Today's guest hasn't ridden a surfboard with fins in a decade. And while that might seem like a fringe

style of surfing, it obviously has roots in the earliest versions of surfing. Wherever surfing

began, by the late 1800s, Hawaiians had developed three distinct styles of boards, all carved

from wood and all finless, the Pipeo, the Eliya, and the Olo.

Pipos are similar to what we know as a bodyboard. Elias are longer and they're meant to be

stood on, but both are only about half an inch thick. The Olo, on the other hand, was the showpiece of ancient Hawaiian

surfing and was written exclusively by the ruling Aliye class. These often weighed 200 pounds,

they were 20 feet long, two feet wide, and up to 8 inches thick. In the mid-1920s, America's first surfing champion, Tom Blake visited Hawaii and restored

two weather-beaten olos that were hanging on the exterior wall at Honolulu's Bishop Museum.

A couple of years later, he was back in Hawaii with Duke Konomoku, and they made a pair of

16-foot Olo replicas

through all of this board building experience.

And then in the year 1932, back in Venice, California, Blake had become one of the very first commercial board builders.

And he released a line of Tom Blake Hawaiian paddle boards, but it wasn't until 1935 back in Hawaii,

where he attached a four inch deep by one foot long keel scavenged from an old speedboat to the tail

of his surfboard. This is thought to be the inception point for the surfboard fin. That fin

allowed Blake to ride on a tighter angle across the wave, but it also created increased drag

through the water. So from this moment on, nearly every element of surfboard design reflected

this precise push and pull for balance

between speed and maneuverability. From fins to rocker, to outline, to the length of your surfboard,

to the deck and bottom contours, each of those choices are made in the interest of increasing maneuverability

while still maintaining as much speed as possible. Which actually brings us back to today's guest

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