A new documentary titled Channel Man explores the short life of the wild-living goofy footer Col Smith who had a profound influence with his surfing on channel-bottomed surfboards.
“I tell you what surfing heaven is,” the Indonesian veteran Grant “Cabbage” Fargusan told The Inertia. “It’s swooping around an offshore brushed, eight-foot Uluwatu Outside Corner wave on a six-channel Indo gun. The speed, the hold, the drive. There’s no better feeling in surfing”.
If you’ve ever ridden a channel bottom, you might know that rapturous feeling. What you might not know is Col Smith’s role in it. From Newcastle, Australia Smith was an Australian Champion and elite surfer who in 1977 took Hawaii by storm riding deep-channeled pintails. His channel designs would influence Allan Byrne, among others, and continue a lineage until today. Sadly, in 1986, Smith died at 31 of cancer.
Often, and understandably confused with the Narrabeen surfer of the same name (also a hard-charging, radical goofy footer, surfer-shaper), journalist Nick Carroll described Smith thusly: “short dark hair, crinkly smiling eyes, perfect teeth, and one of the most fantastically graceful surfing styles I’ve ever witnessed. That was surfing at the time; when a small, poor NSW ex-mining town at the end of a potholed coast road could produce someone who was the surfing equivalent of a rock star.”
That small town was Redhead, located 10 miles south of the city of Newcastle and the place where I grew up and learned to surf. It’s a coastal village with a nine-mile beach anchored by a giant, ochre-coloured bluff, and known for its historic shark tower and consistent waves. It’s produced a lot of good surfers, but a single truly great one. That was Col Smith.
In 1977 he’d burst onto the pro surfing scene after turning up as an unknown in Hawaii with a fleet of alien surfboards, channel bottoms, the likes of which the Hawaiians had never seen. In that North Shore winter, he won the Sunset Trials and came seventh in the Pipe Masters. The next year he would also win the Bells Trials. A movie part in the seminal film Fantasea showcased Smith in his prime on the new designs.
Smith was riding Jim Pollard-shaped channel bottoms. Pollard wasn’t the first to use the design; various renegade shapers had been dabbling independently, but Pollard’s were the cutting edge by the mid-70s. He’d influenced a slew of surfer-shapers to them including Smith, Marty Littlewood, Phil Myers, Phil Fraser, Rod Dahlberg and Allan Byrne.
Byrne, a talented surfer, was fresh out of studying aeronautical design with the New Zealand Airforce when he first clocked his eyes on Smith’s channels in Hawaii.
“I was standing on the beach at Pipeline and Col Smith had just gone out and I’d never seen any surfing like it. He had this Jim Pollard curve channel, single fin. I watched until he came in and he had it sticking in the sand,” Byrne told the Damaged Goods Zine.
“I went walking up to him, ‘Fuck, can I have a look at that?’ And he kinda looked at me sideways and goes, ‘Only if you don’t tell anyone.’ He then went on to do really well at the Pipe contest a few weeks later.”
Byrne would decide to take the design and in his own words, “make it supersonic.” His work on the Gold Coast with Hot Stuff and his own Byrning Spears label would do more than most to make channels go mainstream. In the mid-80s Tom Carroll and Tom Curren would win World Titles riding clinker or belly channels (channels that faded before the tail). In the States, Timmy Paterson and Matt Archbold would also help sow the seed of the design adding radical touches and influencing shapers like Matt Biolos.
In the ’90s, the design faded in popularity. The deep concaves ridden by the likes of Kelly Slater had plenty of the channels thrust and hold, just without the stickiness. The fact that they took twice as long to shape and sand had also made them commercially difficult. But there remained stronghold enclaves and individual outliers.
Col Smith made the channel bottom his own. Photo: Geoff Moore
Newcastle pro Matt Hoy rode six-channel swallowtails shaped by his dad, Brian, in his ten years on the CT. Tom Curren riding Tom Peterson’s fish shape also rekindled interest near the end of the decade. In 1997, Occy rode a Rod Dahlberg-shaped 6’5″ six-channel with glass-in fins at his iconic win at the Bells Skins event in what has been described as the best backhand surfing ever seen.
In 2016 Mick Fanning won at J-Bay on a DHD channel bottom, and in recent years Daniel Thompson and his Tomo channels, the Firewire/Slater Designs Sci-Fi, and Torren Martyn on his Simon Jones-shaped six-channel twins, have proved that channels have a unique and long-lasting place in surf design and surfing.
Filmmaker Nicholas Cupelli’s and producer Terry Campbell’s documentary Channel Man leans into this legacy in the film. It features takes by Tom Carroll, Rabbit Bartholemew, Wayne Lynch and Michael Ho on Smith and his surfing. However, it is more about Col Smith’s short but colorful life, and a homage to Redhead and the coastal towns just like it that produce real diamonds that changed the sport.
The documentary has had screenings in Australia and the filmmakers are looking to secure wider distribution.
