History

In 1966 the Aust. surfing titles were held at the Gold Coast and everybody wanted new boards to surf in them. Peter Drouyn was one of them, an incredibly hot young surfer from the Gold Coast. Peter came up to order his new board, which I think Bob shaped, and he kept saying he wanted it shorter and lighter. Eventually, after much argument it came out at 8ft and real light, Everybody thought he was mad but he went to those titles and did things nobody could believe - and won. My brother Peter won there too, cleaned up the under 15's on an 8'3 ". I do believe this was the beginning of the shortboard era. In only a matter of months all boards began to shrink in size. It had a long way to go, but probably started at Cord. Certainly all the boards at Cord were getting lighter and finer, and some of the things being made there were totally different to anything else made before. Bob especially was feeding off George's ideas and we made flex tails, stepped decks, very rolled bottoms, concaves, scooped decks and even three fin models plus much more. I think they referred to everyone hanging around Cord as the "hot generation" and maybe they were right, or as Bob said to Richard Harvey in his book, the Surfing history of QLD, "when all the boys formed Cord surfboards, it was the best of all".

The other thing is that back in '65/'66 we were constantly surfing great, uncrowded waves, and especially uncrowded Noosa (one of the best peeling point waves anywhere). You know that if there were more than 5 or 6 people out in the water it was "crowded"! Now at Noosa you could do amazing things. Take off and either bottom turn or wall turn, hang back in the hollow section of the wave by stalling on the back and then work out through the white water onto the nose and noseride it right under the lip. Big cutbacks, and probably the first re-entries ever done. The wave was perfect and we had all these new maneuvers happening and were developing the boards to do them on. Bob and Kevin shaped and surfed them and took the feedback from everyone else so in '66 there were some very hot Cord surfboards and Cord surfers riding Noosa. The absolute beginning of a whole new era.