat design theory he was versed in, and a desire to develop a craft with higher top-end speed in more marginal conditions compared to the power-hungry spoon. The idea, said Greenough, was to substantially reduce the wetted surface and thus reduce drag. “It’s common sense,” he said. “Reduce the wetted surface and you increase the top-end speed.”
His initial edge board was built on the frame of a red spoon and went, he said, “better in smaller waves and shitty when it got big.” Counterintuitively, in bigger surf it had way too much fin. “If you’ve got a stiff fin in there and you overpower the fin, it starts sliding and then the hull isn’t grabbing. If you’ve got a fin that’s bending off more then the hull takes over, and the fin and the hull work together. The red spoon was a magic board and I didn’t want to start hacking into the fin on it. So I put it back and built an edge board from the ground up, and that’s the board I used at Bells Beach and Winkipop when I was down there with Ted Spencer in ’68 or ’69.”
Increased crowding at the down-the-line pointbreaks that Greenough has always favored saw him fully embrace the concept soon afterward. “By 1970,” he said, “the writing was on the wall as far as crowds at Lennox go. I decided if I could make a board with more top-end speed on B-grade waves, then that was the whole idea of it. Better performance in not particularly good waves. The hard edge of the center plane gives you total release, and when you go into a bottom turn you’ve got a great, big, fat, soft rail, which holds the board in. You don’t even need a fin.”
For close to 40 years, this multi-hull concept stayed underground, languishing in the wilderness, visible only as a white streak on windy days as Greenough’s edge board windsurfing rig streaked across walls at Flat Rock. Then in 2013, after watching a video of big-wave surfers struggling to make waves, he felt compelled to revisit the concept. “I looked at the big-wave boards,” he said. “I hadn’t shaped a [stand up] surfboard since 1988. But I thought, Fuck! These guys have to have something better than this. That’s when I made an 8’8″. I also built a 6’3″, which Dave Rastovich rode at Cloudbreak.”
The boards were built using Greenough’s standard techniques: hot-wiring high-density Styrofoam from a block, wet-shaping the blank to avoid dust, and adding biaxial lay-ups on the lamination—backyard, but high tech. Initially, the 8’8″ was paddle tested in a lake at Lennox Head, matching a 9’6″ quad gun from Rastovich’s quiver for speed. In a second assessment, as mentioned above, it was only slightly slower than a full-race Brewer 10’6″ single-fin gun.
Rastovich’s Cloudbreak testing had mixed results, however. While the width of the board was 17½ inches, it only possessed a 12-inch center plane. As a result, very subtle control was required.
“The less he did,” Greenough told me, “the better it worked.” Rastovich “ate shit” at Cloudbreak on the first couple of waves but the inconclusive testing piqued the interest of Ellis Ericson, who learned about the experiment during a trip to the Maldives with Rastovich. As the two discussed the radical quiver of edge boards that Greenough had built, it was clear there were moments of potential. And it’s potential that lingers in the unconscious.
For Ericson, the techniques and concepts were ultimately mind altering. His immersion in the design began when Rastovich took him by Greenough’s place while Greenough was building a new 6’8″ gun. The experience, which Ericson describes as a “head fuck,” rattled him. Then in a shaping bay in Bali, he carved out a three-board quiver of edge boards, consisting of a chopped square single-fin, a twin, and a thruster all based on the Greenough concepts.
This initial Ericson quiver, which was brought to the attention of Andrew Kidman by Morning of the Earth creator Alby Falzon, was the catalyst for Kidman’s On The Edge of A Dream project. The film and accompanying book chart the Greenough edge board concept from its inception to the present, specifically focusing on four years of intense testing and development by Kidman and Ericson. It’s half Morning of the Earth, a delicious, visual poem in shimmering North Coast point surf, and half The Right Stuff, test pilots pushing the edge of the performance envelope on radical designs in oceanic waves instead of the air above the Mojave Desert.
*
The dry summer had left the Gondwanan vegetation surrounding Kidman’s Big Sky compound parched and dry when he invited me up to watch the film, with Ericson present to provide a running commentary. Wollumbin, the sharp-spired rim of an ancient shield volcano whose lava flows created most of the North Coast pointbreaks, was living up to its aboriginal moniker: cloud catcher. A family of yellow-tailed black cockatoos sent choruses of raucous, metallic cries into the valley before launching sorties with deep and slow wingbeats.
Surf movies have covered places, waves, personalities, and (most commonly) travel to exotic locations. The reality is we haven’t moved far from Bruce Brown’s template in The Endless Summer. On The Edge of A Dream, however, seems to chart an entirely different subject matter. For the first time, it documents the discovery (or rediscovery) of an entirely unique surfboard design and its subsequent testing, refinement, and evolution. It lays bare the bones of the creative process that flourished during the Shortboard Revolution. Twenty years of computer-aided design and production have given us nothing but increasingly accurate iterations of the status quo. In Greenough’s backyard the paper template, the vice and torsion spring, and a whole gamut of low-tech industrial methods have produced results far outside the mainstream.
When we stopped the film halfway through, Kidman and Ericson were fizzing like teenagers. Initial testing of the edge boards had been conducted with known fin arrangements, they explained. In Kidman’s case, they used a “widow maker” setup with a Brewer-template center fin. In Ericson’s case, they employed a Greenough high-aspect single-fin. Both had limitations. The widow maker cluster held the tail of the board too tightly. The high-aspect single-fin led to Ericson suffering blowouts at high speed under load.
The missing link, they said, was a fin design Greenough had developed during his windsurfing period: an upright, narrow-based blade with a broad, paddle-shaped tip that allows for torsion flex into the water flow. This Power Blade fin was an offshoot of John Eickhart’s V-slot fin from 1960, a design that took the standard longboard D-fin and added a large V-slot cut into the base to allow the head of the fin to torsionally flex.
As they went on, I realized Kidman and Ericson were talking about the fin in a language I couldn’t quite understand. They then began outlining how it bends into the water flow, allowing the tail to follow the nose through turns, explaining that the design creates much less area in the fin but that it does more work.
California shaper Marc Andreini summarized the attributes of the fin in a short pamphlet titled The Next Advancement in Single-Fin Performance. “Here is why it works so remarkably,” he writes. “The narrow base makes the water pressure along the base of the fin almost nonexistent. It allows the rider to pull the board up or across the wave due to the small amount of resistance where the base of the fin is attached to the board. Secondly, the Power Blade is designed to twist from side to side, which gives you propulsion the way a fish drives itself through the water by twisting its body and fins back and forth. When the head twists, that motion gives your board variable tow-in, similar to a thruster, which allows the tail to step out slightly so the tail will follow the nose. This function gives the board more drive.”
These concepts seemed baffling until later, when I test rode an edge board with a Power Blade fin. Meanwhile, as I sat through the second half of the film, a strange sensation of déjà vu took hold, followed by a realization: I’d seen these visuals at some point before. I’d actually been in the lineup and, in another instance, standing on the point and watching with my own eyes as Ericson surfed the boards and filmed at Lennox. Somehow it didn’t register at the time. To a mind like mine, numbed and conditioned by consuming vast quantities of modern industrial surfing, there was simply no frame of reference to process or categorize it. It was happening in front of my eye, yet not translating.
A second realization came hot on the heels of the first, this one while watching Ericson, a doughty natural footer, running through updated versions of the Greenough back catalog, including Velo and White Kite. He, I saw, served as a doppelgänger for Ted Spencer, whose underappreciated, low-slung power stance bought the Velo concept to life for upright surfers during the period following the Shortboard Revolution.
This observation led to the conclusion that the first wave of Australian surfing talent drawn into the orbit of Greenough’s vision (Spencer, Bob McTavish, Chris Brock, David Treloar, Wayne Lynch, Nat Young, and others) is now being supplanted by a second wave, 50 years later, in the forms of Ericson, Noa Deane (featured riding a Greenough board known as Pink at Angourie), Creed McTaggart, Shaun Manners, and Harry Bryant.
It must seem a strange and bittersweet irony to the honchos of Australian competitive surfing that the more money they pour into wave riding as a competitive sport, the more the energy and vitality drifts away, back to the noncompetitive surfer. The next iteration, it seems, has come around to Greenough’s vision of surfing as a noncompetitive activity—a generational passing of the torch. As a document of a singular design being tested, refined, and evolved, the film stands on its own. The final sequence, with Ericson on a 5’5″ single-fin stubby called Hotwire Red is worth the price of admission alone.
*
It’s one thing for surfers like Rastovich, Ericson, and other pros to ride these designs. It’s quite another for an average human to pilot an entirely alien concept. When Greenough rang me and said the 7’8″ would be available and that I should come pick it up, the goal, I decided, was to get from point A to point B. “Hang on,” texted Ericson. “It’s a wild ride.”
A cyclone was tracking southwest into the swell window from Vanuatu, generating stormy 6-foot surf for my opening test. A local pointbreak next door to Lennox Head, which prefers a southeast swell, was pushing wedges square into the point. Twenty knots of sideshore wind and a backwash from the basalt rock face were in the mix. It wasn’t quite Victory at Sea, but not far off. There was no one out. It was far from ideal, and yet perfectly ideal.
I squeaked through the keyhole and wore a brace of 6 footers on the head. Trying to duck dive a pitching 6 footer ended in disaster when I couldn’t get the wide, thick nose of the 7’8″ to penetrate. As I was sucked over the falls, the board clubbed me in the jaw. With its high-density foam core and three layers of glass, it felt like getting hit by a block of concrete.
In the lineup the board was bizarre to paddle. I could feel the edges on the center plane rocking it side to side. The Blade fin seemed to have a life of its own. Ironically, the failure to duck dive it gave me confidence the nose wouldn’t pearl on the pitching takeoffs. I had to trust Greenough’s advice regarding how it might handle in bump: “When you put it up on its rail,” he said, “this vee sits down in the water. No matter how fast you’re going, it’ll break into a turn every time. When the vee penetrates the water, what have you got on the outside? A big, fat, soft rail. Now the water is wrapping around the rail and the suction holds you in.”
I decided to try a variation of the “45 takeoff” he’d described to me—coming in behind the peak, committing the edge to the turn, and angling 45 degrees down the face. There was no regular takeoff spot in those conditions, so it was just a matter of getting into the zone where the backwash intersected the oncoming swell, then finding a way in without getting pitched.
The 45 technique worked from the first takeoff. Staying in a low crouch and holding the rail, I felt the board tilt straight and true onto the edge and angle away from the pitching lip with surprising ease and very smooth handling. The only problem I had was a tendency to over steer as I leaned on the rail and loaded up the fin, which pushed me off the back of the wave. The sensation was of drag-free speed—a finless feeling—except instead of the board tending to break out of the trim line and let go, the fin was holding and steering me back over the top of the wave.
Gaining confidence, I allowed the board to get closer to the wave base and used the bottom tension to draw off. Tilting it on rail allowed me to cover a long radius turn with no loss of speed. By the end of the session I could S-turn it, generating speed from rocking it gently from one edge of the center plane to the other. It was surprising how quickly the alien feelings became normalized. Was I in a higher state of consciousness? More likely a lower and more primitive one, as bait schools and diving birds made me anxiously scan the lineup for predators. The new sensations, however, led to neurons firing off everywhere. I came in with my mind hissing with possibility.
Back at Kidman’s Big Sky compound, Ericson showed me the latest edge board he’d built, the result of five years of intensive R&D. It’s a small, white pod with a tiny, upright Blade fin. The lines are simplistic and pleasing to the eye. It looks like a futuristic spacecraft, dropped to Earth by aliens. It’s unmistakably a Greenough-inspired design, yet like nothing I’ve ever seen before.
Who could understand this merging of past and future? Who could have the mind to conceive it? Could the design infiltrate the mainstream? Kidman is evangelical about the potential of the edge board concept, claiming that “in the future every surfer on the planet will have some edge element at play in what they end up riding.” I have to admit, it’s hard not to get caught up in the unrestricted speed it can produce after testing the design.
The concept has already shown up on some Asian production boards, which Kidman and Ericson dismiss as mass-market “trend jumping.” Greenough points to a backlash against pop-outs and the mass-produced surfboard, a return to the core of what surfboard design has always been: hardcore surfers messing around in the backyard.
“The whole thing is like a dream,” Kidman said in an interview in Acetone, his zine. “And it’s about whether or not you’re gonna commit to following that dream, or just getting up and getting on with a normal day.”
Judging by the fervor with which he and Ericson are embracing the edge, that normal day is still a way off yet.
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Film and book available now at ontheedgeofadream.org.
[Feature image: Flextail spoon, hand shaped and painted by George Greenough,
displayed by Andrew Kidman’s son, Guthrie.]
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