I get a warm feeling deep in my soul every time I see a single-fin surfboard

Why I Love Surfboards.

My first surfboard was a second hand 7-0 Sunshine single fin, in eponymous yellow.

It was a pintail, natch, and presumably shaped by Claude Codgen, an iconic Cocoa Beach surfer/shaper whose entry in the Encyclopedia of Surfing pretty much sums up his mythical career.

Cheerful, smooth-riding goofyfooter from Cocoa Beach; regarded by many as the best East Coast surfer of the mid- and late 1960s. “Claude was super cool, and graceful as a swan,” fellow Cocoa Beach surfer Mike Tabeling said. “Plus he was just the best at everything he did—surfing, baseball, skateboarding, shooting pool, all of it.”

Given that my scrawny preteen self weighed about 85 pounds, that craft screamed down the line like a rocket.

I loved that board, in the way that little kids love the first one of anything that’s truly their own.

I had learned to ride on loaner sticks.

But the Sunshine was mine, I didn’t have to share it, and that alone was worth its weight in sex wax.

It was too much foam to duck dive, so I would turn turtle when lines of whitewater approached, clinging to the thick rails as foam washed overhead.

Once out the back, I’d sit gallantly astride my steed, looking around at the other surfers like I had finally joined King Arthur’s roundtable.

After a few frothing years working on style and flow, I graduated from my single fin era, moving on to an Ocean Avenue, Greg Loehr-shaped thruster (also secondhand) and joining the shortboard revolution right around the same time that Curren and Occy were battling south of the Huntington Pier.

I sold the Sunshine to the dad of one of my church youth group friends, a guy named Mike (his real name) who in his misspent youth spent months living homeless on the beach in Puerto Rico to ensure easy access to good waves.

Mike had long curly hair, never wore real shoes, owned a landscaping business, and walked and talked like he was perpetually stoned.

Looking back, he might have been, although he was maybe the nicest guy I’d ever met.

He paid $50 for the Sunshine and acted like he stole it.

Every time I saw him at church after the sale he would rave about how great it was, although the word “rave” is relative here, more like how a stoner would tell you about their most epic trip.

I was much too cool to care by then — after all, I was 14 years old and rode thrusters and idolized big floaters and hacks, single fin lines weren’t my thing.

So I stuck with the extra fins and honed my late 80s-style float game in Florida’s often windswept lineups.

Eventually, I was ready to move to the next level – my own custom shape.

A local surf shop owner told me about a different Mike than the aging hippie Sunshine lover, some guy named Mike Daniel up near Cocoa who was rumored to be one hell of a shaper.

In the pre-internet area, this was good enough for me.

So one sunny weekend in the late summer of 1990, my buddy Chard and my 17-year-old-self road-tripped up I-95 to the Space Coast, rummaging around til we located a small unmarked unit in a self storage facility somewhere on the outskirts of Melbourne.

That’s where Mike Daniel, shaping god and underground legend, hand shaped not only my first custom board, but to this day the best board of my life (admittedly a view through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia).

That blade was electric, like someone took my old thrusters and added OG Evinrude outboards, plus power steering.

Mike started with an unfinished blank and kicked off his shaping process by asking me questions about where I liked to surf, how I liked to surf, and what size waves I anticipated riding.

With every answer he’d run the planer, tilt and scrutinize the pass, sand a little more here and a little less there, all along providing a running commentary on what he was doing and what he had in mind for my perfect wave missile. 

He prescribed a 6-3, because that extra length is just what you did back then, with some subtle rocker, and what he called a soft swallowtail to cap it off.

It was my first in person experience with a shaper, and it felt like I had stumbled across the authentic Santa Claus. 

But being gifted the magic board wasn’t the most memorable part. 

After he had shaped my board and was ready to hand it off to the glasser, Mike then spent the next hour or two explaining to me and my buddy Chard what he looked for in a shape, how to get the rocker right, and how he used the planer to best effect.

Chard (who then was an apprentice carpenter and today is a long time carpenter) in particular ate it up.

He was getting into shaping, and we had built a couple boards together (to be fair, Chard did the heavy lifting on the shaping, I mainly helped glass and sand).

We were just a couple of no-name frothing teenage kids, and Daniel spending that time to share some hard-earned wisdom made a huge impression.

So much so that I have actually never in my life, through many, many surfboards, owned one that was shaped by anyone other than an East Coast USA shaper.

Yet it’s funny how things come full circle.

Thanks mostly to Mike D sending me down the magic path, I’ve loved my thruster era and won’t ever give them up completely.

But these days I think about that vintage Sunshine single fin all the time.

I haven’t seen it or Hippie Mike since the mid-80s.

Hopefully that yellow sled is up on a rack somewhere being treated like the vintage treasure she was and is.

Regardless of her fate, though, that board’s memory lives on.

I still get a warm feeling deep in my soul every time I see a single fin.

I can feel the long familiar flow under my feet, the smooth rhythm of gliding down the line on a clean clear swell somewhere off Florida’s Treasure Coast.

So if you happen to be out at your favorite spot and see some random older dude with white hair and a big smile, flowing down the point on a beat up single fin, fingertips trailing in the crest, be sure to throw him a shaka or two.

It might not be me.

But I’ll be wishing it was.