Return of the Longboard

Simon Anderson and his Mighty Thruster

Surf and Destroy

Terror from Below

The Unsinkable Tom Carroll

An Explosion of Talent

Tom Curren's Mile of Style

How to Turn a Circus into a Riot

I Predict Waves in Your Future

Cult of the Surf Photographer

Video Killed the Surf Movie

Waves for Sale

Surf Boom Redux

Terminally Hip

Super-Sizing the World Tour

Somebody Should Do Something

Surfers vs Apartheid

Make Room at the Top, Obrigado!

The Last Big Wave

Eddie Aikau's State of Grace

A Beloved Rival

Long Division

In April 1981, just a few weeks before the Dewey Weber Longboard Classic, an oversized Aussie pro surfer and boardmaker named Simon Anderson walked down the stairs at Bells Beach holding a new type of board he’d winkingly called the “Thruster.” It was a peculiar-looking craft, with a narrow nose and three small fins placed in a triangular cluster. To a casual observer, there was no reason to think the Thruster was any different, or more viable, than the hundred or so half-cocked ideas had flared briefly over the past fifteen years before winding up on the board design scrapheap. But Anderson was about to prove that this was something very different indeed. The tri-fin would in fact became the biggest surfboard design breakthrough since the shortboard revolution.

At age 26, Anderson seemed on the downside of a commendable if low-key pro surfing career. He’d been introduced to the surf world four years earlier, in 1977, as the sport’s laziest and most likable pro after back-to-back world tour wins gave him a #3 year-end ranking. Surf journalist Paul Holmes called the 6'2", 200-pound surfer a “benign bear,” and noted that Anderson sat down for his interview “unshaven, hair uncombed and salt-saturated, and dressed in a sloppy and unmistakably beer-spattered tracksuit.” World-tour travel didn’t suit Anderson, however, nor did the new twin-fin boards, which went squirrelly beneath Anderson’s powerful, four-square riding style. Over the next two years, he mostly stayed home in Narrabeen and shaped for his Energy Surfboards company. In 1980 he again applied himself to the tour, finished the year at #6, and began to think about crafting a new type of board, something that would give him a competitive edge—just as Mark Richards had done three years earlier with the twin-fin. In early 1981, Anderson came up with the Thruster.

The most distinctive feature of the new board was a stabilizing third fin, placed behind the side fins, along the stringer, just a couple of inches from the back end. Three-finned boards had been tried before: Dick Brewer and Reno Abellira of Hawaii had designed a version in 1970 that featured a standard-sized middle fin flanked by a pair of small half-moon “finlets.” Two years later, Malcolm and Duncan Campbell, teenaged brothers from Ventura, California, introduced a design called the “Bonzer” (Aussie slang for “great”), with deep concave channels on the bottom, a regular single fin, and a pair of long keel-like side fins. The Brewer-Abellira tri-fin never caught on. The Bonzer was hot for a year or so, disappeared, then eventually came back as a niche-market favorite.

By the late '70s, a few surfers were customizing their twin-fins by adding a half-size “trailing” fin. Frank Williams, a longtime Narrabeen surfer and boardmaker, liked the added traction of the third fin, and in October 1980 he showed the board to Anderson. By week’s end, Anderson had built his first tri-fin prototype. Just three weeks after that, having tweaked the design, he had the very board he’d been looking for. It planed, and held its turning speed, like a twin-fin. But it had the grip and drive of a single-fin. Anderson was thrilled at how well the board worked. He hadn’t exactly slapped it together—but there hadn’t been much trial and error involved, either. "Straight away," Anderson recounted 25 years later, "from that very first board, I knew that 90% of surfers were going to be on this design within a year."

On the beach, and back home, Anderson spent a lot of time just looking at his board, trying to better understand how and why it performed so well. At some level, the pieces didn't seem to add up. The fins seemed too small, to begin with. A regular single-fin was about 8 inches tall. Twin-fins were 6 inches. Anderson had ground the new fins down to 4 inches. It was a trick of the eye, but it just didn’t look like there was enough combined area between the three fins to keep the board on track during a big, floorboarding turn—yet the board actually seemed to grip 

 than a single-fin. The nose looked funny, too. Anderson copied the tri-fin’s outline in part from the “needle-nose” board introduced a few months earlier by fellow Aussie shaper Geoff McCoy. Also called the “no-nose” (or the McCoy-patented Lazor Zap), the design featured low hips, an attenuated narrow-based single fin, and a wickedly long and pointed front end. It was a quick-turning wonder in small waves, more like a skateboard than a surfboard, but couldn’t hold a sustained turn or even a sustained trim line, and was altogether useless in bigger surf. On its own, the needle-nose was an interesting misfire. On Anderson’s new board, however, it was an essential component. The reduced forward area—not quite as extreme as the McCoy template, but narrower compared to anything else on the market—balanced out the stiffer handling brought on by the cluster of fins.

What Anderson did, in other words, was pull a tail design halfway out of thin air and patch it together with another shaper’s failed bit of nose design. So far at least, the board worked incredibly well. And the longer Anderson looked at it, the less strange it seemed.

Anderson called his new board the “Thruster.” He claimed it wasn’t a sexual double entendre. Nobody believed him.

After selling a dozen or so Thrusters to the local lads, all of whom gave the new design rave reviews, Anderson decided in early 1981 to take the board to market. He packed up some Thrusters, flew to America, positive the board would sell itself—and was nearly laughed back to Narrabeen. At the Surf Expo trade show in Florida he took orders for a grand total of three surfboards. At the Katin Pro-Am in Huntington Beach, Anderson not only lost early (all four finalists were on twin-fins), but was heckled by his world-tour buddies for riding a novelty board. The early verdict: 

 can ride the thing, sure. He’s a top-ten pro. But we’ve already got singles and twins—who needs a third fin?

Anderson remained convinced that the Thruster was the best thing to come down the design chute in years, and he flew back to Sydney feeling like an injustice had been done—to himself, but mostly to his new board. Then again, he hadn’t shown it off very well or done much promo work. What he needed, Anderson realized, was the kind of attention he’d received in 1977, after his back-to-back world tour wins. The Aussie leg of the 1981 pro tour began in one month. Three events: the Stubbies, Bells, and the Coke. What would happen, Anderson idly wondered, if he ran the table?

He blew the Stubbies Pro. Then two weeks later, in the preliminary rounds at Bells, he found his stride. Two days after that, on the second-to-last day of the event, with smooth eighteen-footers blowing in from the Southern Ocean—the biggest waves ever seen for a contest outside of Hawaii—Anderson and his Thruster simply left the rest of the field behind. In the huge Bells surf, the twin-fin riders on their jittery little boards looked as if they’d been pushed down a steep driveway in shopping carts. The best of the single-finners drew the kind of long, elegant lines that would have been new and exciting in 1971. On his airbrushed-blue 6' 6" tri-fin, Anderson accelerated and cornered like a Formula One racer, from trough to crest and back again, all speed, power, and control, his board tracking along the huge faces as if it were magnetized. Anderson’s equipment, clearly, made the difference. “Bells was the real test,” Anderson said later. “We hadn’t really evolved yet to a place where you could start a bottom turn, aim up, and actually increase speed through your turn off the top. At Bells, all of a sudden, there it was.”

For the scant few onlookers not yet convinced that Anderson had just reordered surfboard design, on the last day of the event, paired against small-wave genius Cheyne Horan, Anderson took the final—in waist-high waves.

The rest of the year was pretty much a Thruster coronation. At Narrabeen, one month after Bells, Anderson won the Coke contest. In December, he took out the Pipeline Masters. 

 magazine named Anderson 1981’s Surfer of the Year. Reigning world champ Mark Richards, in a rare moment of pettiness, described the tri-fin as good “for surfers who can’t ride twin-fins properly,” but nobody else saw it that way. By the summer of 1982, the Thruster was being copied by every forward-thinking boardmaker in the sport (“tri-fin” was the generic term for the design), and by 1983 it was being used almost universally on shortboards and was popular as well among longboarders. There was plenty of fine-tuning to come, but as of 2015 the tri-fin remains the standard board design.

Anderson probably should have stayed focused on the pro tour in 1981. Instead he skipped three of the 11 events, mostly so he could stay home and shape. Despite his three wins, he finished the tour ranked #6, just like the previous year. Anderson’s attitude was that if a world championship fell into his lap, great, but he wasn’t going to drop everything to chase it. He liked making boards, and was hugely gratified when his design caught on. In the middle of the 1981 season, Shaun Tomson inquired tentatively about getting a Thruster. He expected a polite refusal; he and Anderson had just gone head-to-head in the Coke finals, and they would no doubt be meeting again in competition that year. But Anderson not only rushed out a pair of boards for Tomson, he handed them over at no charge.

Anderson didn’t patent his tri-fin design, and lost out on millions of dollars—probably tens of millions—as a result. This decision also meant that Anderson would continue doing production shaping work, out of financial necessity, for the rest of his career.

Then again, no major surfboard design breakthrough has 

 been patented. Indeed, board design has always provided a small but welcome patch of common ground in the sport. The stony indifference between surfers who don’t know each other can usually be broken with a little back-and-forth shop talk about boards, and boardmakers as a rule view their work as being part of a constant open-source project. “I sure wouldn’t mind five fuckin’ cents for every Thruster that’s been made,” Anderson once said in a kind of resigned growl. Of course, he created the Thruster by using Geoff McCoy’s needle-nose design, with Frank Williams’ three-fin board at a starting point. After making his nickel-a-board royalty wish, Anderson smiled and shrugged. “It’s always been a very sharing industry," he added.

Anderson called his new board the “Thruster.” He claimed it wasn't a sexual double entendre. Nobody believed him.

Chapter: 7

Long Division

Simon Anderson and his Mighty Thruster

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