Discover: Slater’s (new) J-Bay Board!

Shaped by sixty-two-year-old Hawaiian Keone Downing!

Were you surprised, like me, when Kelly Slater beat a sun-ripened Filipe Toledo in three-foot rights two nights ago?

Although riding, as previously written “at a jerky trot”, the one element that did appear to favour Kelly was a heavier than usual surfboard.

And, this wasn’t a surfboard from some boyish wunderkind, Tomo or whomever, but the sixty-two-year Hawaiian Keone Downing who, and let’s give credit where it’s due, won The Eddie in 1990 and who has been shaping since 1976.

A figure of some importance you’d say.

A brief history from the Encyclopedia of Surfing:

“In the 1990 Quiksilver/Aikau event, still considered by many to be the most exciting big-wave contest ever seen, (Keone) Downing was regarded as a longshot contender. But he selected waves perfectly, went through the one-day event without so much as a slip or bobble, and led from start to finish. He rode a board shaped by his father. Downing’s $55,000 winner’s check was the sport’s biggest-ever cash prize at the time.In 2013, the 59-year-old Downing was on the alternate list for the Quiksilver/Aikau event. He also owned and operated Downing Hawaii, the surfboard shop his father launched in 1968.”

It says a lot, to me, about Kelly’s appreciation of the craft of surfboard making that he would approach Keone, in the first place. As it transpires, Keone built Kelly two boards for last year’s J-Bay contest, one a five-ten, one a five-eleven,

Keone didn’t hear anything for a year until, two nights ago, he woke up to a text from Kelly telling him he’d ridden the five-ten and that he might want to check the heat analyser to examine its performance.

The board in question Keone calls the M2K, because of the influence of two shapers, Maurice Cole and Martial Crum, and his own first initial.

Keone had traded boards with the 1988 world champ Barton Lynch, whom he knows well and who was riding a Maurice Cole, and was fascinated by the performance of the deep single concave.

Around the same time, his pal Martial Crum was working on a “booster pocket” or deep concave in the tail section of the board. Keone moved the single concave back between the legs (“This is where the drive is going to come from,” says Keone), threw in a little booster pocket, made it to Kelly’s dimensions (5’10” x 18 3/16″ x 2 1/4″) and glassed it with four-ounce both sides with a four-ounce stomp pad 13 one third up the board. This ain’t no hyper-light epoxy.

“You’ve got to give credit to who inspires you,” says Keone. “We’re all artists, we’re all inspired by something. There’s something that triggers our inspiration that makes you want to go out and create. I always appreciate those people.”

Watch Keone’s board under Kelly’s feet here.

And, if you want to talk with Keone about a custom board, hit here.