So how did we get from here, to here? Photo: Jeff Divine
Editor’s Note: Welcome to “By Design” with Sam George that examines the genius, and sometimes the mystery, of surfing’s storied design history. Sam has been writing about surfing for more than three decades and is the former Editor-in-Chief of SURFER magazine. He won an Emmy for his work on the 30 for 30 documentary, Hawaiian: The Legend of Eddie Aikau. Today, Sam looks at the history of multi-fin surfboards.
Throughout the past four decades or so, many surfing history buffs and/or serious students of surfboard innovation often refer to the “Single Fin Era,” as if a hefty stretch of the modern sport’s timeline saw an extended period of unified design – in this case, surfboards featuring only one fin. A closer look, however, shows that the relatively short time that a “Single Fins Rule” bumper sticker might’ve applied can hardly be considered an “era,” defined as “a long and distinct period of history with a particular feature or characteristic,” but merely a blink of the eye between the introduction of mass-produced surfboards in 1960 and when multiple fins made their appearance only six years later. If you really want to talk about eras, a more accurate historical designation would describe the entire period in which we’ve been surfing since then as “The Multi-Fin Era.”
First off, let’s make something clear: über innovator Bob Simmons doesn’t count, simply because his sandwich construction, concave-bottomed, foiled out and rockered balsa twin-fins were so far ahead of their time back in 1949 as to almost be an alien life form. For all intents and purposes, then, the first modern multi-fin boards entered the picture in the mid-1960s, when a company called Newport Paipo introduced a series of sophisticated bellyboards, a number of their designs offered as twin-fins. By 1967, models like “The Wedge Vector” and “Stub Vector” featured progressive fin templates that made those found on contemporary stand-up boards look primitive by comparison, having much more in common with those attached to Simon Anderson’s thruster some 16 years later. Yet unlike how George Greenough’s kneeboards received widespread credit for sparking innovation in conventional surfboard design, when viewed with an open mind it’s easy to see that late-sixties bellyboards played a largely unacknowledged role in the shape of things to come.
Simon Anderson’s design wasn’t openly mocked, it was openly copied. Photo: Jeff Divine
Consider a prone model offered by Hansen Surfboards in 1969. Longer by a foot than the El Paipos, it featured a concave bottom with subtly tapered template leading back to a wide squaretail, with a semi-keel fin affixed on each corner. Though primarily intended to be ridden prone, it was easily surfed standing up – by bantamweight surfers, at least – and, in fact, looked uncannily like the stand-up twin-fin designs that would burst onto the scene in late 1970.
It’s hard to pinpoint who actually invented the first of those early-70s twins – Santa Cruz’s Tom Hoye tops some lists – but it’s hard to argue that two of the twin’s prime movers were Australia’s Geoff McCoy and California’s Mike Eaton. McCoy, working with Narrabeen hotshots Mark Warren and Terry Fitzgerald, laid his label down on a series of tiny twins that were basically just thicker versions of the Hansen prone machine, and in the 5’5” range, not much longer. To compensate for the reduced length, thickness was maintained throughout, including the wide tail, which resembled a boat’s transom as much as a surfboard. Eaton, on the other hand, shaped for Bing Surfboards in Hermosa Beach, whose top team rider, Rolf Aurness, had just won the 1970 World Contest on a single-fin at least a foot longer than the Aussie’s stubbies. Understandably, Rolf’s twins, as interpreted by Eaton, were a tad longer and a bit more refined template-wise, but still featured the thick transom tail, with fins placed right on the back corners. Though other big labels quickly pumped out their own versions – Florida’s Gary Propper made Hobie’s “Positive Force IV” look good, as did the La Jolla Shores crew on their G&S models –most surfers found them difficult to ride (good luck burying a rail) and even harder to catch waves on. Subsequently, “transom twins” flared for about a season and a half before even the pros got tired of spinning out.
Luckily for us all, other, historically more impactful innovation was concurrently taking place. Hawaiian ace Reno Abellira, for example, working with Island-based guru Dick Brewer, had begun experimenting with sleek, eminently more functional tri-fin designs. In a surprisingly prescient 1972 SURFER magazine feature titled, “One + Two = Free,” Reno stated that, “The tri-fin has single-fin drive and twin-fin torque…a compromise of each with the elimination of either’s hangups.”
The Bonzer looked like it went pretty well. Duncan Campbell, test-riding the very first Bing-made Bonzer, circa 1973. Photo: Craig Fineman
The surfboard industry responded briefly, with a number of manufacturers offering models equipped with “Press-Lok” tri-fin boxes, and companies like Con Surfboards even marketing adhesive stick-on versions of the small side-bites. At the 1973 U.S. Championships, held at Huntington Beach, three out of five men’s finalists rode tri’s. Meanwhile, up in Oxnard, the Campbell brothers debuted their severely concaved, twin-keeled, three-fin “Bonzer,” and to the south La Jolla’s Steve Lis was busy refining his twin-tailed, twin-keeled knee machine, eventually dubbed the “Fish” (still widely ridden today, its design virtually unchanged.)
Nevertheless, all these more complicated fin layups were happening during a time when surfboards designed for use on Oahu’s North Shore dominated much of the industry’s marketing efforts, as if the same, sexy 7’4” Brewer single fin would work just as well at Point Judith as it would at Rocky Point. Which is probably why the extensive effort surfer/designers Brian Gillogly, Dean Cleary and Clyde Beatty Jr. applied to their narrow-templated, toed-in, flat-side foiled twin finned “Rocket Fish” in the years 1974-76 didn’t receive as much recognition as it should’ve. Certainly not of the sort that the future four-time world champion Mark Richards and super shaper Dick Brewer generated with their very similar twin iteration only a couple years later, a design that took the surf world by storm, threatening the Reign of the Single-Fin Round Pin, only to be usurped itself by Simon Anderson’s three-fin thruster in 1982. We all know how that story went –previously considered an aberration, now multi-fin surfboards ruled.
And that was just with shortboards. By 1976, Ben Aipa, Hawaii’s burliest board designer, had already envisioned what a “modern longboard” looked like – some of his personal boards featured aspects like increased tail rocker and tucked-under rails, two fins on the tail. Back on the Mainland, venerable shapers like Phil Becker began offering his “progressive” nine foot-plus models with a “2+1” setup: a center single-fin box with two smaller side fins. Later proponents like Donald Takayama, Bill Stewart and Steve Walden went on to make this configuration standard, and it continues to remain so.
And so what about today? In a world that sees most really big wave guns equipped with four fins, an increasing number of surfers discovering the versatile qualities of “high performance” twin-fins, not to mention the rise of the mid-length, both twin and tri versions, it’s easy to see that A: multi-fins have been with us for decades, B: that single fins are now the anomaly, and that C: to paraphrase righteous Reno, one plus one (or 2) does indeed equal free.
