Designer of boards for Kelly, Dan Thomson, and the influence of his pops, Mark…

Bike. Surf pumping at the point. Monday morning mid morning. Pandanus palm mark carcass. Life outside the mainstream work-a-day culture. Backyard high tech…

Monday morning a couple of weeks ago, late winter to be precise. What are you up to? Making an honest living somewhere? Trading your time/labour/expertise in exchange for a handful of shekels to help pay for the sky high cost of living near the ocean?

Probably.

Dan “Tomo” Thomson is at work too or at least riding home from work. Peddling a bike along the dirt track underneath the whistling she-oaks beside the frogs croaking in the swamp that lays just behind the basalt boulders of Lennox Point. Under the arm, some new foam-and-fibreglass creation has been put on the test track. Something that justifies the term work for a shaper/designer, maybe Australia’s best, certainly the most innovative.

There hasn’t been anything as radical in form and concept as the “Modern Planing Hull” since the shortboard revolution. This one has the parallel outline with a pulled in tail and a quad setup. It looks fast with a ton of control built into the engine room. And I know it works because I just spent an hour watching Daniel put it all over the six-foot walls roping down the Point.

“Shaping started slowly for him. His brain was strong and he knew what he wanted but the hands couldn’t translate what was in his head. It took time.” Mark Thompson,.

I’m not the only one watching. Stretched out across a rock beside a cave-like clump of pandanus palms the father of Daniel Thomson, Mark, is baking like a lizard in the winter sun, a look of deep contentment etched across his face. Yeah, Dan’s doing OK. Hit the big-time with Firewire and his collaborations with Slater. And Mark’s enjoying every second of his son’s success.

Dan’s position at the vanguard of surfer-shapers and shaper-designers, somehow who is as comfortable flaring fins along the coping as they are experimenting with the possibilities of shape and the limits of space age materials, isn’t an accident. He’s no Johnny Come Lately. He’s not some dude who, with a flare for marketing and a partner who could build a website, learnt the intricacies of AKU shaper before he could swing a planer. No, you could say he’s been groomed for this for a long time, maybe since birth.

The upbringing was, how to put it, unorthodox. Mark is an unconventional man and the family compound, a sprawling hippy-type affair nestled in rainforest at the base of Broken Head was about as far from the typical nine-to-five urban upbringing as you could get. The Byron-Ballina area was then, and still is, at the forefront of design experimentation .

Mark says he and Dan “cycled through every design you could think of: singles, twins, concaves, no-nose thrusters. It was nothing to ride something at Broken Head and snap it in the tube, go home, shape another one and come back to the Point the next day to test it. That’s what Daniel grew up exposed to. But it wasn’t easy for him. I was fucking hard on him.”

“The area was just fizzing with everything,” says Mark. “From Al Byrne’s channels to McCoy’s Lazer Zaps to twinnies – we just grew up through that whole change and we were just doing everything we could. There was nothing out of bounds and there were no rules. Daniel was wandering around watching me shape surfboards since he was in nappies,” says Mark while we stretch out on rocks post surf at the Point. “I’d give him a block of foam and a surform and set him up under a tree and tell him to shape something just to get him out of my hair so I could get my work done.”

Mark says he and Dan “cycled through every design you could think of: singles, twins, concaves, no-nose thrusters. It was nothing to ride something at Broken Head and snap it in the tube, go home, shape another one and come back to the Point the next day to test it. That’s what Daniel grew up exposed to. But it wasn’t easy for him. I was fucking hard on him.”

He laughs, uproariously, head tilted back with a mane held in place by an old school sun visor. With a missing front tooth and built like a water buffalo you can imagine the old man would have cut an intimidating figure to a young kid.

At 15 Dan was up to his neck in the Junior Series as an aspiring pro surfer, a contemporary and peer of Fanning, Parko and Dean Morrison. As a country kid from the rainforest he seemed to lack the mongrel required to make the cut.

“Dan rang me looking for advice about shaping a board from a block of foam for SacredCraft and I told him: Just go down to the hardware and buy a chainsaw and fucking attack the cunt. So he did. Won board of the show.” Mark Thompson.

“As soon as that singlet went over his head his brain went to scrambled eggs. If they hassled him he’d be like Curren: he’d paddle up the beach trying to get away from them,” says Mark. “He wanted the best boards and I was always pushing him to be responsible to think about what he wanted. If he broke his boards and came to me – I need a new board Dad – I’d say, well you know where the fucking shaping room is, there’s blanks in there. If he went in there and did it, I’d always go and detail it for him. Shaping started slowly for him. His brain was strong and he knew what he wanted but the hands couldn’t translate what was in his head. It took time. I always knew Daniel was going to be a late bloomer. He got a lot of information at a very young age. I knew it was going to take time to digest that knowledge and put it all together”.

Curren. 

Everyone needs a break, something or someone to crack the world wide open and for Dan it came in the form of a Californian looking to make connections between proto-typical shaper Bob Simmons and the fish design undergoing a modern resurgence, a bookish bear of a man name of Richard Kenvin.

Richard hired Mark as a cinematographer with Rasta as talent but when Rasta couldn’t make it Daniel was subbed in. Initially, the project, called Hydrodynamica, failed to inspire the Thomson clan.

“I wasn’t that interested,”,says Mark, “because I looked at the boards and thought: What’s this 1960’s shit. At the time, I had stringerless XTR carbon flex-tails. Power-drive fins.  Really, really advanced shit. But when Richard explained Bob Simmons maths and the hydrodynamic principles, I thought that makes sense. Now I’m interested.”

The footage of the unknown kid from Lennox Head ripping it up on the San Diego Fish went back to the States creating a buzz as the fish reached a peak in popularity. Dan could’ve stayed in the comfortable bubble of Lennox but he put his sack on the line and shipped himself off to California with 300 bucks in his back pocket to make a go of it as a shaper-designer.

Growing up surrounded by a dominant father and giants of the design world had it’s advantages but with so many tall trees surrounding him Dan felt a need to find his own space and sunshine.

The footage of the unknown kid from Lennox Head ripping it up on the San Diego Fish went back to the States creating a buzz as the fish reached a peak in popularity. Dan could’ve stayed in the comfortable bubble of Lennox but he put his sack on the line and shipped himself off to California with 300 bucks in his back pocket to make a go of it as a shaper-designer.

“I had to get out his shadow,” Dan says, “so I took my own path with the fish.”

Innovation wasn’t long coming. An irony: that the path to the most radical transformation of the shortboard for 50 years came via the lineage of the San Diego fish, the ultimate symbol of hipster retro fashion.

While Mark found inspiration in nature and universal geometry, Dan was surrounded by the high-tech world of California and saw design principles in science and technology. Military aircraft, with their sawn off sharp angles and drag free surfaces became design templates for the fish to become harder, more modern, more angular and high performance under Dan’s planer.

The Sacred Craft Shape-Off, a trade-show competition between shapers, put Dans’ credentials and upbringing centre stage.

“I’d always taught him how to attack foam,” says Mark from the verandah of the Lennox family home overlooking a North Coast pointbreak. “Dan rang me looking for advice about shaping a board from a block of foam for SacredCraft and I told him: Just go down to the hardware and buy a chainsaw and fucking attack the cunt. So he did. Won board of the show.”

Dan was surrounded by the high-tech world of California and saw design principles in science and technology. Military aircraft, with their sawn off sharp angles and drag free surfaces became design templates for the fish to become harder, more modern, more angular and high performance under Dan’s planer.

While the Fish was relentlessly and ruthlessly modernised by the country kid in the heart of California, almost a perfect mirror of the historical moment when the Californian Greenough presented the vision of the future to the longboard riding Aussies, the great leap forwards to the Modern Planing Hull was incubated in darkness.

Dan’s relationship with his American gal and mother of their child foundered and went sour and in the throes of that misery Dan went into the shaping bay and let loose with a white hot burst of creativity. Those boards, radically different to anything else, with a kiteboard aesthetic, were tested at Lennox Point. I saw them being ridden, in the early stages. Bizarre looking, thin, narrow, short. But it was immediately obvious that the “planing” in the planing hull was incredibly efficient. Effortless speed. According to Mark those boards, the future, or the radical present, then sat in a cupboard. Unseen.

Dan’s relationship with his American gal and mother of their child foundered and went sour and in the throes of that misery Dan went into the shaping bay and let loose with a white hot burst of creativity.

That is, until they were launched at a trade show in the states.

Which brings us to the next great juncture in the Dan Tomo story: the linking up with technology platform Firewire to mass-produce the Modern Planing Hull.

When it comes to Firewire and Tomo it’s a fair question to ask: who made who? Firewire was struggling, looking for investment (taken on by Kelly Slater eventually) and drifting down a path of over-sized grovel boards for intermediates. It was a company haemorrhaging credibility in the high-performance space. Tomo elbowed aside the Sweet Potato with the Vanguard, the Evo and now the Slater designs Sci-Fi and Omni and the market lapped it up.

Firewire CEO Mark Price confirms Dan Tomo has been the highest-selling designer for Firewire since he came on board.

Of course, the benefit flows both ways. The royalty cheques mean Dan can afford to be riding his bike back from the Point with a new design under arm at 10 am on a Monday morning, a Hydrodynamic Architect ready to take theories from wherever he can find them and translate that into the continuing progression of the modern shortboard.

Just like his father taught him.

(Editor’s note: I commissioned this story for an issue of Surfing Life, a surfboard themed issue. If there are any good guys left in this topsy-turvy old world, it’s the owners of Surfing Life and White Horses, two print mags bought from their corporate owners and run by surfers for no other reason than a desire to not let their babies die.)