Design Commitment
Every one of my boards contains everything I've ever learnt from from exploring the limits of every single wave I've ridden in the last 35 years.

Each board contains the knowledge gained from spending thousands of hours developing, creating and testing surfboards in an incredible variety of waves all over the world.

One of my boards is a serious investment in surfboard design.

Design History
I first started shaping in 1971 under my parents house at the age of 12.  As the 70’s progressed I developed a range of 70’s single fins with clean classic lines were necessary for surfing fast and deep in the most critical parts of Cronulla’s unforgiving powerful reef breaks.

These designs proved to be right at home for my early trips to Bali and the long fast walls and deep barrels of Indonesia led to further development of these designs.

Subsequent trips to Hawaii throughout the late 70’s and early 80’s expanded my knowledge of what was required for riding large, powerful waves.  This combined with observing the designs of and exchanging ideas with legendary shapers like Dick Brewer,Tom Parrish, Owl Chapman and Wiamea thruster pioneer, Chris Lundy led to further development and refinement of my designs.

It was no big thing and inevitable, but in 1981 I created the first pintail thrusters despite the general consensus that the thruster had to be a square or swallow tail.  My surfing in Hawaii later that year on what was probably the first ever pintail thruster allowed me to surf Hawaii in ways that it hadn’t been surfed before and earned me pretty good raves in the magazines at the time.

Bailing from the poor quality waves my top 16 position on the pro tour in the early 80’s, I hit the road to seek out the most remote and challenging waves I could find to pit myself and my boards up against.  This led to the creation and fine-tuning of the highly regarded Hit The Road series of pintail thrusters.  With the legendary "Glassed to Last" laminations this series of boards became the benchmark for many traveling surfers throughout the 80’s and 90’s. 

It was these trips that really deepened my understanding of critical waves and established a range of boards that could be relied upon to be able to handle whatever the ocean was going to throw up, especially when things got serious. 

The Evolution of the Retro and Fish Designs
In 2006, curious about the retro, Steve Liz 70's style twin keel fishes that were appearing, I borrowed a friends homemade version. I was astounded by the performance and took a few measurements, tweaked them a little and created a board that made tiny waves unbelievable fun. Curious as to their limits and hooked on the beautiful free glide feeling they produced, i began riding them in larger waves.

The original design proved to be very limited in anything over waist high, but after some serious tweaking and a lot of waves I've developed a twin keel fish that's capable of surfing double and sometimes even, triple head high waves. Since then I've found them to very capable at up to triple head high Lennox, a variety of double head high waves throughout Indo, WA and even the thick barrels of Tahiti proving them to be a very viable design that still makes tiny and sloppy surf a ton of fun.

Research and Development
Researching and testing surfboards, especially boards for bigger and more powerful waves is not a cheap exercise. It involves dragging bags of surfboards through airports and onto planes and then out to often remote locations to put in the time to wait for sufficient swell to be able to test each design.

Because I make so few boards, less than a hundred boards a year, my per board R and D cost is really high. It’s currently running at about $300 a board and with some models, like the MKIII twin keel fish series, I actually have about $30,000 worth of R & D invested into that one model.

I’m not going to pretend that I don’t enjoy testing the boards….it’s usually the best part of making boards, especially when a new design performs well. But at the same time it's a real cost of producing my boards and has to be factored into the cost of building them.