“I’ve been doing a lot of single fins in the past few years, and just in the past 18 months or so I’ve been having a bit of a dig around in that early-’80s kind of era. Working with 1970s ideas, your mind starts to wander … I’d see guys struggling to ride thinner, conventional boards and think how much I’d like to see people flying out on the face and doing a big long carving sort of turn. The idea here was to offer a bit more foam – not so much to nurse
someone who was learning to surf as to show a better sort of surfer how they could find other lines in the wave just by being able to catch a wave earlier. The lower entry rocker does that, but it can be difficult to blend with a more modern tail rocker. Recently I’ve just been writing the length measurement on boards, not all the other measurements, because it’s important for people to relate to how it feels, not so much to the numbers.”

Custom’s come back. The general strength of the surfboard-making world has been underpinned by a trend toward custom orders – a trend ideally suited to the many mid-range and small boardmakers who’ve been at the heart of the industry for years. Like a lot of our boardmakers, Stuart Smith reckons this is a sign of all the beginners of the past few years feeling they now deserve a “real surfboard”. “It still boils down to the shaper-surfer relationship,” he says. “Eventually, that’s something all surfers want.”