“The main thing I was trying to get with this alaia was flotation. The thickness is about 1.5 inches, but by extenuating the bottom contours and adding deck camber, I was able to keep the rails nice and thin; similar to a solid wood alaia,” says Mark.

James Parry testing the design

Experienced Alaia rider James Parry tested the board for Mark and provided some really positive feedback, “This Alaia was a pleasure to ride and a great deal of work has gone into this board. It was easy to paddle because of the floatation, which also made getting to your feet a lot easier and I could ride it in larger surf with ease”.

I asked James how the ride compared with a solid wood alaia, “I felt with this construction it sat higher on the wave and that gave it a bit more down the line speed. The straighter rail and deeper concave meant it rode really well on our beach breaks and had plenty of hold. The flex allowed it to fit into the wave nicely and went on a rail easily, so I could turn it like my paulownia boards. This board is a great weapon to have in a quiver and it is a lot easier to ride because of the floatation.”

Increased speed down the line

The Glass Tiger technology and the ancient alaia appear to be the perfect match of old and new.

After a record number of entries, the 2011 Presentation Ceremony took place on Friday, 22nd of July in Melbourne. 2011 also marked the inaugural year of the AIDA under the custodianship of Good Design Australia.

Hawaiians have been riding “alaias” – traditional finless craft – for centuries. Bringing his experience to GSI is alaia enthusiast and 2009 Surfer Magazine board shaper of the year Tom Wegener. Tom first shocked the surfing community in 2005 with claims that the ancients, with their thin, finless wooden boards, were far more advanced than we ever thought possible. The “Tuna” is an extension of ancient surfing, designed with the perfect blend of flex, rail and bottom contours, and combined with modern materials to increase flotation.

Surfing on traditional wooden finless boards is something only highly skilled surfers can become proficient at. The award winning collaboration with GSI opens the door for everyone to enjoy the unique experience, which is one of very little drag or surface tension, and freedom with the ride.

“The alaia works off a different set of principles than our modern surfboards, and The Seaglass Project is about taking the ancient’s knowledge and applying it to modern materials,” said Tom.

“I’d like to hope I can share this fantastic Australian International Design Award with those generations of great surfboard shapers from the distant past.”

The Design Award™ award and trademark is a highly respected symbol that gives consumers added buying confidence. The AIDA are one of the longest standing and most prestigious design awards in the world, representing excellence in form, function, quality, safety, sustainability and innovation – the cornerstones of great design.

The 2011 AIDA achievement marks the second year of success for GSI, with the acclaimed Meyerhoffer surfboard taking out a 2010 accolade. For GSI’s Managing Director Mark Kelly, it reaffirms the choices made on some of their less than traditional shapers.

“I am extremely proud of achieving AIDA recognition two years running. This feat has rarely occurred and is an extremely prestigious honor. Our goal to be the best surfboard company in the world is being recognized here by these awards,” said Mark Kelly.

“The surf and active lifestyle industry that GSI works in is quite niche, so to be honoured with these awards by a wider audience is fantastic. We get to do what we love every day, which is work with great people like Tom Wegener and design cool stuff for people to use, enjoy and enhance their surfing experience.”

The award winning Seaglass Project Tuna is available now from Global Surf Industries, RRP $695.00. To find your local store or purchase globally online, visit surfindustries.com.

Filmed by JB Letoile. Edited by Yrwan Garcia-Leal.

Check out more at hiddenwoodalaia.blogspot.com

These boards have been extensively tested throughout the surf of Bali, and provide amazing speed with the unique feeling of weightlessness that only finless wooden boards can achieve.

While living and working in Bali, Jamie Johnstone continually searched to find the most environmentally friendly wooden surfboards. The Journey product range cause minimal environmental damage in construction, without comprimising on the quality or performance of the boards. With Alaia riding continually increasing in popularity, these environmental factors are important.

Alaias by Journey

Please download the Powerpoint show or email Jamie for the full Journey Alaia range. This includes technical details of each model and their dimensions, as well information on the wood used and its sourcing, and the boards manufacturing process.

The first batch of Alaia’s will be arriving in the UK for April 2011.

PRICE (excluding VAT and UK postage/transport costs):
The Serious and Magnum Alaia will be available at a wholesale price of £175, with a recommended retail price of £275.
The Pleasure Alaia will be available at a wholesale price of £225, with a recommended retail price of £325.

A photo exhibition which is happening at BRIGHT in Berlin, on January 20th to 22nd, 2011. Main focus of the exhibition is a Black & White photo series portraying the genesis of an Alaia, an ancient hawaiian surfboard made of Paulownia wood. The love for craftsmanship, attention to detail and puristic approach to surfing shown in the series are the same concepts inspiring the TWOTHIRDS Fall/Winter 2011 Collection.

© Yohan Colin

Based in Biarritz and influenced by his surroundings, photographer Yohan Colin has been capturing with his silver camera the atmosphere of surfing and street culture. His work has been featured at galleries and fashion boutiques such as L‘Artnoa, O.K Daddy, Corezon and 90 Grados.

Protect what you love.

Obeche is a West African hardwood timber that comes from Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Cameroon. Although it’s slightly heavier than paulownia, it’s still a lightweight timber, plus it has a high strength to weight ratio and will flex like paulownia. The trees grow in sandy, alkali conditions, so the wood can tolerate salt water and dries out well, which explains its popularity in boat building. It also works easily and has an attractive, pale finish. The main advantage of obeche though, is that it is easily available in the UK and isn’t prohibitively expensive.

Warren at Woodstock timber supplies in Falmouth was a fantastic help and is a font of knowledge about all things wood. He’s also pretty clued up on alaias and hand planes, so is a great point of contact for anyone wanting to shape their own board.

The proof of the board is in the riding, and my obeche alaia floats like a dream.

One big reason I turned to wood – years ago now – was I that love longboards, and foam has a limit of about 12 feet. After that it bends too much, loses drive and breaks easily. Soon I developed three totally different 16-foot shapes: the finned pintail, the Olo and the toothpick. Each is magic in its own way and great to surf.

When making the big boards, one thought kept crossing my mind. How come I have three totally different 16-footers based on opposing aqua dynamics, while all 6- to 8-footers are really the same? I figured that the shortboards in production were the best result we could expect from the ubiquitous foam/fibreglass construction technique.

[Caption: This board brings back the grace of planks at Waikiki, has the speed of the toothpick and la la of the alaia, and is light like a foam board. It makes riding small waves an exhilarating experience.]

Then along came the alaia and completely disrupted the machine, and it became popular largely on the discovery of paulownia as a wood for surfboards. The alaia has one drawback – it’s very hard to paddle and catch waves. I struggled to make a board that floats and rides like an alaia (which turned out to be the tuna) without the alaia’s weight. I tried surfboard foam, but it doesn’t have good memory when it comes to flex. I thought that a hollow wood construction might work, but it’s very complex to build. Twenty years ago I had experimented extensively with EPS, and I knew it was the answer to these problems.

Now my quiver is home to three distinct 6- to 8-foot boards: the finned foam board, the alaia and the tuna. My brother Jon has developed a fourth board, half-way between the tuna and the finned board called the Bluegill, and Sage Joske has his Vector.

Surfboard shapers have much wider range of materials to use nowadays, and their customers are hungry for new boards. I think we’ll be seeing a lot of fantastic stuff coming in the very near future, but the shapers that will stay in this business will really have to up their game.

I am the most stoked I have been now. I am making all sorts of boards and I can definitely understand them better – like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, I feel as if I am exploring a whole world outside what we once thought we knew. I’m asking my customers “Where do you want to go? What waves do you want to ride?” We can go places that we have overlooked for years.

Photos courtesy of Keith Hamlyn.

For Wegener Surfboards, the Festival was great fun and gave us lots of publicity. We caught up with hundreds of our best friends in our shack at surf city and revelled in the success of the finless surfing movement.

The Wegener week kicked off prior to the Festival, when we made a custom Olo for Dave Rastovich. We started with huge slabs of paulownia and spent two weeks milling, gluing, and shaping the wood into a fine 16-foot, 160-pound, solid surfboard. In the surf shack we oiled the board and Dave surfed at Granite Bay. Tears welled up in the eyes of the onlookers as Rasta skilfully steered the board across the walls of water just as the Hawaiian royalty had done in the distant past, demonstrating as he did so how surfing is truly the sport of kings.

The contest started with a free finless surfing exhibition, mainly on alaias and my new foam version of the alaia. The surf was absolutely perfect and the likes of Harrison Roach, Christian Wach and Taylor Jenson were happy to surf first point with no competition from other surfers. The viewers were very enthusiastic and the comment I heard most often was that the boards were much faster than anything they had seen before. Also, they couldn’t believe that a finless board could hold into a tube so well.

I was pleased to see that my new mini-tuna foam boards were surfing at a very high level alongside the alaias. I have been working on the foam tuna hulls recently, mixing them with flex from an EPS blank. I cannot believe how much water is displaced by the ‘Tuna’ tail – do check out the previous entry in this blog and how we learned about lift. The big rooster tail that Isaac Blyth is throwing out in this picture is formed because of the water rushing through the concave. Also, check out the line of spay thrown by Jacob Stuth as he does a bottom turn on his peanut. Jacob is still the master alaia rider.

During the week there was a shapers forum on surfboard design. There was the largest group of shapers I had ever seen and I was absolutely beside myself to share a stage with heroes like Bill Wallace, Bob McTavish, Mark Richards, Simon Anderson, and Peter Townsend. We each gave a bit of a talk on our contribution to surfboard design, and I spoke about how the surfer in the Diamond Head photo showed me about how the ancients had used concaves and parabolic rails.

[L to R] Simon Anderson, Mark Richards, Thomas Meyerhoffer, Phil Jarratt, PT holding the photo, Micky Munoz, Mike Henson, Bob McTavish, Bing, Joe Larkin, Bill Rice, Gordon Woods, Bill Wallace. And me talking.

There was plenty going on in the evenings, too. Richard Tognetti, the great Australian violinist, played live to surf clips including Derek Hynd riding finless at Jeffreys Bay. Jack McCoy hosted a night of short, living-room-style surf movies including Denny Auberg’s (he was there) Super-8 footage behind-the-scenes of ‘Big Wednesday’, and George Greenough’s new narration for the tuberiding sequences in ‘Innermost Limits’. One night, the real Gidget, Kathy Kohner Zuckerman, hosted a girls’ night out featuring fashion, stories, and music… The fun never ends during the Festival.

During the week the surf was pumping off its head all day long and surfers were soon weary from the hours paddling. After surfs, we relaxed in our Wegener shack in surf city and talked story. We had lots of time to contemplate where surfing is going and what surfers would like. It seemed to me that shapers have been focusing on fins on boards for a very long time and not looking at flex and twist in surfboards. The alaia is based on flex and the new foam tuna/alaias I am making are held into the wave by flex more than edges or concaves. I think I will be focusing on taking what we know about fins and the boards based around them and mixing them with the advantages of flex in the future.

One thing I have noticed is that almost all surfers want a light surfboard that is easy to transport yet can still catch waves. The alaia is the smallest and easiest board to travel with, as well as the best board in the world when on the wave, but it is very difficult to paddle. For the vast majority of surfers, the EPS foam tuna board will be a very good surfboard. It is very small and light, easy to paddle, extremely fast – which suits good surfers – and easy to belly board – which suits beginners. And, very important for today’s more crowded surf conditions, it is VERY SAFE to ride. There are no fins or sharp points and the foam is softer than regular boards.

My life as a surfboard maker has taken many twists and turns as I try new ways to ride waves. Nothing has been more surprising than the success of the alaia! Now I am taking a new direction to help more surfers enjoy the waves. I have been wrestling with the fact that I am experimenting with boards that are not green, and that I do not enjoy making – nothing is as good as wood in my book. But there is a place for these boards. I think surfing is a bit stuck with the domination of the tri-fin surfboard. Don’t get me wrong, these are good, but they’re a little one-dimensional. I think that this foam finless board will open up a wide range of surfing to the majority of surfers who are not interested in wood.

In my previous article here on Drift, I was talking about the Tuna and wondering why it is so much faster than any other surfboard.

The speed of a board as a huge influence on its performance, and is a really important quality of the Tuna. We want speed on a wave, and the Tuna tail is the fastest tail I’ve experienced by a long shot. When you’re going fast in trim you have really reached the ultimate goal of surfing – the fast, effortless slide. And manoeuvres like bottom turns and cutbacks come easier too.

The Tuna seems to be opening a door to a new type of board design.

My brother Jon has been experiencing the same speed with the Tuna over in California as we have here in Australia. He’s been exploring this new wave of board design, and has made a small foam alaia/Tuna and called it the Bluegill (after a very pleasant little fish). Although the board has the same bottom contours as a Tuna, because it’s shorter and made from a (secret) foam blank and glassed, we didn’t think we could call it a Tuna, hence the name. I was intrigued by this new incarnation, so I made one too, and I was surprised to discover that the foam has the same feeling of speed as the wood.

I’ve been studying this footage of the Bluegill in action, and I have worked out why the bottom of that board is so fast. Over and over, I watched my apprentice Matt Williams riding the Bluegill and eventually I spotted what’s best described as a ‘rooster tail’ of water coming out from behind the board. It’s as if the water is being pushed out from the back of the board. You can see this most clearly on the very last wave in this film, where Matt is riding prone. I think that the rooster tail holds the answer to why the shape is so fast.

In fact, the answer is so obvious that it hurts to think that it took me so long to see it! Maybe it’s something that other shapers have known about all along, but I’ve never read or heard about it.

Skip Fry told me many years ago that all surfboard design can be explained by putting a spoon under running water – you see how water attaches to curves and releases from an edge.

The explanation for the Tuna’s speed is that simple: water attaches to the two convex curves on the bottom of the board and is pulled to the centre. There, the two bodies of water coming to the centre from the two sides crash into each other in the concave and create turbulence and high pressure. This high-pressure water pushes the board up and shoots water out of the tail. This is lift.

[Harrison Biden on the 7' Tuna. The speed on the finless board is breathtaking. With the Bluegill we have put flex through the board so it will hold in a tight turn. Photo by Dane Peterson]

Back to foam
So, the Tuna project has made an unexpected return to foam. Although this was a genuinely unexpected change of direction, I have, for a while, been thinking that there had to be another board out there. I made several 7’ wood Tuna and they rode pretty well, but the Bluegill rides better. I definitely prefer to work in wood and I’m confident that I will find a way to make a wood Bluegill eventually. But I’ve got to say, one thing foam has got over wood is that it’s cheap and easy to work.

The reason I went back to foam in the first place for the shorter boards (foam will never replace a wood board over 8’ long) is because a shorter board must have flex. They just won’t work unless the flex is there. Without a fin, a rigid board will slide sideways towards shore. In order to grab into a wave and keep trim, the bottom curves of a board need to be able to suck the board to the water – when the board flexes into the shape of a wave the curve realises more surface area in the wave’s face, resulting in more grip.

My biggest breakthrough with the alaia was when I discovered that thin alaias flex into the wave and hold far better than the inflexible thicker alaias. Getting the flex is easy with an alaia because it just means making the board thinner, but it’s impossible with hollow wood boards because the rails and internal framework are rigid: if they flexed they would crack.

Surfboards for crowds
There is one other very important reason I have looked into the foam finless board – I genuinely believe that they’re a better board for crowded surfing situations.

This summer I saw thousands of beginners in surf schools around Europe. The first thing they learn is to stand up and ride straight to shore. This is fine for those folk who aren’t really going to take their surfing much further than these few lessons, but those who catch the surfing bug and really want to ride waves have to unlearn these early lessons. It would be much better for them to learn to angle themselves across a wave and get a feel for how the wave catches the board, THEN stand up.

For a young beginner, a 7’ finless board would be perfect. First they would master the art of riding prone really well. Then they would learn about catching waves and angling themselves correctly. Finally, when they stand up they’ll already be at the right angle to catch the wave. If they choose to carry on surfing outside of the lessons, they’ll have a much better understanding of how to move with the waves and surf a crowded break.

In addition to its benefits for learners, the finless Bluegill is the safest board in a crowd because you can just go right over the top of other surfers. I was inspired by this video clip of Rob Machado and Ryan Birch riding foam blanks and having a ball. About a minute in, Rob goes right over the top of his friend – how many times do you want to do that during a crowded session?!

Last in its list of plus points, the Bluegill is light with a round nose, so you can play bumper boards and still be safe. I know that this summer when First Point gets perfect and crowded, I’m still going to get good rides. The tube gets really perfect but there’s always someone in the way, but this summer on the Bluegill I’m just going to go right over the top and not really worry about them!

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the Bluegill is better than a finned board in small waves. It’s faster and can do far more manoeuvres. And it’s safer. I’m pretty convinced that the Bluegill will have a big place in modern surfing very soon – you heard it here first.

I just surfed Tea Tree today and the local crew were trading my two Bluegills around. They were so stoked. It can get really crowded here, but there are also really shallow rocks on the inside. Many waves here are only surfable on finless boards, which usually means they’re reserved for the alaia crew. But the Bluegill was insane – we were coming off the bottom and doing 360, sliding off the lips over the dry parts of the reef. I can’t wait until tomorrow!

Thank you very much.
Tom Wegener