Surfing wouldn’t be where it is without Steve Lis. There are a select few shapers whose names have entered the surfing public’s lexicon – Lis’ certainly has. He started off bodysurfing before he got into shaping surfboards. “We started at the bottom and worked our way up the chain,” he said in an interview with Joe Ryan. Lis moved from there to a bellyboard before dabbling in kneeboards, which led to his creation of the fish.
Of course, Steve Lis is credited with truly creating the fish, but like everything else, he wasn’t exactly the first. A long chain of events led up to it. First developed as a kneeboard, the fish was created when Lis noticed that his fins would drag off the sides of his preferred pintails. “He decided to split the tail, giving him the width needed to support his fins, while still holding on to the performance characteristics of a pintail,” Adam Fischer explained. “This fish proved to be a barrel machine, able to paddle in early, take fairly late drops, hold high and tight in the pocket and was snappy off the top. It wasn’t long until he had refined the design to suit stand-up surfers, and the fish design took off.”
Over the course of his career, Lis made a lot of surfboards. And if there is one place you can find a lot of surfboards, it’s Bird’s Surf Shed in San Diego. High up in the rafters, there sat an old, brown, Steve Lis fish. Ellis Ericson recently visited Bird, who kindly offered it up — after 30-plus years of collecting dust — for a spin at Malibu. And we’ll bet Lis is happy with how it went.
