The Art of the Turn

Tom Blake, a tanned, toned, blonde-haired haole who lived and surfed in Hawaii, is the godfather of modern surfing, partly because in the early twentieth century he pretty well invented the concept of the surf bum by sacrificing everything else in his life—and partly because in 1935 or so he invented the surfboard fin when he glued a piece of a boat keel to the bottom of a board. Before Blake’s tinkering, surfboards were mostly flat as pancakes on the bottom. The epitome of performance surfing was spinning around on the deck and flexing your muscles while the board traveled in a straight line toward shore with nothing to help it track or turn.

With Blake’s addition of a fin, it was possible to maneuver the surfboard up and down the wave face and to turn the dang thing without the tail washing out (sliding ass they called it back then). Blake’s skegs were rudimentary, without much thought given to shape or appearance, but