"THE MINI BOARDS" BY DICK BREWER (1968)

"The Mini Boards," a single-page article by Dick Brewer, ran in the June 1968 issue of Petersen's Surfing magazine. This version has been slightly edited.

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The mini boards are the most important breakthrough in surfing in recent years. It took the Aussies to do it. The simple fact is that you just don’t need ten feet of surfboard to ride a wave effectively up and down the curl line; one needs as little board as necessary. Large boards are not only harder to get around, but there are places where they just don’t fit the waves. Any shape surfboard can scale down, sort of take a foot or a foot and a half out of the center. The object is to then cut another ten inches off the tail.

Here in the Islands, we have been working on the mini gun for small waves. I have been working on the hypothesis that if these boards are going to have complete freedom, they just can’t have any drag. I’ve found the flat bottom is the "fastest bottom. You can expound on a round bottom, V-bottom, or any other kind of bottom, but a flat bottom will go the fastest. Other than speed, they turn, so if you really want to be creative and do more turning at higher speeds, your board has to look like a little gun or a large water ski.

Surfing these new boards is really an experience. One can find places in a wave to go faster, places you never found before. After a whole day’s surfing on a mini board, the surfers' legs are actually tired from turning. This never happened before. What will they look like in the future? Who knows? Let’s go.

[Photo: David Darling]