The author, circa 1995, reaping the benefits of this board’s wide appeal. Photo: Tom Servais
When on a chilly January evening in 1993 I turned down the gravel driveway that led to Dave Parmenter’s modest ranch on the outskirts of San Luis Obispo, I had no idea that the entire direction of my surfing was about to change. Dave, a longtime friend and former top-16 surfer on the world championship tour, was by this point in his career shaping surfboards full-time under his “Aleutian Juice” label – and still one of the best surfers in the world, especially in bigger, more powerful surf and pointbreaks. As well as one of the most controversial (read: opinionated), most notably when it came to the state of contemporary surfing — and surfboard design.
Keep in mind, this was the very beginning of the “Glass Slipper” trend, when, following the lead of world champion Kelly Slater and his legendary shaper Al Merrick, conventional surfboards went on a crash diet, dramatically shrinking in width and thickness, with a corresponding increase in nose and tail rocker. Specifically tailored for Kelly’s tight-arc, vertical surfing in the power-pocket zone of well-shaped waves; patently inappropriate for the vast majority of surfers, who in average surf conditions struggled not only to ride these so-called “glass slippers,” but to even paddle into a wave on one. Yet while most established surfboard manufacturers uniformly followed suit, pointing to the surfing of the top pro competitors to validate the design, Dave Parmenter, from the depth of his rural Central Coast shaping room — and his fertile imagination — was taking a different line. In a SURFER magazine design feature, Dave, commenting on the “Glass Slipper,” had minced no words:
“The absurdity of the modern shortboard has cleared the path for an unprecedented renaissance of alternative surfcraft.”
He didn’t, however, reveal exactly what sort of alternative surfcraft he was referring to. But on this January evening visit, I was destined to find out.
I’d hardly had time to catch up on things, when Dave, in an obvious state of what, for him (a notorious stoic) passed for suppressed excitement, brushed aside my pleasantries, saying, “Check this out.” He emerged from the kitchen holding a startlingly unusual surfboard. It wasn’t just the length, which I estimated to be around 7’0”. Nor just the outline, full-figured, its wide point a few inches above center, with a smooth, integrated curve carrying all the way to the nose. No, it was the foil: super thin, but with volume Dave had blended from the center of the flat deck carried out to a boxy, tucked-under edge — what Rusty Priesendorfer, one of Dave’s primary mentors, called an “Occy Rail.” A pro surfer’s rail, applied with low entry rocker, flat bottom mid-section, and a subtle spiral vee feeding into the three-fin cluster. Oh, and really, really light.
“Whoa, Stub Vector!” I said, calling up memories of a short, stubby Newport Paipo bellyboard model marketed in the late ‘60s. The “stub” part, though, had a more current application. While working as senior editor at SURFING magazine in 1985, I purloined (a fancy word for “stole”) the only existing VHS copy of Albe Falzon’s classic 1972 surf film Morning Of The Earth, which I remembered seeing during its first run in San Francisco’s Giannini High School Auditorium. Now, sitting and watching in front of the TV with Dave, I found that distant memory served, the film, which primarily featured cutting edge surfing in small-to-medium sized pointbreaks, having initially touched off my longstanding affinity for such waves. But though the movie had been more often celebrated for eloquently capturing the era’s antipodal “Country Soul” era than the surfing performances within, Dave was galvanized by the radical, high-speed attack of iconic Queensland surfer Michael Peterson, who eschewed the period’s sleek pintails, instead choosing to tear Kirra apart on a short, wide squash-tail that would come to be known as the “Peterson Stubby.”
I would later find out that Dave shaped this particular board I was holding while listening to a one-off Morning Of The Earth soundtrack he fashioned off my stolen VHS copy, and had actually placed the single “Aleutian Juice” logo on the bottom, right where Peterson had his. But that was as far as nostalgia went, and compromise never entered into it. This was no “fun shape” or “mini-longboard,” designed to accommodate diminishing skills, fitness and commitment; no “beer-belly board” or “wave hog.” Wide, thin, light and refined…this thing was like no surfboard I’d ever seen (and since having my first custom board shaped by Ben Aipa in 1968, I’d seen quite a few.) This board was obviously built to fly.
I just had to ride it.
“Go ahead,” said Dave. “Take it. Let me know what you think.”
So I did, carefully loading the Stubb Vector (I was already calling it that) into my truck with the rest of my conventional boards, and then blasting down Highway 101, headed south — I’d stopped at Dave’s on the way back from Santa Cruz.
I pulled into the Rincon parking lot around 11:30 p.m. Not surprisingly, it was empty. I should add here that when living in Santa Barbara in the late 1970s to mid-80s, I enjoyed my share of full-moon Rincon sessions. Nothing like sharing overhead waves at the Cove with just a few buddies to really cement an intimate relationship with the “Queen of the Coast.” So that the prospect of a solo session this night didn’t faze me much. I fairly flew down the trail to the base of the Cove, the Stubb Vector, at 21” wide and 2.5” thick, tucked reassuringly snug under my arm. I could hear the waves, knew it was going to be good. And it was — good and empty. Again, I fairly flew over the low tide rocks at the top of the Cove.
First impression: the thing paddled like a dream. Pushing no exaggerated entry rocker, the board felt like it would actually hit planing speed, had I enough muscle to propel it. I don’t know about you, but for me, increased paddling speed translates directly to increased confidence; no kicking and thrashing to start things off. Which there was none of, not when having sat comfortably in my preferred take-off spot (no one frothing up the line, so why not?) for a few minutes, I spun and paddled into the first wave of a glassy, overhead set.
Second impression: I was moving fast even before getting to my feet, so there’d be no standard three pumps necessary to bring the board up to planing speed before doing my first turn. For the first time in long time — maybe ever — I could take advantage of the initial steepness of the wave, so that my first bottom turn, the only truly essential surfing maneuver, could be done with the throttle wide open.
Third impression: Speed translates to power, which, in turn, leads to more speed. Speed + power = freedom. Riding on a moonbeam, I carved and banked my way down the line, surfing with a confidence that the last 15 years of straight-up kick-turns at this same break had never instilled. Down by the freeway, I pulled out of that first wave wondering what I was going to do with all those other surfboards in my garage. Or the ones in my truck, for that matter. As it turned out, I’d never again own a pointy-nosed board under 21” wide.
Dave would later be quoted in “Wide Appeal,” SURFER magazine feature profiling the Stubb Vector design:
“Look at surfing in good pointbreaks and realize that radical surfing is speed and banking and carving directional changes, using 90 percent of the wave’s face, without having to hop, and without being tied to the curl like some fly buzzing around,” said Dave, as acerbic as always. “If anyone thinks they can go faster on a point wave than on these boards, bring them on.”
Two-time world champ Tom Carroll, who on the French leg of the 1995 pro tour borrowed a second-generation 6’8” Stubb Vector of mine to ride in a specialty “expression session,” came away intrigued. “It took a bit of getting used to, all that planing speed,” he reported. “But when you found the sweet spot, you could really carve some beautiful turns. I’d love to ride a board like this in big, sloping lefts, with a lot of face. You could really get creative.”
On hand for that same French event was the legendary Nat Young, 1966 World Champion and hugely influential proponent of the first modern shortboard, where he didn’t borrow, but more accurately commandeered my Vector for a long beachbreak session of his own.
“I knew this board,” came Nat’s informed assessment. “It felt great to be able to bury a rail on a board this size, and push against all that curve. And how good did it feel to paddle the bloody thing?”
Yet despite the many performance advantages offered by Dave’s evolving Vector Series, the design never fired the imagination of the many surfers held in thrall by most of the major surfboard manufacturers, whose marketing was characteristically based around competitive and/or high-risk danger surfing; the only “alternative” presented by the big brands and existing surf media were longboards, and even these were often presented as a step down from “real” surfing. Had Dave been shaping Stubb Vectors for a big label in San Clemente or San Diego, instead of in a converted barn outside of San Luis Obispo, perhaps things might’ve been different. Yet lack of widespread acceptance hardly deterred Dave from continuing to refine the Stubb Vector throughout the subsequent decades, offering the design to a small but faithful cadre of customers on a custom basis, and at less than a handful of exclusive retail outlets. Many of whom today carry a wide variety of mid-lengths, both big brands and boutique labels extolling the design’s performance benefits as if they were something new. Dave Parmenter can afford to shrug at these revelations.
“I don’t really care about credit, and I’m not worried whether or not surfing history acknowledges that Stubb Vector was the first postmodern shortboard,” says Dave. “I was just sharing some photos of a new shipment of stock Vectors for Moondoggie’s (Dave’s longtime SLO retail account), remarking that I’m still shaping them 33 years later. Even after all the dismissals from those image-conscious surfers who were afraid to be caught with a Vector under their arm at their local beach, despite knowing that the design would greatly improve their surfing. Which it has, for thousands of my customers, by my count.”
You can count me as one.
