The Surfers Journal
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When Leah Dawson was 14, she got a longboard from Donald Takayama. It was a 9’0″ hand-me-down, originally shaped for one of her surfing heroes, Cori Schumacher. By then, Dawson was already a promising young surfer among her peers, but she had an Achilles’ heel in her game. “I was really struggling to ride the nose,” she says. “I had been surfing longboards for years, and I knew how to cross-step, but noseriding was hard.”
She took the Takayama out on a summer day at Malibu, and it instantly transformed her surfing. “I felt it as soon as I started paddling, before standing up, and from the first wave I felt so connected to the board,” she remembers. “I was noseriding easily and hanging five all the way across the point. I remember thinking, Wow, I didn’t know that I could do that. This board is magic.”
Dawson’s experience highlights the one unifying—and perhaps most crucial—trait that defines a magic surfboard: It unlocks something in one’s surfing abilities that previously was inaccessible, uniting a surfer with a new-and-improved phantom self they once could only see lurking in the shadows. Yet the source of that magic is a much harder thing to quantify in an objective sense. After all, Dawson’s magic board was originally Schumacher’s castoff. And it didn’t last: Dawson loaned the board to a friend, and the friend broke it. It was years before Dawson got another magic one, and she never tried having the first board replicated. “I just don’t think you can re-create a board like that. Magic boards are their own candle, and once they burn out, that’s it. You’re not gonna bring it back up. You can make something similar, but it’s going to have a unique life of its own.”
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If Dawson is right that every magic board is truly one of a kind, there’s something both tragic and hopeful in that reality—tragic because it means that when a magic board goes, it’s gone forever, but hopeful because it means magic can’t be contained or commercialized. Magic is egalitarian. It can be found anywhere. It’s as likely hidden in some dusty rafters, a garage sale, or a Craigslist ad as it is in a brand-new, off-the-rack board for which you’d pay top dollar. The most painstakingly crafted surfboard offers no greater guarantee of that transcendent thrill.
In the mid-’80s, Dave Parmenter noticed the maddening way in which one man’s trash was another man’s treasure as a competitor on the world tour. If you’d expect to nail down some common elements of magic anywhere, it might be among a cohort of similarly talented surfers riding nearly identical boards in the exact same conditions. Yet opinions ranged wildly.
“At one point, around 1986, Rusty Preisendorfer basically made half of the boards for the top 16 surfers on tour, and Al Merrick made the other half,” Parmenter says. “We would get these boards and someone would say, ‘This board’s a fucking bush pig. It’s terrible,’ and he’d give it to someone else who would say the same, and then he’d give it to someone else who would say, ‘Oh my God, this is a magic board.’ Watching that happen over and over was a foundational experience of my shaping life. It showed me how problematic the idea of the magic surfboard is because a magic surfboard for one really good surfer was someone else’s poison.”
In Parmenter’s case, he says riding the same equipment competitively for years caused surfing to temporarily lose some of its spark by the late ’80s. The accepted board designs for competition had by then narrowed to near-complete uniformity. “Almost everybody was afraid to ride anything but a 6’2″-by-
19 ¼”, and if you did, you got written off. If I wanted to ride a 6’6″, people would say, ‘You’re riding a gun? What are you doing?’ Eventually it got so stale riding the same type of thing over and over, I felt like I couldn’t progress, and I was kind of fading out on the tour.”
Parmenter decided to shape a board in January 1988, just before the Katin Pro contest in Huntington Beach—only the 10th board he’d shaped at that point in his life. He borrowed a shaping bay at the factory where his friend Greg Mungall worked in Huntington and made a 6’5″ six-channel semi-gun. He finished shaping the board late in the evening, and Mungall glassed it that night. The next morning, Parmenter borrowed Mungall’s truck and took the board up to Cayucos in San Luis Obispo County to test it. The conditions were subpar storm bowls, and the south wind was howling, but the design brought Parmenter back to life.
“I felt like I could surf again,” Parmenter says. “I could do anything I wanted on that board. I wasn’t totally in control of the process of shaping it, but it felt like the best board I’d ever ridden up to that point. Years of struggling on the ASP Tour were erased, and I knew not only how I wanted to surf again, but what I wanted to do with my life.”
Parmenter rode the board later that month in the Katin contest and went on to win. Then he packed the board to Australia for the event at Bells. In the parking lot before the contest started, competitors teed off on the crude design. “Ian Cairns was my mentor,” he says. “He took one look at it and said, ‘I like this rail better than that one,’ making fun of how uneven they were. I was so excited to show it to Simon Anderson, and he raised his eyebrows when he saw it and said, ‘You reckon it’ll work?’”
It was near the end of Parmenter’s competitive career, but he went on to beat Michael Ho, Richie Collins, and Martin Potter in classic conditions to place fifth. “It was proof of concept that a board does not have to be perfect, even, or symmetrical to be a magic surfboard,” Parmenter says. “When you have a board that’s working for you on tour like that, it becomes everything in your life, and so much superstition and care goes into worrying about if it’s gonna get to the next stop dinged or with a fin broken off by the airlines because you realize how hard it is to get another one.”
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Parmenter’s experience illustrates what a crucial role belief plays in the notion of a magic surfboard: It is ultimately a surfer’s belief in a piece of equipment, and their own psychological and emotional attachment to it, that brings a magic surfboard into being. If a surfboard can be said to contain magic, that magic often can remain untapped for years until finding its way under the right surfer’s feet, at just the right moment in their life.
Dane Reynolds speaks to his own experience of connecting with a board less on the basis of any exceptional design characteristics but rather through his belief in its powers. “A magic board is something that does whatever you command it to do with ease,” he says, “but it also could just be a time and a place when you find something that suits where you’re at in life.”
During the years when Reynolds was balancing the pressure of a multimillion-dollar sponsorship contract with Quiksilver and the spotlight from becoming the most highly anticipated addition to the world tour, he latched onto a board sitting in the Channel Islands factory that originally had been shaped for Andy Irons. “I would ride that same board in every contest for years because I could trust that it wouldn’t give me any surprises,” he says. “Sometimes magic boards can be hard to control because speed counters control. This board wasn’t the fastest, but it was so forgiving. It felt like it could lock into a wave and roll easily from rail to rail without me ever worrying about skidding out.”
If a magic board can be understood as a highly subjective experience that centers on an individual’s belief in its powers, then it’s tempting to take a fairly unscientific view of the whole endeavor. The most accomplished shapers working today will be the first to attest to the impossibility of re-creating a magic board, which stems from their hyperawareness of how many uncontrolled factors there are in the process.
“If you try to replicate a magic board, you’re going to fail,” Parmenter says. “There are too many variables. Even if you could control everything in the process, a lot of the time surfers who bring you a board they’ve loved for a long time have crushed the deck down to the point that they wouldn’t even recognize the same board if it was new under their feet. Surfboards can actually become so overly refined and perfect that they get sterilized. Bumps and kinks and weird aberrations in design often allow the rider to work against something. Personally, I’ve never wanted to have the same board twice. I’m more interested in taking the lessons I learn and applying them to other boards. I start thinking, How can I apply this to bigger boards? or How can I use this to solve my Sunset problems or my J-Bay problems?”
A sense of magic returns when the ability to control some aspect of design is lost. From this perspective, the impossibility of replicating a magic board can be understood as integral to its definition.
In a recent interview with Stab, Jon Pyzel highlighted just how many inconsistencies enter into building a surfboard. “I can’t copy my own surfboards, so anyone who tells you they’re gonna make you a magic board over and over again is totally full of shit,” he said. “You have a stringer. It’s made out of wood. Every tree has different grain. It flexes different. It loses its flex. It does all this different shit. Then you have a blank. They blow them by hand. They pour the stuff by hand, and then you throw fiberglass on top of that. There are different resins and different temperatures. Things kick different. So you have a whole different setup even if you’re doing the exact same layup and everything. Plus, you’ve got a guy putting in fins. Then you have a guy sanding the board. So you think all those things are gonna happen twice? No chance.”
In decades of apprenticing, and now running one of the largest custom-surfboard operations, Britt Merrick has probably seen as many attempts to re-create a magic surfboard as anyone working today. “I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about magic boards, and a large part of what I do working for top-level surfers is trying to re-create and recapture magic boards. It’s a fool’s errand,” he says. “I can re-create a great board. I can do that all day long. But if you’ve got a magic board, just frickin’ enjoy it. Fix your dings, use a board bag, and be careful, because you’re probably not getting another one for a while. There are too many things that go into it, and too many intangibles, but that’s part of why I love surfboards. There’s true mystery in it.”
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To Parmenter’s point, maybe the desire to replicate a magic board is misplaced. Plus, as far as shapers are concerned, the impossibility of copying a magic board does not mean that there’s nothing to be learned from the magic contained in them. Looked at from a certain angle, the entire progression of surfboard design could be thought of as an attempt to better control aspects that once were uncontrolled and therefore regarded as mystical by surfers.
One example of an increasingly well-controlled design characteristic that shapers interviewed for this piece almost unanimously agreed was the most crucial to a great surfboard is rocker—the curves running through a board from nose to tail. It’s been a matter of only decades—within the long arc of thousands of years of board building—that shapers have approached rocker with anything resembling some basic scientific method.
“In Dick Brewer’s time,” Parmenter says, “they didn’t know that rocker was a magic ingredient for surfboards. Tom Parrish was the first guy to quantify certain magic ingredients, like rocker, in a way that he could start to replicate. A lot of times in the Brewer days, and even through Parrish, it was very hit or miss. Then Bill Barnfield came in and took an engineering viewpoint of measuring everything precisely on a surfboard, and Rusty learned that from him. By the early ’80s, people began to appreciate that rocker was the magic ingredient in surfboards. They saw how the bottom curve trumps everything, especially when it’s placed in harmony with outline curve and foil. You can shape an otherwise shit board and, if you get those three things right, you can still have a good time with it. Now US Blanks’ custom rocker program has gotten so good that it’s pretty hard to wander too far off the trail if you know what you’re doing.”
The history of rocker design illustrates the ways in which magic and discovery exist in tension with one another. Once a magician lays bare the inner workings of a trick, in other words, it ceases to appear as magic. In any endeavor of human progress, scientific discovery can have a way of reducing a sense of the supernatural. When cavemen discovered fire, it may have understandably first appeared as magic, but it seemed less and less so over time as people learned its properties in such a way that it could be used to forge steel and propel humanity forward in so many ways. By the same token, if you handed a pre-1900s surfer a board with modern bottom contours, they would be more likely to deem it a magic board by comparison to the flat planks of the time because of the way it unlocks something new in their surf experience.
Today we have the privilege of taking many well-studied aspects of design for granted, at least to the degree that shaping a board with modernized rocker is insufficient to bring a sense of magic to a present-day surfer’s experience.
While some shapers can be self-denigrating about the uncontrolled nature of surfboard building, as more aspects of design are understood it also creates an ever-higher bar for shapers to clear in order to deliver a magic board. Reynolds describes how immeasurably small degrees of difference in rocker can now separate a good board from a magic one.
“The first Proton model I rode felt like magic to me because it was so different from what I’d been riding,” he says, “but for some reason the curve in the belly of the board was really hard to replicate. The first one had a really unique curve. They scanned it, but for some reason the curve never felt the same again. That one in particular was especially tricky to replicate because there was so much curve in it. A relatively flat board can have some slight differences and it will still ride about the same, but the more curve you add, there becomes a very narrow margin for error.”
The experience shows how a sense of magic returns when the ability to control some aspect of design is lost. From this perspective, the impossibility of replicating a magic board can be understood as integral to its definition.
The many uncontrolled variables still present in board building led Merrick to imagine how surfboard design might be different if it had a NASA-size budget behind it. “The materials we use were originally invented for aerospace technology,” he says. “To really improve upon the current materials and techniques would take significant disposable resources to invest, and there’s just not enough money in surfboards to advance things to that next level. Nowadays, people say, ‘Oh my gosh, epoxy and vacuum bagging, that’s new.’ But it’s not new. Windsurfers were doing that in 1983. CAD programs and machine cutting have advanced some, but that’s really old news too. It’s hard to think of another industry that’s progressed as little as surfboards.”
So while surfers tend to do a lot of hand-wringing over the increased mechanization and automation of the shaping process, it seems unlikely to go far enough in the foreseeable future to extinguish a sense of magic from custom-built surfboards.
Parmenter argued that even if board design progressed significantly in terms of its precision, there would still be enough subjectivity in the overall process to allow for surfboards to contain mystique. “In a way, the blueprint for a magic board has to start with the customer,” he says. “The less disparity between the evaluation of his or her own experience versus their actual experience at least gives you a much better chance of building them a great surfboard. That will always be a highly subjective part of the process. And even though we can measure the hell out of things, it’s meaningless if a shaper doesn’t fully understand what each component of a surfboard does, how it works in harmony with other components of a surfboard, and how you can pair contradictory components together to push someone’s experience into the great unknown and the transcendent.”
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To put it charitably, surfers are a bit unusual in our tendency to instill talismanic powers in our equipment. Put less charitably, a culture so rampant with superstition and magic perhaps distinguishes itself from conspiracy theorists and religious extremists only on the basis of receiving sufficient vitamin D dosages and regular exercise. “There’s a lot of superstition that’s gotten developed about surfboards, and surfers are superstitious at the very highest levels,” Merrick says. “They have a good heat and they’re going to repeat everything, including what they had for breakfast, the boardshorts they wore, and using the same bar of wax.”
Yet this fanaticism can be understood less as a modern surf-cultural phenomenon and more as a continuation of the traditions from which board building emerged in ancient Hawaii. The kahunas were responsible for building surfboards—among a range of other forms of expertise, from medicine to spirituality—and had intricate rituals that were passed along generationally through oral tradition. One entry from the 1896 edition of Thrum’s The Hawaiian Annual provides an account of the extensive board-building customs practiced by the kahunas:
Upon the selection of a suitable tree, a red fish called kumu was first procured, which was placed at its trunk. The tree was then cut down, after which a hole was dug at its root and the fish placed therein, with a prayer, as an offering in payment therefor. After this ceremony was performed, then the tree trunk was chipped away from each side until reduced to a board approximately of the dimensions desired, when it was pulled down to the beach and placed in the halau (canoe house) or other suitable place convenient for its finishing work.…Before using the board there were other rites or ceremonies to be performed, for its dedication. As before, these were disregarded by the common people, but among those who followed the making of surf boards as a trade, they were religiously observed.
Parmenter sees that reverence for shapers as a priest-like class continuing into more recent decades. “In the ’70s, the shaper was still very shaman-like, and that came straight out of the fascination with the Hawaiian kahuna,” he says. “The godhead shapers of the day—Sam Hawk, Dick Brewer, Reno Abellira—had a mystique that was captivating. I didn’t care if I saw my favorite surfer across the street. But seeing your favorite shaper? Oh my God. They were like Merlins. Some shapers’ ideas might not have all held up hydrodynamically or scientifically speaking, so surfboards really were a talismanic thing.”
One could argue that some of the regard for shapers as mystical godheads of the culture has been diminished by developments of the twenty-first century that have disrupted the oral tradition initiated by the kahunas. Information that once was accessible only through yearslong apprenticeship is now freely available online, not to mention the pay-to-play shaping classes and entry-level college courses that have become increasingly prevalent attempts to formalize the ancient tradition. But it’s likely that anyone who’s applied themselves to surfboard building, regardless of where they acquired the knowledge, will still come to a sense of the practice containing some rarely found mysticism.
Alex Lopez’s path into shaping in some ways perfectly mirrors the intergenerational tradition established by the kahunas, who typically passed board-building knowledge from father to son. In this case, the transfer of knowledge came from the most heralded Pipeline surfer-shaper of all time, Gerry Lopez. Alex’s path into shaping was less orthodox, however, in that it began at a great distance from any rideable waves—in Bend, Oregon, where the Lopez family was living at the time.
In his early years learning to shape, Lopez was an avid snowboarder, given his proximity to Mount Bachelor. Yet snowboarding held much less of the rampant superstition and mysticism of surfing, despite whatever close parallels one might draw between two outdoor board-riding pursuits both subject to the whims of nature. Lopez saw major differences centering on the way surfers regard their equipment in comparison to snowboarders.
“In snowboarding, it’s rare that you would ride a board for more than a year if you’re a really avid snowboarder,” he says. “You’re constantly getting new ones, and they’re pretty much all the same. People don’t keep a great snowboard their whole life. Plus, surfboards are handmade. You’re never gonna order a snowboard from someone with your exact dimensions and specifications in mind. It’s not even an option. You get it from a factory, and you get whatever they give you.”
As Lopez continued along his surfboard-shaping trajectory, by contrast it only revealed new layers of complexity that lent the practice a greater sense of mystique. A board that he’d poured all his effort and knowledge into could have middling results until finding the right fin, only then to transform into a magic board. Or a board that once felt magical in California could fail to hold up under more trying conditions on the North Shore.
The nontransferability of magic from board to board suggests that this energy could instead move from board to surfer. This would explain why there’s a compounding effect observable in the abilities of someone like Curren, where magic seemingly begets even more magic.
“Snowboards are flat. They’re more or less two-dimensional,” Lopez says. “With surfboards, you’re dealing with a three-dimensional thing with bottom contours. The deck could be flat or domed. The foam could be centered forward or backward. They’re handmade. You begin to realize there are a million things that are so much more intricate. That’s why I really have no idea what makes a magic board, and I don’t think anyone does.”
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If you ever have that magic feeling yourself and go back to your shaper raving madly, you’ll likely get a reaction that’s one part flattered and one part skeptical. After all, you’re complimenting them on something that they know goes beyond their abilities in the strictest sense. Merrick says that, from his experience working with surfers, the “magical” label tends to get overused.
“The term ‘magic board’ gets thrown around too lightly by a lot of people these days,” he says. “I think a lot of surfers get a good board and say, ‘Oh, this thing is magic.’ But I know just by how often that I hear the phrase [that] a lot of people don’t know what they’re talking about, because a truly magic board, by definition, should be extremely rare. You’re going to have a lot of good boards, and you’re going to have exceptional boards. But to have a truly magic board, it’s got to elevate your surfing to a level that you couldn’t have achieved without that board and that you weren’t achieving previously.”
Merrick and other shapers argue that locating true magic is an ability that can be honed through lifelong dedication. In other words, there is always more magic to be found in the hands of a great magician, and Merrick says that perhaps the greatest magician of our time, Tom Curren, brought magic to life in so many surfboards through not only his preternatural ability but also a nearly unparalleled study of his equipment. “Tom is a good case study for this,” Merrick says. “When we were working on twin-fins in my shaping room, he was telling me details about boards my dad had made him in ’78, ’81, ’83, and he was telling me the measurements of the rocker, the measurements of the vee, specifics about the thickness flow—and he was getting all of them right.”
Merrick was able to essentially fact-check Curren’s memory of the boards he referenced by accessing his father Al’s handwritten shaping files—little faded note cards on which he meticulously recorded all the details and measurements of boards shaped in the pre-digital era for surfers including Curren, Kelly Slater, and Shaun Tomson. “Tom has all that stuff in his head,” he says. “I was absolutely dumbfounded. I don’t know if there’s another human on earth like that. My dad wasn’t like that. I’m not like that. Tom’s got this investment in surfboards that most people will never even come close to, and it helps create magic in that realm. People who are that connected to their boards are going to have more magic ones because they’re on the search for it. Surfboards for them are not just utilitarian.”
Curren can probably also be credited with having ridden more iconic boards than any other surfer—the Tommy Peterson Fireball Fish, the Mark Rabbidge J-Bay boards, the Hamish Graham Backdoor board, the Maurice Cole Reverse Vee, Black Beauty, Red Beauty, and so on. When asked if each of these were magic boards or just canonical boards that had somehow wedged themselves in surfing’s consciousness, Curren says, “They all had their own magical qualities. The best way I could describe it is when asking them to do more than I thought they were capable of, they responded—or, under stress, they could step up to another gear. With Red Beauty in particular, I can remember it didn’t respond until I really started to push it, and then it became one of my favorite boards. One thing I try to remember is that a board is flexing and twisting while you’re riding it, so there are such subtle things that can happen, depending on who you are as a surfer, which dictate whether that board feels magic.”
Even after decades of close study, Curren still finds that magic boards tend to come from unexpected places. His magic board of the moment, he says, is a used 6’8″ Pearson Arrow twinzer from the late 1980s that someone gave him, “perfect for hunting down mysto peaks.” Another recent magic board was a 5’5″ twin-fin made by a relatively unknown shaper, Hani, based in Tel Aviv.
The eclectic range of magic boards that Curren has ridden illustrates how unlocking so many new peak feelings over the course of your surfing life will send you looking to ever-more-obscure designs in search of an encounter with the supernatural. Curren attributes his more recent experimentation in the realm of skimboard design to this desire to continue discovering new magic feelings. “With the skimboard-influenced designs,” he says, “they’re hard to catch waves on, but once you get up on a good one, it’s so exciting. They don’t have a speed limit, or at least I haven’t been able to find a speed limit on them yet.”
If magic boards cannot be replicated or quantified objectively, there’s something in Curren’s experience that offers an alternative answer to the big question: Where does the magic go? The nontransferability of magic from board to board suggests that this energy could instead move from board to surfer. This would explain why there’s a compounding effect observable in the abilities of someone like Curren, where magic seemingly begets even more magic.
Is this totally crackpot, unscientific, unproven speculation? Of course it is. But please know that the failure to indulge this line of thinking is not without consequences. You’re either in surfing’s cult of magic or you’re out, and magic only ever graces true believers. When it does, its powers remain long after the foam-and-fiberglass conduit that delivered it has been eliminated.
“Once you walk through that door of learning what’s possible on one magic board, you want to open new doors and find out what’s possible behind them,” Dawson says, recalling her experience of the magic boards Takayama gave her before his passing in 2012. “I still think about the magic ones all the time. Even if I can only see them in dreams, that’s fine. I’m still riding those waves.”
[Feature image: Every board seems to be magic under the feet of the right surfer. Dane Reynolds, performing the impossible on an early Proton model. Photo by Bernard Testemale]
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