source:http://hydrodynamica.com/totem/fish.php
taken from the mysterious Hydrodynamica project.
RK's internet clips are really nice blend of surfing and music.
Nice that he puts in online for all of us to see. and free.
Otherwise it could be shelved like so many other over hyped surf movies.
accompanied text:
In the late Sixties and early Seventies two
young Hawaiians named Reno Abellira and Jeff Ching recognized the
potential of the fish design as a means to fulfill their boyhood dreams
of mastering the art of stand up paipo riding. Both Reno and Jeff grew
up riding paipos at the Wall at Kuhio beach, and both were spellbound by
the amazing stand up paipo style of Valentine Ching, though they found
it too difficult to stand up on a paipo themselves. Jeff moved from Oahu
to San Diego in 1966 to attend Cal Western University
in Point Loma. After arriving there he befriended a local teenage
kneeboarder named Steve Lis, who, in January of 1967 created a tiny
split tailed kneeboard design he dubbed the “fish”.
With it’s unprecedented speed and traction the fish was the most progressive
surfboard to emerge from the 1960s shortboard revolution. Coming from a
background of bodysurfing and bellyboarding Lis had intuitively arrived
at some of the same design solutions as Bob Simmons had 15 years
earlier, but in a much smaller, refined, and more maneuverable package.
What he had created was essentially a buoyant paipo board souped up with
elements of Simmons’ basic planing hull design. Lis was a phenomenal
kneeboard surfer, and he rode in a manner that conventional surfers
would not equal for decades. Inspired by watching Lis ride and by his
memories of Valentine Ching’s paipo riding in Hawaii, Jeff Ching decided
to try riding Lis’s tiny, paipo-like kneeboard as a stand up board. The
result was a hyper-leap forward in stand up surfing performance. From
that point on the San Diego fish cult rapidly evolved in almost total
obscurity at the reef breaks of San Diego’s Sunset Cliffs area.This was
one of the most dynamic and creative scenes in the history of modern
surfing, and it all went down under the radar, intentionally.Creativity fueled by regular doses of psychedelic drugs, the fish crew surfed Lis’s little aquatic skateboard in a style that foreshadowed the coming revolution in skateboarding soon to be ignited by Frank Nasworthy’s release of the urethane wheel in 1973. Nasworthy himself is a life long fish devotee. Meanwhile, Reno Abellira evolved as one of Dick Brewer’s mini-gun test pilots in the late Sixties. In 1972 he witnessed Jimmy Blears and David Nuuhiwa ripping trashy waves on very short fish boards during the finals of the World Contest in San Diego. Reno went on to make himself a fish-like twin fin to deal with trashy surf at the Coke Contest at Narrabeen in Australia in 1977. Mark Richards was inspired by Reno’s board, which led to him to create the MR twin fin in the late 70s. A few years later Simon Anderson took the multi-finned board a step further with his Thruster design and the modern “shortboard” was born.
Music: "3 little stones" written by alias pail/bryan doring and steve dacosta.
singlikebuildings.com
aliaspail.com
