The designer.
"ABOUT PAUL"
Paul grew up at the beach. His dad, Bob, was a keen diver and spearfisherman. He bought Paul an 11'4" Ron triple stringer when he was a little nipper.
"I remember trying to turn it - it handled like a semi-trailor and loved to drill you in the shore break!"
By the age of 14, Paul began building his own boards and a few for his mates. He loved surfing at Cronulla Point and the Point loved chewing up surfboards in the days before legropes.
For 19 years he surfed as much as possible and travelled each weekend to get uncrowded surf. He tried competition surfing a couple of times but the surf was small and Paul preferred large gnarly waves that were a challenge. His style was radical power surfing, and he has many injuries to show for it.
Paul was a trainee Flight Engineer in 1968 at Qantas' private college, averageing 92%. They were upset when he left in second year to pursue his love of surfing.
Bobby Brown was a friend of Paul's, a major influence in his early surfing life. He helped Paul land a job at Gordon & Smith Australia early in 1969. For six months, he did ding repairs, made fins and put stringers in blanks. He designed a new board for himself using a profile shape derived from the top side of a plane wing and and mirror-flipping it. This produced a streamlined 7' board, breaking away from the rounded square-nosed 9'2" mini-mals. It was a huge commercial success for G&S; they sold 300 units that season and Paul became a full-time shaper shortly afterwards, and progressed quickly to Head Shaper. The manager, Terry Hamill, would allow Paul some free materials from time to time to experiment with new design concepts. When G&S was sold to a group of business professionals, Paul left, as shaping 30 boards a week all much the same got very boring.He bought a Norton Commando and went motorcycle racing.
"As the number of boards you've shaped runs into the thousands, it's very pleasing to do custom boards for good surfers"
Paul stopped making surfboards for a living and really enjoyed surfing
without all the hype.
"I've been surfing for 41 years and it's even more fun now. It's not like racing bikes - if you lose concentration, you only get wet - or ski racing where you get ice burns and twanged ligaments".
The world of flow dynamics has been an interest to Paul all his life.
Through the years he's worked on cruising yachts and racing exhaust systems for cars and bikes. He's always had an interest in fighter aircraft and their history, and in space research. It became obvious to him that the surfboard of the mid 70's hadn't changed much in 25 years. To illustrate, if you get 100 new boards from reputable manufacturers around the world, line them up and stand back 30 metres, they all look much the same. He was watching a surf video one day and held up his hand over the board in the film and asked himself 'What's that guy standing on? How does it work? Why is it so?'. A Pandora's box of fluid dynamics opened up.
