Dennis Jarvis holding the surfboard that started his career. Photo: DJ
“The first board that I ever shaped (that I actually knew what I was doing) was the one that caused me to step into this world of sweaty, dusty frustration. I was on the pro tour and I was down in South Africa for the Gunston 500,” Dennis Jarvis, the founder and owner of Spyder Surfboards, tells me over the phone. He was 20 years old. The year was 1979 and it was his second year on the tour.
“I went down and my boards that I had made by my shaper were really super thick. I think that they were just kind of rushed out, not gonna lie,” he says. “I don’t know whether it’s saltier in South Africa, but we’re out at the Bay of Plenty and I’m sitting way high in the water. I’m used to sitting up to my chest.” The boards rode on top of the wave and stubbornly refused to give him the power he needed for turns. ”So you’re kind of just skimboarding at that point,” he says.
“This is not going to fly,” he thought. “I’ve got a contest coming up.”
At the same time as he was realizing his dissatisfaction with his own boards, Dennis was hanging out at the Eden Rock Hotel with the other pros and watching what they were riding. “I would just check out everybody’s quiver and what I was riding compared to what, like, Shaun (Tomson) was riding,” he tells me. “I would look at his board and it sparkled. His was frickin’ fine art and mine was okay. That’s what I kind of realized.”
Dennis got knocked out early in the Gunston. “I was a second round clown,” he tells me. “So there was a week between then and the next contest.” He decided was going to use that time to make a new board for himself.
He could do it, he thought. Making art his whole life had given him a steady hand, and he’d spent hours carefully watching the shapers at the South Bay surf shops where he worked as an airbrusher. He grabbed a board that he’d only ridden once and brought it to Safari Surfboards in Durban. It probably still had wax on it.
“Look, I got this brand new board from California,” he said to the staff. “Can I trade it for materials?”
“They kind of laugh at me and go, ‘What?’” he remembers. They were confused at being offered what seemed like the way better end of a deal, but Dennis didn’t care. He left the board at the shop overnight so they could look it over. “I wasn’t sure if they were going to even go for the deal,” he tells me, but they did. The next day Dennis got a blank, some templates to borrow, and some time in one of their shaping bays.
When he walked into the shaping room, it started to hit him, what he’d done. He’d just given up a surfboard that he could have sold for good money back home and he’d never even really planed a blank before.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. There was exactly one other time he’d made a board, years before. “There’s one that I did, as all kids do, where they’re goofing around,” Dennis tells me. “I had a friend named Fidel Garza and he wanted to get a surfboard, but he wanted to learn how to laminate and I wanted to shape. I think I was 18, maybe.”
“It was just terrible. We did it in a garage. No lights or anything. No symmetrical corners. Nothing. The rails were so pinched and the only color that we had was this okra brown, the ugliest, muddy brown, but he wanted it that color,” says Dennis. It was a deep swallow tail, the kind that almost looks like a pin tail. It had a big, beaked nose.
“The rails were super pinched because I didn’t know anything about apex,” he tells me. “I didn’t understand. I just kept milling the deck because I wanted it to look cool and domed.” For a graphic, he took the logo from the surf shop where he worked and cut up the letters to write, “DJ Surf Bros.” Later, when the owner of the shop saw it, he was not happy.
“The fin was off of one of my old boards that we broke off. It was a really ugly, red fin.” It had originally been attached to a Jacobs Panacea, the first board Dennis ever rode. “I remember we broke it off and I didn’t have a grinder, so we were out in front of house, using the curb to take off the fin roving,” he told me. “That was the only board I shaped forever and ever, and it was such a disaster.”
Since then, Dennis had only glassed or airbrushed boards. Now he was standing in someone else’s shaping bay in Durban, staring at a blank.
To make matters worse, he didn’t even have the right tools. “Everything was weird to me,” he remembers. “I’ve been watching the way a Skil 100 works my whole life, and then I’m picking up this strange planer and just trying to figure out how it worked. My blood pressure went up, thinking that I’m going to butcher this blank and then then what. Are they going to give me another one? I don’t know.”
But there was no turning back now, so he put his head down and went to work. The end result was a twin fin, hard-winged swallow-tail, again with a beaked nose. He’d modeled it after the boards he’d seen Mark Richards carrying around. “I remember MR sitting there. He had his board that was called his pal, and he wrote ‘Pal’ on it,” says Dennis. “I remember looking at his boards and he had the pointiest wings on them and I wanted to try to replicate it. It was a hard wing swallow, but I couldn’t flute the wings like he did, because they didn’t have the tools for that and I didn’t know actually how to do it.”
He wasn’t totally fumbling in the dark, though. “I did learn about apex before I got to that board and it had nice thin rails,” Dennis says. “I was pretty good at outlines and stuff. Foils were a little different for me, but outlines, I think I was pretty good.” After he’d finished shaping the blank, he put some color on the bottom – he was an airbrusher, after all.
“I remember paddling out,” says Dennis “When I ran and I jumped and laid on the board, it just kind of like glided in and I felt like, ‘Okay, this feels like a board that I can actually ride.’” It worked, better than his other boards, at least. “Didn’t win the contest, but, you know, I was able to see what all these other guys were riding and try to manifest that into this surfboard,” he says.
The original Spyder logo that Dennis painted on the South Africa board. Photo: DJ
After the second contest ended, he brought the board home with him and painted a logo on it – a spider he’d seen in the margins of Mad Magazine that became the seed of his brand. Coincidentally, around that same time the shop he worked at got a 100 board order from Japan and Dennis was tasked with milling them. It was a trial by fire, but gave him the skills and cachet to start fielding orders of his own. It was the beginning of a long and twisting road, but as Dennis tells me over the phone, “It kind of goes back to that board in South Africa.”
