"Intelligent Design: An Interview with Simon Anderson," written by Andrew Kidman, ran in the April 2006 issue of Surfer's Journal. This version has been slightly edited and shortened. Anderson was 51.

I was living 200 meters from Collaroy Beach; my father was swimming every morning and we’d go swimming before he went to work. We’d do this through the summer and winter months at the rock pool in the corner of Collaroy [which back then was] the hotbed for surfing on the Northern beaches despite being a shocking place for surf—that was Nat Young’s beach. I’d see him surfing on his famous old maroon board, knee-paddling out the back.

Ten years old. At that time we also got into foamies [coolites], the sort of craft available for young people to have fun on. In those days, if you were a little bloke you couldn’t surf a board because they were just too big. You couldn’t carry them down the beach by yourself, and they were very difficult to handle in the surf. I was very fortunate as I grew up to see the evolution of the surfboard at my beach. The first wave I got was on a 9' 6" old-fashion mal-type board. As the shortboard revolution came in they dropped dramatically to 8' 6", then 7' 6", and so on. I wasn’t necessarily part of that ’cause I couldn’t afford to buy boards all the time, but I couldn’t help but be fascinated by this dramatic change.

The boards started to turn shorter. You really noticed it when the boards got to the ridiculous stage of being 5' 4". I think that coincided with Nat at the 1970 world titles at Bells. I did get a 5'4" at that stage. I had a sponsorship with Peter Ryan surfboards, so I got a 5' 4" single-fin. To see these guys like Chris Young (Nat’s brother) surfing a 5'4", the sort of cutbacks they were doing, it was great. For us, it was a really good thing having 5' 4"s because we were still surfing Collaroy and maybe Long Reef a little. We were young enough and strong enough to jump up and do these new short turns. But as Nat and all those guys found out when they went to the Johanna for the world titles, they'd actually gone too far. They couldn’t surf a 5' 4" in powerful waves like Bells Beach. So boards started going back up to 6' 6" and 7' 0", a more realistic length. This was around 1971.

When I was 16 I left school; my parents weren’t too keen on this, but I got a job with Shane Surfboards. At the time I was sponsored by Shane, they had a position as ding fixer at the factory, and I worked 40 hours a week for 40 dollars. At 17, I won the Sydney title, came third in the state, then went to Bells and won the Australian Junior Championships. When I got back, Shane said, “What do you want to do in the factory?” I'm sure he was hoping I would say, “Sanding would be good. Or getting in amongst that resin would be great.” But, of course, working in that environment you see who the prestigious people in the factory are and it was Terry Fitzgerald, Butch Cooney, Ted Spencer, and Frank Latta. The shapers. They were these impressive characters that would come in and shape, make a bit of noise, and then they were gone again. Gone surfing. They had this mystique about them—they were vastly different than anyone else, any normal surfers or people. There was kind of a romance in that. Naturally, I wanted to be like them. I didn’t want to be a glasser working in the fumes. So Shane gave me a job as an apprentice shaper. I got to watch Terry Fitzgerald—he showed me a few things when he had the time [laughs].

I’d also struck up a friendship with Frank Latta and he showed me most of what I learned in the early days. At the time, Shane was selling pop-out surfboards. It was this new innovation where you’d just get a blank, take the crust off, glass it up, and sell it to beginners. So I got to learn on pop-outs, which was a fast track way of learning to shape. I started making my own boards in 1972, doing my own designs and stuff.

Was shaping your own boards a good thing for your surfing?

Yeah, it was good. It was a good way to get instant feedback. I remember the first board I shaped I made the rails a little soft and it was a little sluggish. I took more notice of fine details in shapes. I could see someone that was surfing impressively and have a look at what they were riding, and because I was shaping and getting an eye for the shape, could take in what others are doing and put my own interpretation on it—which is really what you end up doing all throughout your shaping career. Yeah, it was a big advantage to be a surfer-shaper.

He’d left Shane’s just when I was beginning to shape and was shaping in an old house two blocks up the road. After work, I’d stop in and see what he was doing because we were still mates—or as close as you could be with Terry [laughs]. I remember watching him shape and he was a very impressive craftsman; his accuracy was incredible.

I remember other conversations we've had where you said you thought Terry was the best surfer in the world at the time.

 showed Terry at Rocky Point and Sunset, and you could just see that he was a better surfer than anyone else.

Narrabeen would get perfect and there would be these hollow lefts running down the bank, week after week. The layback was just a way to slow myself down. It preceded the arm-in-the-wave rail-grab. In my day, grabbing the rail was seen as not a good thing. Guys used to grab their rail on their forehand. So the layback was one way of slowing yourself down to stay in the barrel a bit longer without grabbing your rail.

Did the Thruster come out of wanting to push single-fins beyond their performance possibilities?

No. I was actually pretty satisfied with singles, how they were going, and the surfing I was doing on them. The single-fin was evolving; each year I'd make improvements. No, the Thruster was purely a competitive innovation on my part because I was dissatisfied with my performance in smaller waves, and the fact that the tour was expanding to more and more small-wave locations. It was firmly scheduled in those days. You’d start on Wednesday morning and finish on Sunday afternoon at three o’clock. It didn’t matter what the surf was like. Providing you had a good carpark, and you could fit everyone in, that was the formula.

Mark Richards had popularized the twin-fin again [in 1977] and was very successful on them. With the tour moving to more and more smaller wave locations, everyone was moving toward the twin-fin. I’d seen what it had done to Shaun Tomson’s surfing. He was still a great surfer, of course, but he’d made compensations to his style. It was difficult to go from your twin back to your single because your single felt so dead. So I was fully committed to single-fins. But then I was faced with this dilemma all the time of having to surf single-fins in two-foot waves—so eventually I gave in and rode twins. But I wasn't happy about it.

I was thinking about it the other day and really there are three fathers of the Thruster. Although there was work done even before that. The Campbell brothers, for instance, came up with the Bonzer in God knows when. I tried one but didn’t like the overload feel. It was a fabulous design innovation, though, and they should get more credit for coming up with it. Meanwhile, Terry Fitzgerald was doing the tri-fin thing as well. His was a single-fin with these little side fins, and the idea there was it would hold you up high as you did that old-fashion high-line and drop down thing.

Later on, Cheyne Horan and Geoff McCoy set out to beat MR and his twin-fin. They waged a full campaign, and one of the designs they came up with was the no-nose concept, which was a single-fin idea. Around 1980, I’d been using the McCoy no-nose idea on my boards for a year, and I think my boards improved a lot. So Geoff McCoy is the first father of the Thruster. So I’ve got a single-fin I like and I’m surfing a twin-fin in small surf. It’s okay. I’m not really stoked, but I’ve got to do it.

I’m in the Narrabeen carpark one day and [local surfer-shaper] Frank Williams comes out of the water, and he's got a twin-fin with a little half-moon keel on the back. I said, “Hey, Frank, what’s that do?” And he said, “It helps stabilize the board.” That clicked, and I went back into the factory and shaped my first tri-fin. So Frank Williams is the second father of the Thruster.

I knew as a basic standard that a single-fin has this much surface area, and a twin-fin has got roughly the same amount—the fins are smaller, but together they add up to be the same as a single. So I’m figuring with three fins, they’ve got to be roughly the same surface area as the single- and the twin-fin. You don’t have to be a genius to come up with that. I reduced the size of the fins, moved the front two up a bit further than a twin-fin, and the rear one a bit further back than a single, and we got it all glassed up. Now the board is about to be sanded, and I’m looking at it, and something is bothering me. The rear fin is a little bit longer than what we use these days, and it’s protruding off the back of the board by about an inch. In those days boards were pretty short, around 6'2", and oftentimes your foot would slip off the back, and I’m thinking, “I could slice my foot off here.” I'm looking at this back fin and I said, “Right, Steve, just sand it down so it doesn’t stick out past the back of the board.” This is my very technical design instruction to the sander, Steve Zoeller. So Steve sands the fin down to what he thinks will work best. I’m looking at the board when it’s sanded, and now the fins are all roughly the same size. So there’s the third father of the modern-day Thruster—Steve Zoeller.

The first surf was at three- to four-foot Alley at Narrabeen, with maybe some five-foot sets.

And the thing is just going ballistic. Not only has it got speed through the start of the turn, it appears to build up speed and momentum 

 the turns, and it’s just fantastic. The only problem is I’m using single-fin fin panels and they’re very thick. It seems to be dragging a little bit. So we reduce the thickness of the fins and make a few other adjustments and we’re away.

Yeah, I was very excited by the overall concept. Originally I was looking to use the board for a very specific wave size and type, but I realized from the very start that this board is going to go in anything. I mean, straight away, from the very first board, from the very first wave I rode, I knew that 90%  of people were going to be surfing this design within a year.

Well, but there must have been a lot of designers over the years that have thought that.

At that stage I was a professional surfer, one of the best in the world you could say—top 20, whatever. So I knew the feeling I was getting was very accurate and could be transferred to a lot of people. Also, just from the fact that I'd been riding very good boards 

 I came out with this. And this was so much better!

No, you're right. I spoke to people and they were a bit skeptical, saying, ‘You can surf anything, Simon.” And then I began to have second thoughts about the world domination of this design. This was sometime in October 1980. I already had my board program going on for Hawaii that winter, and at that point I wasn’t ready to take the Thruster straight to Hawaiian guns, so I made all single-fins for Hawaii. But I did take a 6' 1" Thruster. Dougal Walker rode it one small day at Rocky Point, and he was very enthusiastic about it, and that was a good sign.

In early '81, I went to a trade show in Florida. We’d made a Thruster model for Nectar Surfboards, and we got three orders in Florida. That's it. Three boards, total. We were pretty much the laughing stock of the trade show with this new design.

How did that feel, people laughing at your board rather than embracing it?

I didn't really know anybody in America and didn't really consider them as hardcore people. I was kind of amused. I was laughing back at them.

Well, you were coming from a pretty hard-core area in surfing and design.

Yeah, pretty much. That's why I didn’t mind. America—Florida in particular—was a long way from the northern beaches of Sydney, which at the time was one of the hotbeds of international surfing, so it didn’t worry me.

I still very much wanted the Thruster to do well. I talked about it with Gary McNabb, the guy who owned Nectar, and he said, "Simon, you're going to have to win a contest on that board." Which is just what I'd been thinking, too. So I flew home and got ready for the first event—the Stubbies at Burleigh. I had my whole quiver of boards, all Thrusters. I get to Queensland, and the first heat I surfed was against Maurice Cole. It was one-foot onshore Burleigh over the rocks, and Maurice beat me. I drove back to Sydney, made another board, and went down to Bells early to get ready for the next contest, and surfed pretty much in isolation while the Stubbies finished up.

That was kind of out of the blue for the rest of the surfing world. The waves were 10- to 12-foot, just beautifully clean, with some 15-foot sets during the day. Everyone was caught short that year; almost nobody had brought their big-wave boards. I had a 6' 6" and was woefully under-gunned, but it was so clean that it didn’t matter. It was a funny day. My board, in fact, went fantastic. I was carving all across the big faces and maintaining speed.

You hadn’t surfed it in waves that size before?

No, the biggest I'd surfed the Thruster so far was maybe five feet.

That must have been unbelievable. Some of your feelings?

The famous heat, I was up against Bobby Owens. He had a seven-foot Hot Buttered board shaped by Terry Fitzgerald, so he was more ready than anyone else, apart from me [laughs]. He surfed well and it was a close heat. I only just won. But the whole thing—it was just a magic day, the forum, the canvas, the scenario. Tell you the truth, in the water during that heat I wasn’t thinking about the Thruster changing surf history. I just wanted to beat Bobby, and I knew Bobby was going to be hard to beat.

Do you ever replay the heat in your head?

You know, I really wasn't sure how the board was going to go in those size waves. It could have been a whole different case if there had been a bit of bump on the face. I would have spun out on a few bottom turns, and everyone would have turned away and gone, "Nah, that board's no good, it doesn’t work.” But because it was so big, and so perfect, it turned out to be the time to show what the board could do.

Connect the arcs. Surfing hadn't yet gotten to a place where you could start your bottom turn, hold your speed right through the turn, maintain it through your top turn, and increase your speed coming off the top. All of a sudden there it was.

Twenty-six. I was a semi-successful professional surfer. I'd had my moments.

Back then, for a professional surfer, you were kind of old.

Yeah, in a way I'd had a disappointing career up to that point. I'd won Bells in 1977, and the Coke that year as well, so I'd done okay. But I hadn't done as well as I'd have liked. Yeah, I was getting on, and people weren't thinking too much of me. People weren’t talking about me, and rightly so. Then all of a sudden, I beat Bobby in that heat, and I feel like I’ve got a good chance [to win the event] because I know the board is working well; I know this design has set a new standard in surfing. And after Bells, all of a sudden I’m getting attention where there was none before.

That year you won Bells, the Coke, and Pipeline. How come you didn’t win the world title?

We were still competing in a lot of places where the waves were small. I’m a big bloke and I was still struggling, even on the new board. Now, in the finals at Bells, I beat Cheyne Horan in one- to two-foot surf. I really thought I was going to get my arse kicked that day, but I got six good ones to the beach and won. But as a rule, I wasn’t good enough to win in small waves.

After the Australian leg of the tour, I was leading the world title race and there was a lot of media interest, and people wanted boards off me. The one thing that was still going on was [that people were saying] "they work all right in Australia and in big waves at Bells, but they’re not going to work in Hawaii." Hawaii was the ultimate proving ground. It didn’t matter if you were world champion, you had to prove yourself in Hawaii. That was just part of surfing in those days and probably still is, and rightly so. I took a quiver of Thrusters to Hawaii in 1981, and they worked really well at Sunset and at Pipe. So that took care of that.

I constantly had to prove it that first year. I had to win a contest, so I did that. I wanted to make boards that worked in Hawaii, and that was a challenge, but I did that.

I've talked to other recreational surfers of the time and they’ve said that when the Thruster arrived and was accepted, you couldn’t get anyone to make a single-fin, and they were disappointed because they liked the feeling of single-fins. That didn’t bother you?

No, it didn’t bother me at all. I was always about progressing, and not looking back—I’d gotten that from guys like Terry Fitzgerald and Geoff McCoy and Frank Latta. It was all about performance, but it was a personal thing as well. I’ve only ever done whatever I’ve done in surfing because I want to go surfing—not because I want to dictate where surfing goes or I want to lead surfing off into a certain area. I’ve just done it because I want to move forward with what I’m doing.

Pro surfers have stopped shaping their own equipment. Do you think that there’s not that need anymore to come up with design innovations to give you the edge in competition?

Possibly. I question your point, though, that design is stagnating because of this. If you look at Al Merrick and Kelly Slater, for example, I think they were responsible for a big jump in surfboard innovation when they came out with the narrow, thin, rockered shape. That, in fact, led the way for Greg Webber being able to reintroduce deep, significant concave. And we’ve moved on from there substantially. Kids today are surfing really well from an early age on very loose surfboards, largely because of my innovation. I’ve had people say, “Geez, Tom Carroll must have been good when he was coming up as a kid.” And I say, “Well, no, not really, he was average,” because in those days the boards were difficult to surf, and you needed a lot of power. Possibly that's what inspired Tom to become as strong and physically fit as he did.

You didn’t show as much promise as a young guy back in those days. You had to wait until you became a man. You had to become strong so you could really turn these boards. Now it's a different proposition. Perhaps Martin Potter was the first one, surfing a loose twin-fin at the age of 15—kids can be world-class surfers at a young age. But to return to your questions and pro surfers not making their own boards. It’s such a fast-paced world now, in surfing; there’s a big structure in place and there are a lot of contests for these kids. They don't have time to even consider being a shaper. To be a successful surfer now, you need to be fully focused, and you possibly couldn’t do it being a shaper as well. Maybe it is the end of an era.

What drives you these days? What is it that makes you want to still shape boards?

I'm not sure. Maybe it’s the only thing I can do. It’s as pathetic as that. It’s demanding on your body; there’s a physical price you pay doing the same thing over and over. It’s not what God meant you to do. I’m not a religious person, but I know man was not meant to be walking back and forth in a 14' x 8' box with fluorescent lights on the side. God knows how many miles I walk a day when I’m production shaping, and we’ve all got to production shape, unless you’re Al Merrick.

What do you see when you look back on your life in surfing?

I’ve had two careers, if you like. The professional surfing part was predominant in the early years. The shaping part is now what I do. But I like to keep it the same as what it was in the early days, in that I'm still shaping to try and improve what I’m doing in the water.

[Photos: Bernie Baker, Peter Crawford, Hugh McLeod, Craig Fineman, Dan Merkel]

Simon Anderson (2006)

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