One of the most free thinkers out there, Leah Dawson. Photo: Seea//Inspire Courses
Ditch the fins, the real job, and specialization…for a start. Then maybe build a boat, ask a woman’s opinion and ride some solar waves. Then if all else fails, drop some acid.
“You could almost say surfers are mutants, ‘throw-aheads’ of the human race. It’s a non-productive, non-depletive act that’s done purely for the value of the dance itself. And that is the destiny of man. Surfers have taught me the way you relate to the basic energies, and develop your individual sense of freedom, self-definition, style, beauty and control.”
That was Timothy Leary, psychologist, author and labelled an acid demigod for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs, speaking to SURFER magazine in 1978. Almost 50 years on, Leary’s rather flattering, all-encompassing, take on surfing and surfers, is worth a look. Are surfers really free thinkers? And if we aren’t, how do we become one?
We could start with our equipment. Some of surfing’s most ludicrous and enjoyable action is, in my opinion, coming from surfers that don’t even use fins. If there has been a better wave ridden than this one by Ari “Krooky” Browne this year I’d like to see it.
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Krooky, who apart from being known as the best friction-free surfer of his generation also gets free thinking points for starting Bay Wash, which had the dedicated aim of being Byron Bay’s worst magazine. Started with his brother Raff (who 14 years ago decided never to go backhand and has surfed switch ever since) he reckons he achieved his goal, with the bonus of running at a loss.
There is a definite through line between finless surfing and freethinking. It takes imagination, courage and no small amount of skill to dedicate your precious surfing time to it. Looking at a list of its best proponents; Bryce Young, Dave Rastovich, Jordan Rodin, Laurie Towner and William Allioti, you might say they are all operating in the throw-ahead realm.
“Your toes are like little feeling sensors, little signals to your brain,” said West Oz’s Rodin. “The low center of gravity is better for control and stability. It’s a weird one.”
You would have knocked that list if it didn’t include Derek Hynd, who not only brought finless surfing to wider recognition, but is widely regarded as one of surfing’s free thinkers. “Let’s think about the fish. It’s rapidly become a design that has little resemblance to the classic Sunset Cliffs San Diego fish,” he told The Inertia, way back in 2010. “People started modifying the design and pretty soon all it became was a 1982 thruster. The Americans called it ‘retro’ and took it by the skin of the collar and just started shaking it for all the pennies it was worth.”
Along with finless surfing, it was Hynd’s championing of the Skip Frye Fish, and his encouragement of Tom Curren to do so that led to the retro movement. It is the hybridization of the old designs, and making surfing easier, that he believes has led to closed thinking where surfing has had a colossal lack of imagination. Bad news if you thought that sleek new twin fin was a portal to a more creative place.
Before Hynd, perhaps one of surfing’s greatest freethinkers was George Greenough, who among other things, developed high-aspect ratio fins and whose scooped decked, wide flex-tailed spoon ushered in the modern shortboard.
However, it was his take on where he surfed that might offer an average surfer the most freedom. “I look for the spot with the most power and the least number of people. I don’t care about shape,” he told Surfing in 1982. “So, I know a lot about working unusual waves, even Class-D waves, and having fun. That’s what it all is — I want to go out and have fun, not be seen on class-A waves.”
In 1967 George also built a fiberglass 37-foot ketch with his own centerboard keel; equipped it with an efficient homemade wind generator and sailed to Australia, spending nearly a year surfing unpopulated breaks in Tahitian and Fijian waters.
Interestingly, that is what Torren Martyn and Dave Rastovich are doing right now. The pair is building an ocean-going catamaran on Dave’s property, named the Gannet, and will use their creation to go surfing and expand their minds and the surfing universe. Call it serendipity, or just a new take on Mark Twain’s theory that there is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. Twain reckons we all simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.
Martyn with his films and his surfing on the Simon Jones-shaped twin-pins has already altered the course of surfing’s trajectory. Rastovich, with his early commitment to alternative designs and his environmental activism through non-conformist thinking, made a mark. They have kaleidoscoped the fuck out of surfing more than most.
Of course, being an old white bloke, and constrained by decades of restricted thinking, the absence of women in this whole naval gaze blows a massive hole right through the heart of it. “We’re here to shake shit up and bring the women who are free thinkers, pioneers, rule breakers, creators and doers to the center stage,” wrote the website Patti, in the blurb for the movie This Way, starring Nora Vasconcellos, Laura Enever and Jaleesa Vincent.
“We are making a scene, fucking up, making art, playing music, doing ‘boys things,’ doing ‘girls things,’ breaking down walls, seeking the like-minded and dancing together in this strange world that doesn’t want to take us home to mom. We are here to wake the sleeping,” said Vincent.
Women, who have been marginalized in surfing for so long, might be where surfing finds a new voice and a new way of thinking. God knows surfing needs a perspective. Maybe we just need to be more open to new ideas. Look outward to the horizon, not back, toward the shore. That’s when we are happiest, after all.
Leary proposed that, eventually, we’d all be surfing solar waves. These were great waves of energy coming out of the sun. He proposed that by erecting super-thin sheets of phase vapor-deposited nylon mesh, you can catch and harness these waves of solar energy. And ride ’em.
Or maybe just grab your standard squash-tail thruster, drop some acid and see what happens…
