Covid made my flatmate believe that drinking bleach was the cure for all ailments. It also made every average or aging surfer believe that one day, they too, could surf like Devon Howard.

Many of us passed the time in lockdown watching a style of surfing rise to popularity on our YouTube feeds that was an attractive deviation from the regular WSL content. We became entranced by longer boards and longer lines and watched them take to walls that we could only go to in fantasy: Mikey February at J-Bay, Torren Martyn in Morocco and Devon Howard in Malibu. As the world burned in petty crime and Clorox, the gods of the mid-length came to mass awareness and subsequently inspired a surfboard sales boom that is now referred to as ‘the mid-length revolution.’

The dignified style of surfing, coupled with the extra volume under foot, invites a benchmark of achievability for every surfer who knows deep down they will never be a bulldog like Italo. This is the gift of professionals like Devon: they make refined skills look sleek and effortless.

But Devon Howard believes he’s not doing anything particularly remarkable. He also feels his level of performance is realistic for the non-professional.

And the good news for the layman surfer is that Devon’s insight is the one worth believing: the 50-year-old San Diego native is a former professional longboarder who shaped his early boards with the renowned Donald Takayama. He then became editor of Longboard Magazine and still contributes to The Surfer’s Journal. He went on to work various corporate roles in the surf industry, eventually getting recruited by the WSL to overhaul their longboard tour. Devon is now posted at the Channel Island headquarters in Carpinteria, California, where he takes our call to discuss the board that has swooned the most aloof of us: its design, its evolution, and what its rise signifies.

First of all, how does Devon Howard define a mid-length?

Mid-length is a modern term that describes something that is not a shortboard, not a longboard, but not an alt-craft either. The egg is the original mid-length. On average, it’s meant to be ridden a foot taller than the surfer. But it’s not a mini-mal or a fun-board either — it’s designed to be more performance-oriented than that.

What’s important about the distinction between fun-board and mid-length?

The fun-board has historically symbolised kook-dom or giving up.

It’s a bastardisation of a really cool design, which was the egg. It came about in the late 80’s and it took the idea of a shortboard, but it gave more foam and more length and made it easy for a beginner. So when core surfers saw one of those come down the beach, it was looked at the same way as a Wave Storm. It was a sign like, ‘more waves for me’ or ‘I’m gonna get hit.’

So because of this, older or out-of-shape surfers would just jump from a shortboard to a longboard because at least the longboard had a culture and it wasn’t kooky.

The actual performance mid-sized boards were always around but were more of an underground thing. The only people who really rode them would be your obscure types of people like Joel Tudor.

It used to be that if I looked around any lineup, it was 50/50 longboard and shortboard — very few of these midsize boards in between. It’d be like 3% – 5% of the lineup had them.

Why do you think the people who were riding them well, were only ever on the fringe?

In the mainstream world, through media and brands, that didn’t align with the products that were being sold. It was ripping, lacerating, destroying, winning, irreverent, fuck you. Some soul daddy kind of cruising just didn’t work.

In the early 80s, the thruster replaced the twin fin and that trajectory of surfing just intensified and the surfing got more radical and more powerful. It was raw aggression. The building momentum of surfing is always pushing forward, always pushing performance, never looking back. The old stuff is lame. It’s like your grandpa’s Oldsmobile. You don’t want to drive that.

The C.I. Mid is hugely popular — one of the top-sellers of the modern mid-length. It’s a mix of contemporary and classic. How did you come to develop this with Channel Islands, a name that’s synonymous with high-performance shortboards?

I started working at Channel Islands in 2018. I came here to help with their marketing as a contractor. And then they wanted to make a performance mid-length shape.

I think it’s right to associate C.I. with HPSB’s — that’s what we’re known for. But it’s not like we never made longboards or we never made fun boards. We’ve had lots of different models over the years. They weren’t our top sellers but we always had them. And so it was time to refresh the one or two designs we had that were 20 years old — they just looked super outdated.

Tell us about how your longboard-shaping expertise, learnt from Takayama, was a magic mesh with a HPSB shaper like Britt Merrick

We wanted to put out something that a shortboarder could come up to and not hate. C.I. brought in the shortboard DNA, and I brought in the sort of traditional alternative craft side of things. We ended up with a board that had some modern characteristics in the rails and in the concave. But the outline was inspired by a board that Al Merrick had made in the early 70s.

When you ride a mid-length, it’s not designed or built to be ridden like a shortboard. It’s rail surfing, not tail surfing.

When I worked at the WSL and wrote and overlooked the criteria for judging longboarding, I kind of geared it back towards the traditional. Longboarding for a long time was shortboard style. The problem with that — same with shortboard style mid-length riding — is when you’re doing tail surfing, you’re lifting the board out, and you’re tick-tacking and pumping. You’re defeating the purpose of the design and you’re actually making the board harder to ride.

Can you describe how it should feel?

It doesn’t look from shore like, ‘Wow, that person’s ripping.’ It’s more so, you know it when you feel it. You get on the board, and you feel it, and you’re like, ‘Hmm, this is really special.’ The board’s fast, and it has this beautiful trim feeling — it’s effortless. And I think that’s where the real appeal of this board is; when you tap into it and sort of ride it the way that it’s designed to. It’s very positive and intuitive.

What was the effect of releasing it just before Covid hit?

When we put it out, we were like, ‘How many should we make? Is anyone gonna buy this thing?’ We had no idea. I think we made 50 of them.

We put it out in January 2020, then COVID happened in March of 2020. And then that next year or two, everybody was surfing because they couldn’t do anything. We couldn’t even come close to making enough.

No one could have predicted that. So I just think things were building up. People were relating to surfers like Torren Martyn and then this all hit. So not only were new people coming into surfing, but I think a lot of people who’d given up on surfing and were out of shape came back to performance shortboards and were just too big and too intimidated. I think if anyone’s honest — put all the cynicism and the jokes aside — there were just way too many people who wanted to surf again.

What other reasons do you think this style of board blew up at the time and in the way in which it did? And what does that signify to you?

All of this stuff ties back to what I’ve learnt: no matter what happens in society, especially in American culture, we’re always sort of progressing to the new, next, best. Better performance, better this, better that, in with the new, out with the old, put your grandparents in a home and forget about them. Everything’s about me, now, performance.

I think what’s striking about the mid-length is that despite all these changes, one enduring aspect or facet of human life is the nature of beauty. You can’t really talk about mid-lengths without attaching it to the word style and you can’t talk about style without attaching this idea of beauty.

Beauty and style are made fun of a lot because a cynical shortboarder will say that style is contrived — like some kid throwing his hand in the air. That is pretty silly. That is contrived. I don’t subscribe to that. But I think natural, good style usually blends and bleeds right into good form. It’s easy on the eyes, and it’s inspiring.

I take it the marketing was pretty effortlessly graceful then, too, right?

If you go to C.I.’s YouTube page and click on popular, look at the top ten videos and then look at the views and then do the math on how many of them are on mid-lengths.

So I think what it tells us is that surfing at large, globally speaking, is what they say about how people vote with their wallets. People voted with their eyeballs. We just put out basic clips with Dane Gudauskas or Mikey February or myself and there’s not a lot of marketing spin. There isn’t a lot of talking. The board is just flowing and working.

When we had found some old templates of Al Merrick’s and saw his old logos we thought, ‘This doesn’t need a big hex on it. This isn’t like a three to the beach, wear your Jersey type of order. Let’s just honour the heritage and tradition of the brand and just go quiet with it.’

It all tells me that people are pulling back from noise and explosives. The proof is in the pudding: quiet is the new loud.