THE CRAZY KANGAROO
“I make boards when the waves are crap, and when there’s a swell I stack the boards in my van and hand-deliver them up and down the coast,” Dylan Longbottom tells Tracks. “In the 1970s my dad packed up his Kombi and delivered G&S boards. Fifty years later I’m doing the same thing.”
Dylan’s father, Ross, was one of the pioneers of the Australian surfboard industry. A ‘Sandshoe Boy’ from Cronulla, who spent more than 30 years in the industry, starting as a glasser for Peter Clarke from the mid-60s, and working for decades at the legendary G&S label from the 70s onwards.
Dylan spent his early years in the Cronulla G&S factory, running barefoot in the foam dust, listening to the hum of the tools and the banter of the shapers.When he was eight, his parents and his elder brother Darren, aka Daz, moved to the South Coast.
“They wanted a change, but of all places, they moved to Dapto,” laughs Dylan. Dapto is a small town, located on the ‘wrong’ or westerly side of Lake Illawarra. Known more for its Greyhound track and Dapto Canaries Footy Club, its 20-minute train ride to the beach, and the derision that came with the journey meant that it also bred a certain type of surfer. “Everyone wrote me off so hard as a grommet for being a Daptoid,” says Longbottom, “But the Dapto surfers were so keen and they took me under their wing. They charged so hard,
