World Champ Jen Smith

Proudly presenting the current and 2x Women’s World Champion, ripping on a 9.2 Meyerhoffer. Enjoy Jen

Outside The Box, Alternatives to traditional surfboard designs.

From the exhibition at Surfers Heritage Foundation. The show features Joe Bauguess, Mini Simmons. Carl Ekstrom Asymmetrical, tri and multi fin shortboards. Thomas Meyerhoffer, Prototype and production model longboards. Steve Pendarvis, Pendoflex, swallow, flextail shortboards. Bill Stewart S-Winger, 5 fin double wing pin shortboard.

The New York Times

Going Beyond the Waves to Reshape an Experience

MONTARA, Calif. — Somewhere over the course of five years and seven prototypes, Thomas Meyerhoffer found that his experimental surfboards no longer looked like surfboards. The pointed nose had faded away. The wide waist had melted inward. And the back stretched into a long, slender tail.

The prototypes were not even close to the conventional boards he had been riding each day since 1998, when he left his job as a designer at Apple. But Meyerhoffer tired of those boards anyway, and he sought a new surfing experience. So, from his home office and a tiny backyard shed here, Meyerhoffer took what was considered the most radical leap in board design in 50 years.

“It’s about creating a different feeling,” Meyerhoffer said recently. “Like the difference between playing tennis with a wooden racket and a metal racket. Or playing golf with wooden drivers.”

To the surfing world, Meyerhoffer was a voice in the wilderness.

“He’s coming at it from a really innocent design perspective, and that’s what makes this significant,” said Sam George, the former editor of Surfer Magazine and a daily surfer since the 1960s. “The outline of the surfboard has remained remarkably static over the decades. So when a guy like Thomas comes along and fundamentally changes the look, the whole outline, it’s startling.”

The idea behind the shape, reminiscent of an hourglass, is to emphasize noseriding and tailriding for recreational surfers. In the simplest terms, it is supposed to be a longboard that rides like a quicker, more maneuverable shortboard. When Meyerhoffer describes it, however, he cannot help but lapse into design-speak about removing mass, redistributing volume and continuous organic shapes.

He insisted that the crazy lines were not just different for the sake of being different. It was a painstaking process of trial and error.

“I never designed the board to look this way,” Meyerhoffer said. “It became this way.”

The big-wave rider Peter Mel, who also operates a surf shop in nearby Santa Cruz, was stunned when he took Meyerhoffer’s board out for a ride.

“Initially, I thought, What the heck is this thing?” Mel said. “We’re so used to seeing surfboards a certain way that we all get caught in a little box. But when I rode it, I was really surprised.”

Mel was not the only apprehensive surfer. When Meyerhoffer took the board down to thebeach two blocks from his house, people took him for a kook with a wipeout waiting to happen. Still, it was more respect than he received with his first experiments: conventionally shaped boards with a colorful translucent section filling up the back.

“You show up with something like that on the beach, and people just shake their heads,” he said.

“It’s so much more satisfying than when you design a mobile phone,” he said. “Then you just make a call. Here, you get to surf.”

Lisa’s Bday board, Thanks Tony!

Make Something.

Times Square, New York, April 2009