Guidance if you’re holding a finless event anywhere.

The beauty of finless surfing was captured immediately by Tom Wegener when he thought about shaping again and then surfing his first alaia. At the beginning he rode it prone, because after having mastered his art as a finned surfer, riding a finless plank of wood was suddenly a new beginning and a new form of glide, one he had never felt before, and one that happened to be extremely difficult. Soon enough he stood up and so did the amazingly talented surfers that share his Noosa sessions, capturing our imagination all over the world, and stimulating some of us to try it too.

Trying is what it is all about really. So I tried and still am, sometimes successfully riding a wave, most of the time struggling to catch them, but always with an intense satisfaction when it is done right.

Most people will not do it because they wouldn’t want to waist a good session on their dialed board. Too bad; but then most people don’t like to get out of the track either. For those who dare experiment the finless motion though, a new world of glide will open its doors to them.

What is happening is not a revolution. The shortboard was a revolution, when from one year to the next, almost all longboards were replaced in the water by shorter single fins. In spite of the fame finless boards have acquired in the last couple of years (mostly alaias to be exact), no significant proportion of surfers will soon swap their usual boards on a regular basis. And yet, everybody knows someone that has one in his quiver, should it be made of wood or of foam.

Neither is it an evolution. The evolution was Tom Blake’s idea to add a stabilizer to his surfboard and make it easier to ride and turn, followed by creative surfers and shapers fine tuning whatever idea was theirs at the time (Bob Simmons, George Greenough, Simon Anderson, etc…), and contributing to surfing’s big leaps. Considering the type of boards we are talking about, taking the only element of balance out of the equation would be rather coldly considered as a step backwards by most surfers. And who could blame them given the level of ability and technique required to surf properly those new finless surf crafts?

Rebellion is what most accurately defines what is happening with finless surfing, or to simplify, finless boards.

Alaias have been shaped and surfed again for 5 or 6 years. Seeing some of the best surfers in the world ride them the way they do is striking after such a short period. What will the surfscape look like in a generation, when some young surfers will have learnt how to surf on these boards from the very beginning?

Part of the answer lies in the efforts of finless shapers and surfers to come up with new type of slick boards, adding some volume to the genuine alaia. They will float better, paddle better, and most of all allow access to many more waves.

History and memory is one thing, improving concepts is another, and as the French say, there is no need to be more Royal then the King himself. Finless foam or hollow boards are not as fast and flexible, but they are much easier to surf than the thin wood planks, and still deliver that very specific joy and stoke.

The movement started with one man, interested in ancient times, skilled and passionate. He reproduced what he saw in the Bishop Museum of Hawaii, but didn’t hang it on the wall like others before him. He surfed it. Then shaped another one and changed things. He found out what worked and what didn’t, outlines, lengths, rails, curves, he explored all aspects and even found the best common wood for the job. If everybody talks about alaias and the absence of fins today it is because Tom Wegener dedicated so much time to this idea. And he still does. Logically, the next step was to add volume to the alaias, which he did with what he calls the Tuna, a bodied interpretation of the alaia, made of wood, or foam, or even both sometimes. Every day in Noosa he surfs and experiments with these finless prototypes, changing materials, measurements, and templates once again.

At the same time, other surfers also started thinking that fins were not that essential for a surfboard to glide and begun their own experimentation, following different tracks, and creating a world-wide interest through the films, footage and pictures that can be seen more and more often as time goes by.

What Derek Hynd is doing in his world class South African backyard is mind blowing. His approach is so different from Wegener’s that it surely paves the way for more finless shapes and directions to become available in the near future. Instead of a long concave and sharp rails to grab the wall and fly, Derek Hynd started cutting inches out of old boards, shaping channels on the bottom, foiling back the rails, then re-glassing them to see how these ideas worked. They obviously do, if he can spin several times at big J-bay without loosing his forward momentum, then take a highline and accelerate even more while launching himself again on the steep wall of the wave.

In California, the everlasting Hydrodynamica project led Richard Kenvin to shape, with his non-surfer accomplice Carl Ekström, finless foam boards. For them the approach was similar to Hynd’s, using deep channels to compensate the absence of fins and create grip. The concept was however carried out by a designer, an expert in fluid hydrodynamics, which led in turn to a totally different result. Kenvin started surfing and filming to show what was going on at Windandsea.

More recently, Ryan Burch, goofing around and having fun as he does, dug a little more into the planning hull bible (Naval Architecture of Planing Hulls, by Lindsay Lord, first published in 1946). He proposed that perhaps something even more basic could work, a rectangular piece of foam for instance, slightly scooped on the nose and not even glassed (why bother?). And he saw a similar result, the speed down the line is so unbelievable that when you see the footage, it almost seems as if the film was played in fast forward. He could make waves that would have possibly not been makeable with a finned board, getting deep into barrels with nothing but a piece of EPS. The cheapest board ever…

Ryan Burch & Eric Snortum surf alaias:

Historicism, empiricism, hydrodynamic theory and application; whatever the method, a few creative shapers and surfers have recently decided that it was time for something new, that they’d had enough of fins and of the everlasting debate of what set up is the best. Now for them, and those who listen, it is no longer an issue. Many people would agree, we live in the best times to be a surfer, and the best times to rebel against the monotony of the line-ups and the dictatorship of the top 44 surfing style.

Tom Wegener has brought to our attention again the possibility of surfing finless, while standing up. Without him we would still have forgotten that not so long ago surfers didn’t even have a choice, and most of all without him, finless surfing might still be only anecdotal.

The finless virus has spread and is now very active all over our the globe, though few people have yet been contaminated. For those who are interested in contemporary surf culture, no decent surf festival excludes the finless phenomena: Noosa Surf Festival, Green Room Festival, Surf Film Festival Ciudad de Santander, Surf Film Festival Saint-Jean de Luz, every one of them is now fishing for the latest finless surfing premiere.

Perhaps we should keep in mind one of surf’s unwritten rules – the less we are, the better we are.

My love for Noosa – despite never having actually been there before – is founded on photos and tales of epic point breaks, perfect for longboarding and with the backdrop of the national park and a quaint little town.

Plus I was going to catch up with shaper and Drift’s wooden wander Tom Wegener, who resides here and has been kind enough to offer me a place to crash!

I’d checked the internet last night and there were already images coming through of 3-foot, perfectly peeling, hollow swell and it was expected to last most of the week. I won’t lie – I just wanted to get there asap!

After arriving mid-afternoon (a day earlier than planned, due to the weather) I headed to First Point (after the now routine fight for a parking space!) to catch up with Tom and shoot his finless exhibition on the beach. Strolling along the white sands and mid-way through drooling over the peeling rights that were being carved apart by the surf competitors, I bumped into Tom’s apprentice Matt – I’d last seen him in sunny Cornwall, so he was rather puzzled to find me turning up, like the proverbial bad penny, in his hometown!

Tom soom rustled up his trusty crew of alaia riders for a team shot before they all hit the water for a demo heat, including a 14-foot traditional log!

Shooting from the rocks and watching the sets has made me fall in love with Noosa all over again. It’s everything I expected, and then some.

The now-familiar stoke that Tom showed during his shaping sessions back at Newquay cam over the tannoy during the finless demo. He has so much passion; it’s no wonder he’s managed to (excuse the pun) carve his way into the shaping scene.

Some people shape for money.

Some people shape for fun.

Tom obviously shapes because he loves it.

The various shapes, styles and types of finless board in the water took full advantage of the perfect conditions, sliding and spinning across perfect Noosa faces with Tom’s stoke rippling through the crowd.

After the heat came the festival’s opening ceremony, something I was keen to witness. First off was some traditional didging by a local ripper, then came the mixing of water.

A bowl was produced and in front of the crowd people poured in water from their local breaks. By the end of the ceremony the bowl contained water from all corners of Oz, as well as further afield – Jersey, Japan, Brazil, Canada, the US and Chile.

This was truly an international event. I only wish I’d brought some of North Devon’s finest brine to add to the pot!

Next was the paddle out, and everyone who had access to a board headed for the water and got into the line-up. This was followed by the traditional Hawaiian joining of hands and Ocean Prayer. I opted to photograph it rather than participate, and it looked perfect in the setting evening sun.

As the surfers splashed water over their heads the festival was officially on.

…Roll on the next few days

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