Vintage Surfboards and Longboards

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The oldest surfboards date to the 6th century, when early Hawaiians practiced he’e nalu, what we call surfing today. Common-folk islanders rode the waves on 10- to 12-foot wooden alaia boards made from native koa trees. Chiefs surfed on olos,...
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The oldest surfboards date to the 6th century, when early Hawaiians practiced he’e nalu, what we call surfing today. Common-folk islanders rode the waves on 10- to 12-foot wooden alaia boards made from native koa trees. Chiefs surfed on olos, which could be as long as 24 feet and as heavy as 200 pounds. Captain Cook’s diaries from 1777 describe Hawaiians surfing, but missionaries in the 1800s frowned on the activity—by the end of the 19th century, surfing had been all but wiped out. One of the first people in the 20th century to revive the sport was a Hawaiian named George Freeth, who, in 1907, cut his heavy, traditional, 16-foot board in half. The resulting shorter board sparked renewed interest in surfing. The sport got an even bigger boost when in the 1910s and 1920s, Hawaiian-born Olympic gold and silver swimming medalist Duke Kahanamoku made surfing demonstrations a part of his swimming exhibitions on the mainland. In 1929, a fellow swimmer living in Santa Monica named Tom Blake made the first hollow-body wood surfboard, based on templates he had created in 1926 after restoring a number of ancient boards for the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. Blake’s surfboard, which was constructed like an airplane wing and nicknamed the "cigar box," weighed half as much as a solid-wood board, thus opening the sport to many more people when these new boards were mass-produced—a first for surfboards. Blake was also the first person to put a fin on a surfboard, but his shape was still very old-school. Los Angeles native Bob Simmons changed all that in the 1940s by experimenting with a board’s rocker, which is the amount of curve a board has from nose to tail. The Simmons Spoon, as one of these boards was called, curved up at the nose, but its most radical difference was its material—balsa wood. Lightweight, South America balsa wood had been around the surf scene since the early 1930s, and Simmons was not the first to use it. But he was the first to combine it with...
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