“They were the hardest gouges I’ve seen him do in a long time.”
The day after a subdued performance during a world champ exhibition heat and the gatecrashing of a Stephanie Gilmore interview, Kelly Slater has thrilled surf fans with a wildly artistic display of surfboard riding at the surf major at Snapper Rocks.
While the commentary team was perplexed as to the genesis of the little twin-fin he was riding, online sleuths were quick to spot the famous Rorschach logo of experimental surfboard shaper Greg Webber.
Greg Webber, who is sixty-three, is the shaper who made concaves his own personal fiefdom, beginning in the late eighties.
Forty years on, his designs are still adored by Kelly Slater.
(He is also the inventor of a yet-to-be-made wavepool so good that he insists it will make the little blue veins in your neck bulge like delicate pencil marks and his shark nets promise a bloodless solution to Great Whites hitting surfers. )
And, the surfboard Kelly Slater was riding in his round of 64 heat was a five-eight swallow-tail twin that Greg had shaped for him last March. The first Greg heard of it was when he started getting messages from middle-aged former pro surfers telling him,
“Give me of those fucking boards that Kelly was riding.”
Greg Webber answers his telephone with a slight delay, an indication of his isolation four hundred nautical miles north-east of Sydney, on an island inhabited by four hundred souls, where air conditioners are forbidden and which David Attenborough described as, “a place so extraordinary it is almost unbelievable… few islands, surely, can be so accessible, so remarkable, yet so unspoilt.”
At first Greg couldn’t remember the board Kelly Slater was riding until the Champ messaged him and told him it was the only swallow-tail version of the Dart model he’d developed.
“The funny thing about the board is when you look at the measurements it has a tiny nose and tail rocker and all the curve is under the feet,” he says.
Greg Webber says the most notable thing about the switcharoo is the ability for the surfer generate speed early and carry this velocity through the turns with flow all the while being front-footed.
“There’s an influence from Taj Burrow there,” he says. “And some of those turns Kelly was doing were really hard, some of the hardest gouges I’ve seen him do in a long time. I really liked the range of turns, he was doing all sorts of things. He was pretty underscored. He was underscored quite badly. The other guys, with due respect, were flapping around a little bit, without the range that he had, and without the control over the range. It’s all very well to doing all manner of turns on a wave but if you can link those things artistically and you have the range…”
A pause or maybe a phone delay.
“What the…fuck…were the judges thinking?” says Greg. “They should spend a bit more time looking at the video instead of punching the score straight into their digital devices. Go back over it and freeze-frame it. He does it so smoothly you don’t realise what he’s just done. Curren had the same issue; Parko had the same issue. Super smooth but it looked like nothing really happened. No, moron, slow it down, do a freeze-frame. See how perfectly that turn was done.”
If you want dimensions, it’s a five-eight, 18 3/4, 2 3/8, around twenty-seven litres, Kelly Slater’s magic number.
