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Firsts..... surfboard, wakeboard, hydrofoil, etc.


Bill_AirJunky

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Klarich posted this ad on his FB page today. I thought some of you would get a kick out of it. It's from the 1970s. Has to be one of the first wake surfers ever.

Check out that pimpin handle!!

banana.jpg

I have a few other firsts I'll post later too. And would love to see what anyone else has.

Edited by Bill_AirJunky
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I have a 1980's photo that shows me riding a kneeboard standing up. I call it "the day I invented wakeboarding". The chance of me knowing how to scan and post that photo are pretty much zip.

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We had one of those ropes/handles in the 80s! :rockon:

Had.....we found one of those and a old Maharajah slalom board in my dads attic when we helped move them last summer. Needless to say productivity was lost after that. :rofl:

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Klarich posted this ad on his FB page today. I thought some of you would get a kick out of it. It's from the 1970s. Has to be one of the first wake surfers ever.

Check out that pimpin handle!!

banana.jpg

I have a few other firsts I'll post later too. And would love to see what anyone else has.

Neat idea for a thread...would love to see more. I know that my father in law was riding a disc cut from plywood in the mid 60s. I have seen pics of him standing on top of a bar stool while riding on the disc.

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Oh yea, the plywood discs were really popular back in the day. Especially in the midwest where the old ski shows always went on. I saw a guy with a little dog doin it one time.... balancing a 6' step ladder on the disc, then climb up the ladder, with the dog in his hands, all while being pulled behind the boat!

Skyskier, lets see it! Snap a shot with your cell phone! Wiley has some interesting pics of early stuff like that when he was a kid too. Riding a piece of plywood with a piece of rope tied to it. I used to spend tons of time checkin out all the stuff they had all over the walls in that place.

OK, heres another one. This is right off my own garage wall. A guy who worked for Washington Watersport, an old MC dealer in Seattle, gave it to me. The earliest reference to a wakeboard. It's a "Buyers Bonus" by Owens boats, owned by Brunswick. If you buy an Owens boat, you will get a free fiberglass wakeboard by Phil of Downey.... a $99.50 value! Offer expired Jan 31, 1965!!

earlywakeboard.jpg

Here it is the Nov, 1964 edition of Popular Science!

Edited by Bill_AirJunky
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  • 3 weeks later...

OK kids, time for some more history.

The first personal hydrofoils..... that I can find. Heres some highlights.

Before there were sit down foils from SkySki or AirChair..... Before the standup surfers claimed they were the first to stand up on a foil..... Back in the early 1960s a couple of guys created some stand up foils that they mounted on combo skis. In 1963 they showed up in Popular Science.

-Some of you Seattle riders may remember this couple.... from an old ad in Playboy magazine.

ccfoilad2.jpg

Then in 1965 they were patented in the US. A company out of Indiana called City Engineering was contracted to make them.

foilskis.jpg

In the late 70s Mike Murphy & Bob Wooley started riding stand up foils on the Parker Strip. They loved it immediately, but found all the weaknesses. Mike started jumping them & found out how easily they broke. He got one of his SoCal buddies to help him make a stronger set. Heres a shot of Mike, Bob & all their buddies riding stand up foils..... including the old timer, Banana George.

8foilskis.jpg

Eventually they decided that standing up on foils was crazy. So they played with putting foils on kneeboards, on SitSkis, and eventually on a single board with seat. This was the end of foils of any standup variety for quite a while. More hydrofoil history here.

In about 1999 Bobby Taylor started playing with stand up foils again. Some of you may remember the name..... he is a former NHRA Top Fuel funny car champ from the late 1990s (drives 240 mph for a living & rides SkySki for kicks). He cut down & welded old SkySki foils in a variety of configurations, bolting them to wakeboards, surfboards, modified sit down boards, etc. Eventually Laird Hamilton & Rush Randle got a hold of his designs & took them back to Hawaii to start big wave surfing with them.

In about 2001 I found a set under a deck on Lake Sammamish. Notice the "flush mount" screws & wooden plugs in the hollow fuselage. :crazy:

oldfoil.jpg

In 2002, Jake landed the first invert on a set of stand up foils. Shortly after that Bobby landed the first handle pass 360 on a stand up foil.

pic9.jpg

In 2008, we actually had a chance to get one of us up on a set of the old stand-up foils. Erika is like 100 lbs, and the things were incredibly flimsy. :rofl:

Edited by Bill_AirJunky
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Klarich is around. He's writing a book now days. His latest Facebook entries are where I got the first pic in this thread.... the banana board or first wake surf board from the 1970s.

For those of you wondering who Klarich is..... Tony Klarich is Murphy's nephew, a former kneeboard & hydrofoil champ. Heres a good video of him showin off, the guy used to ride or ski just about anything under the sun. Front flips on a slalom ski??

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Back in the 60's we rode anything we could put behind the boat. Of the two items listed here we had the disc and a item we towed behind the boat hooked to a rope. It was a piece of plywood about 5-6' long and maybe 3' wide. It had a rope handle tied to it. The thing was much like the kids ski skimmers that are around today except that it wasn't cut out in the middle. Both of these things were terribly dangerous it turned out. This contraption that was towed would sometimes dive if the front of it went under water. If you happened to be tangled in the rope/handle, you went down with it! We finally lost that thing one time when my Dad fell. The nose went underwater and went straight to the bottom. I guess it stuck in the bottom or got hung on something underwater. It snapped the ski rope that tied it to the boat and we never saw it again. It never surfaced!! Good thing my Dad wasn't hung up on it. The Disc was another fun ride, you could spin it, put stuff on it to ride like the barstool and step ladders. The biggest problem with the disc was if you fell and the disc dove underwater, it might go 6'-8' or 10' underwater. When it came back up, it was usually coming up very fast and would fly up out of the water if no one was there to get hit by it on it's way out. Imagine holding a surfboard underwater at about 8-10' and letting it go. That thing would launch!! We had the split handles too. They would really help a skier learning to get up on a single ski. The handle on each side of the ski would help keep the ski from going off to the side. Much like the Deep V handles we use to teach Skyski riders now days. One of the ones we had was a single handle that would split apart with a half twist and make two handles.

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Hey Ronnie,

You should pull some of those old pics out & scan them to show off.

Wiley's has a big bulletin board at their front door. It has tons of old pics on it from when they were kids skiing on anything they could get their hands on. I believe there is a shot of Darren up there on a big sheet of plywood similar to what your talking about.

I've been looking for a shot of a guy on the disc with the ladder. I grabbed this out of Tony's video. Somewhere I saw a guy doing it with a little dog too. :rofl:

ladder.jpg

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If there are pics, my parents have them. Might have to go through them someday. They took a LOT of pictures when we were kids. Your picture above is much later, we had ski belts, no vests were out there yet. :lol:

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