Patagonia NZ

Discounting wooden boards, the starting point of any surfboard is the blank – usually polyurethane foam – roughly the length and width of the final board, the final form hidden, waiting to be released. The shaper – the sculptor – has the task of conceiving and revealing the board. Within this very limited brief of a blank lies another infinity of possibilities, and like every artist faced with a block of marble, the way each set of hands touches the stone delivers a very personal vision – until the tools are set down and ‘it is done’.

In the beginning it was adapting a canoe, or a binding of reeds as they did in ancient Peru, or simply a plank of wood to paddle onto or slide into a wave, to return from fishing, or just to have fun. Or both. Throughout the historical world – where there were water bodies big enough for waves – some sort of wave-play developed. It was in the Pacific, though, as the Polynesian cultures grew and spread, that surfing became itself. Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti, New Zealand, and Hawaii.

In Hawaii, particularly, and probably because it was so blessed with wave abundance, he’e nalu – ‘wave sliding’ – grew. Olo, alaia, paipo, as each board form had a name, for royalty alone to common folk, they fed the ways to play, and as the haoles (non-Hawaiians) found this love, so the evolution accelerated.

In statistics, an outlier is “an observation that lies an abnormal distance from other values in a random sample from a population.” In surfing, it can mean one who lives far away from surfing centres, or surfs in a way outside the norm. In surfboard shaping, it can mean one whose approach to shaping is singularly different.

This is a story about outliers – surfer-shapers who have evolved their paths; different, creative, singular, theirs. Part one involves a road trip to the South Coast of NSW, timed for a swell, and a week of diving into the minds of three very different characters.

Australia being Australia, a road trip is no 20-minute blip. Relatively, mine was short. A quick eight hours north to Canberra, an overnight catch-up with family, and a pre-dawn rise to hit the coast two hours away. I was greeted by a surprising swell and met my first shaper overlooking a bay where four metre waves boomed in while out to sea bomboras rose above the horizon, their spray joining the few clouds in a bright morning sky.

Kirk Bierke was born in Wisconsin, far from the ocean but blessed with two coastlines just the same. Lakes Superior and Michigan have their wild days, with the cargo vessel the Edmund Fitzgerald sinking with all hands during a Lake Superior storm in late 1975. It was on the shores of Lake Michigan, though, that Kirk encountered his first wave. Just a little boy, as he says, wondering “why did the water jump up and knock me down?”

Not long after, Kirk’s family moved to California, where he began surfing in the summer of 1972. Three years later and self-taught, he began making surfboards in his garage. By necessity too, as in those pre-leash days, home board repair and backyard building were a way around replacing damaged gear. Before he knew it, shaping became his vocation. Four years later he had his first real start, as a sander with Bob Haakenson’s Spindrift Surfboards in Santa Barbara.

Kirk is at pains to say that his time there was not an apprenticeship. You learned on the job. What Bob did give KB though was a systematic approach. One step at a time, disciplined. The Yin to Bob’s Yang at Spindrift was shaper, Rich Reed. As Kirk tells it, on seeing his quite adequate self-taught skills shaping, Rich sat him down, introduced him to the Skil 100 planer, a new work ethic, and a philosophy: Every board is a chance to learn, a new world, a new personality. Grow your skills and let the art happen.

Parallel to all this board making was Kirk’s development as a surfer. Kirk is a lightly built guy, strong but wiry. Around 65kg, his mass in inverse proportion to the waves he likes to ride. And, as a goofyfooter working mostly in Santa Barbara’s beautiful but ‘soft rights’ as he called them, he was drawn south to Mexico and the giant beachbreaks of Puerto Escondido. The draw of big waves continued, and he found himself in Hawaii in 1986. It became home for 16 years. There his shaping career blossomed, learning from legends about riding giant waves and shaping the boards for them.

Hawaii back then was already busy, so, before they became at all popular, Kirk began to explore the outer reefs, building exquisite big-wave guns made to roam far out to sea, virtually alone. At waves like Phantoms and less crowded outer reefs the feeling of space, and perhaps an exclusive camaraderie added to the adventure. Out there he found a dangerous peace.

He also found the love of his life, Leanne, herself visiting on a surf trip from Australia, catching his eye at the Turtle Bay disco in 1992. It sounds like it was close to love at first sight, but it was five years before their first child, Russell was born in 1997. By 2002 the family had moved to Australia. Claire was born the following year, at the same hospital as her mum and grandma too.

Kirk had visited Australia a few times before, for exploration and shaping gigs. It wasn’t new to him completely, but originally, he and Leanne were living on the far North Coast of NSW (more rights), but Kirk kept hearing tales of the South Coast which is where the family home is now, in a beautiful town blessed with bays, slabs and points, more than a few lefts, and many holding size. Their slice of heaven.

The genetics of loving size and power are strong in both Leanne and Kirk. The kids have it too. Russ has evolved into one of the world’s best critical-wave surfers, his own slight frame completely at odds with his choice of surf. Where he lives, the bodyboarding community is strong and inspiring, and seeing the way they navigated late drops and chip-ins has fed a unique skill set. Catlike and fearless, Russ is at a savant level in serious surf. He has ridden Kirk’s boards his entire life, beginning with a tiny red thing that was made before he could walk. He’d later stand on it while eating his cereal as a toddler, tick-tacking the nose around the pivot of a snub fin Kirk had made to make it a bit tippy. When you start that early you cannot remember not having your feet planted on a board. The family seems born to it. There’s a shot of Claire (now at uni studying an environmental science degree) styling off the bottom at Rocky Point in Hawaii, and another of Russ deeply slotted as a 15-year-old at a nearby wave that years before wasn’t deemed rideable.

Their sun-filled house has a myriad of beautiful big-wave boards spanning decades festooning the ceilings, and another room with virtually every board from the family’s younger days… plus Russell’s tricycle. It has pink wheels.

Kirk’s boards are not radically unconventional. Not obvious outliers. They are finely crafted, with a very distinctive rail and a lean to being made for waves with power. That Russ rides his dad’s boards in the most dangerous waves in the world speaks volumes to their relationship and trust. Watching Kirk shape, his process is efficient; quick but considered, with some fine-tuning techniques involving small piles of dust and a ruler I’d never seen before. I was sworn to secrecy, so cannot say more about where he learned some things, or who taught him. Shapers can be like that.

Further south, two more, very different beasts.

Mick Mackie is an affable, though quiet bear of a man with a scruff of hair; always looking like he’d just exited the water, roughly towelled the mop and left it that way. He lives with his Polly on a hilltop overlooking the most beautiful valley you will see anywhere. A river winds through it. Often, in the morning, a blanket of mist drifts with the river, until the sun rises over the hills to burn it off. It is wondrous to wake up to. The meander through the quiet roads to empty beaches with emerald-green peaks must be a heaven hard to leave.

The large swell I’d been greeted with a couple of hours north two days earlier was waxing, but a morning surf with Mick had glassy overhead waves with occasional rights running for 100 metres and more. Mick was an aspiring pro in his younger years, and it shows. He’s got a rock-solid accuracy, everything looks ‘right’, his wave sense spot-on. He’s a joy to watch.

Mick stated surfing at around 10, “maybe earlier”, on a Coolite, those unglassed polystyrene kids’ boards of the sixties and seventies that were guaranteed to give you terminal belly rash… and a great deal of fun. His advanced development was on the reefs and beaches around Cronulla and searching out new spots south.

In his teens Mick surfed for Hot Buttered, the legendary label of Terry Fitzgerald, whose own shaping was influenced in part by Hawaii’s Dick Brewer. Suffice to say there have been genealogies of shapers drawn up that, like the Tree of Life, see lines and influences tracing back the best part of a century. Mick’s time at Hot Buttered also provided the opportunity to learn to shape. Mick credits Terry with his early ‘80s shaping instruction, inspired by the boards that Derek Hynd was using when he was riding twin-fins shaped by Craig Naylor and Ronny ‘Magic Hands’ Woodward.

The seminal film Litmus, made by Andrew Kidman and Jon Frank, featured Derek Hynd riding a Skip Frye Fish, the most influential of an array of boards in the film. That fish further piqued Mick’s explorations away from ‘high performance’ to more subtle feelings.

Mick has found a path that is a mix between the Hot Buttered competitive days, and his other loves in skateboarding and snowboarding. Flex plays a big part in both, particularly during those developmental years. He has a treasured early ‘70s Bahn flex deck skateboard he still rides. As well, a pristine early Winterstick, the original snowboard invented in 1972 by Dimitrije Milovich.

You only have to look at Mick’s Winterstick or have any experience riding an old flex deck skateboard, to get a sense of what makes Mick tick. His boards are different but remain beautiful. Mick’s a big lad, he likes his boards thick, but as I watched him shape a 5’8” twin for a client all he could think or talk about was what would work for that lucky surfer. Our conversation drifted around flow, and blending, reminiscing on his time with Terry, just getting the basics right… the rest will follow.

I asked if he could remember how many boards he’s done “I don’t number them… maybe 10,000.” He’s a funny one, Mick. He does measure on key points, but a lot works on feel. Placing his fin positions by eye, getting one in the right spot, then working out the rest around that. An intuitive way… if it looks right, it is right.

The idea of an eye for things has its place throughout the arts. The famous Golden Ratio was first described in Indian mathematics around 200 BCE by Pingala in his work on enumerating patterns in Sanskrit poetry. This became known as the Fibonacci Sequence in the West, this pattern of numbers – 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144… – the sum of the two preceding numbers defining the next. As this relationship of numbers grows, they become more and more accurate approximations of phi, which, like its close cousin pi is an irrational number that keeps recurring.

Suffice to say, this proportion of seeming near-rightness appears throughout nature. Why is a hard one, but the simplest way to say it is nature seems to find a way of doing things the easiest way. Be it a nautilus shell or a spiral galaxy, the curves feel familiar. The number in its simplest form is 1.618 recurring.

Just down the road from Mick lives Jed Done. Another very different shaper, Jed has been working applying the curves of numbers in his uniquely methodical way; a method tied to the application of 1.618 recurring.

Jed Done began surfing at around 12 years old. Chasing waves quickly became a passion. Did it get in the way of school or not? Probably. But his leanings were towards using his hands, and at just 16 he learned to shape – alone, bar the help of US shaper John Carper’s video series Shaping 101. He also took an apprenticeship as a carpenter, and this, not surfboards, has been his living since. In this sense, Jed is a true outlier as his output has been just a couple of boards a week virtually his entire shaping career. Unimaginable, in a way, as his boards are inventive and beautiful.

Maybe the inventive part comes because of this; a freedom that comes with making surfboards not being ‘how you make a buck’. Jed’s influences are left of centre in the extreme. Peter Berry, a shaper of spacecraft-like kneeboards in the early ‘70s, with unconventional lines and full of ideas. George Greenough, another kneeboarder and the godfather of modern surfing in so many ways. New lines being traced on a wave, fins, flex, and materials. And Mitchell Rae of Outer Island Surfboards, whose explorations in flex and concave continue unabated after 56 years. Just names to many, but full of meaning to students of the art.

Back in 2007 Jed was part of Musica Surfica, a film project initiated by Richard Tognetti of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and surfer Derek Hynd, riding boards without fins. Within was a double premise of bringing young minds to classical music, demonstrating that with risk comes great creativity, and learning. Coincidently, there was a mathematician down on King Island at the time who was asked, by Derek, if he were to design a surfboard, what would he do? His response was, “… well, I know nothing about surfing, but if I did, I’d use these curves.” This set a fire under both Derek (who would evolve his finless project) and Jed, who began his explorations of the application of mathematical proportions. He even built his quietly famous ‘Wave House’ using them.

Though not living there at the moment, his Lord of the Rings-like shaping shed remains available on the magical, ‘roo-friendly property. He was born there, still shapes there, and will return to this amazing. self-built home one day, with his partner Eva and daughter Flo.

Sitting with Jed at the screen, listening to him explain how each curve and curve transition on a board, regardless of the axis or cross-section, is forensically examined, and refined. The curves are applied over any range of sizes, thicknesses and design variations, his end game for a custom board being to make sure it works both with his intuitions, and the numbers, for the rider. The lines are unerringly clean and clearly from Jed’s hand, just as the signature lines of Kirk and Mick reflect theirs. Half-jokingly, as we talked, I said I’d lay money any board from a shaper worth his salt would likely fall very close to Jed’s numbers. Jed’s response: “One hundred percent.”

But it will be their board, in their way. Surfers, in the end, chase feelings, and romance. To look at one of Jed’s boards is to see something beautiful. As a professional carpenter, his skills with tools and materials have found another home in his boards with experiments in board and tail flex, board tuning, and explorations with parabolic stringers. Even building stringers similar to an old British longbow, feathering towards each end. This allows a controlled flex accelerating longitudinally, with torsion (or twist), in the tail. Here we begin a dive into my aforementioned surf-nerdism, but it does throw light on the way Jed thinks. A self-confessed bit of a flop at school, he’s clearly an intelligent guy. As he says, “I should have been in a Steiner school or something. Just have them say, ‘He’s too hard. Throw him in the corner and let him play with some toys.’”

Exploring the idea of outliers, and meeting three very different people, illuminates what even draws people to become a shaper. Surfers first, but with a desire and inclination to get their hands dirty, learn by doing, and let the slog of learning what might be seen as a trade make way for the art that comes with time.

This story features in Roaring Journals, Edition Two: order your copy here.