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Heath/Kelley-Inspired Hot Curl Boards
Nose 12" back w 11 3/4" t 2"
Widepoint 82" from tail w 19 1/2" t 3 1/4"
Center w 18 1/2" t 2 5/8"
Tail 12" up w 10 5/16" t 2 3/8"
6" up w 8 1/4"
Square tail 3"
In 1934, frustrated by spinning uncontrollably out
of large Hawaiian waves on ten foot square-tailed Hawaiian redwood boards,
Hawaiians Fran Heath and John Kelley altered a board and created the first
"hot curl" board that would hold in a hot curl. Kelley says, "On every
wave we'd catch, if you tried to turn your board a little bit, the back
end would come out because there is no skeg, and you'd just 'slide ass'
sideways...So we came back to my house at Black Point , and I had two saw
horses set up on the porch. I took an ax and said, 'Damn it, however deep
this ax goes, I'm gonna cut that much off the side of the board.' So I
let it fly and it went into the redwood, and we cut the rails down and
made a board with a tail about five inches wide. Where the two sides came
together at the bottom it became sort of a vee shape...by mid-afternoon
we were back out there with this board. I caught a wave and the tail just
dug in and I went right across, and we figured something had happened."
(Thanks to Surfer's Journal,Vol. 3, No. 2) Indeed it had. Modern-day
big wave guns came from here! The slight "V" shape, which begins about
a third of the way from the tail, acts like a skeg and helps the board
go down the line instead of spinning out.
This replica was made from salvage old growth redwood logs
on the Wood Ranch in Southern Humboldt County. It captures the history
and grandeur of those first Hot Curl boards. The lumber was finished milled
in my shop. |
