OH, THE PLACES YOU’LL GO

Congratulations This is your wave You launch over the ledge And you’re up and away

You have wax on the deck And fins down below You can steer yourself Wherever you want to go

Turn your surfboard over. Oh, it was already fins-up? Then turn it over again, Einstein.

Check out those slender, curved foils of fibreglass on the bottom. Where did they come from? What’s that? They came with the board? No, I mean, where did they really come from? How did they come to be? From whence did they originate? Fins are so integral to modern surfing you might not give their origins a lot of thought.

But fins have as fascinating, twisted and meandering a history as surfboard design itself. Think of them as your board’s steering mechanism, your ship’s rudder. From finless, ancient, Hawaiian timber solids to Tom Blake’s first crude keel in the 1930s; from eccentric Californian Bob Simmons’ first twin fins in the late ’40s to the ubiquitous but clunky D-fins of the longboard era to kneeboarder George Greenough’s high-aspect-ratio, long-raked and flexible single fins in the ’60s.

But it was in the ’70s that fin diversity really exploded. As boards became radically shorter, a wild array of fin templates and configurations were experimented with as surfers found new places to take their newly abbreviated shortboards, in and around, up and over and inside the curling lip of the wave. Experiments with flex, materials, templates, positioning and size and numbers of fins exploded.

All that experimentation was distilled into Simon Anderson’s epoch-defining invention, the three-finned thruster