The thruster looked like revolution. Sounded like revolution. Threw fire around with a ‘fuck you’ kind of third fin. It was Curren on Black Beauty, Occy on Rusty ‘84, Tom Carroll on Byrnes, Kong on ‘Hot Stuff’. It arrived in the early 1980s, under the arm of a beer-loving natural-footer from Narrabeen and was embraced by neon, tank-topped alpha types with habits for car park punch-ups and cocaine.
By 2020, it was high time for the pot to get stirred again in the way that we ride surfboards. The world had changed enough so that the craft would have to follow suit in some way. We braced for stronger, faster, sharper — a new weapon to stake its claim. But what we got was an egg. A round, smooth, perfectly medium-sized elongated gumdrop that, if it could speak, would sound more like Mr. Rogers than it would Miki Dora. The egg, now referred to as the mid length, smiles at you whether or not you smile back, and it wouldn’t be a true revolution if that didn’t piss a bunch of people off. You either love them or hate them.
Shortboard purists will say that mid lengths are for out-of-shape or delusional surfers who take all the set waves and believe they’re ripping. This is true for some. The pandemic saw an influx of adult learners skipping the necessary rites of passage, paddling into the lineup with more foam than skill.
But this sub-group of people would not have a powerful enough influence on surfing to create and sustain a legitimate movement as enduring as this one has been. There’s a reason why there has never been a Wavestorm revolution. The mid length is subtle. It doesn’t ask that we pay attention to it, but we should at least take note of what it’s signifying.
Like all heroic revolutions, this one began on the couch. Most of us were stuck at home watching freesurfing on YouTube as Covid bopped around outside. While competition surfing was put on pause, we switched our attention to alternative surfing. Two distinct figures were capturing a lion’s share of attention, both of whom were riding longer, fatter boards that drew lines in a way that tickled our heartstrings. It was like the noise settled down, and a more dignified style of surfing rose to popularity.
It was Devon Howard on the C.I. Mid and Torren Martyn on Simon Jones’s mid length twins. To eyes that have only ever seen the mid length ridden by the Covid learner, yes, the board may present itself like the overly friendly neighbour in khakis and a cardigan. But witness it ridden properly, and you will recognise in one, fluid swoop how surfing can be the highest form of artistry. A skillful rider on a mid length will convey an effortlessness that, while still a delusion to many, may actually be within the realm of relatability to the non-elite surfer.
Devon began developing Channel Islands’ version of the design in 2018. “We put it out in January of 2020, then Covid happened in March of 2020. We couldn’t even come close to making enough — we might have only come to a quarter of the demand because we were making them traditionally. No one could have predicted that. So, I just think things were building up.”
“We didn’t invent a new design. Nor were we the ones who kicked off the résurgence — most shapers were making their versions too. It was just that the public demand for that design exploded very quickly. The origins of it go all the way back to 1967 when longboards were becoming shorter and giving a glimpse into what was coming.”
Australian shapers like Bob McTavish and Wayne Lynch were experimenting with designs that allowed for more maneuverability while preserving glide. Meanwhile, in California, Skip Frye was refining his own version: a sleek, egg-shaped board that could stay deep in the pocket without losing speed.
By the early 1970s, two competing design paths emerged: the clean, flowing lines of the egg and the radical, performance-driven approach of mini-guns and shortboards. The latter won. The arrival of the thruster in the early 80s accelerated the shift toward a contest-based, aggressive, top-to-bottom style – straight-line glide was the first casualty. For a moment, mid-sized boards were the future. Then they were gone.
The real nail in the coffin was the funboard, which was created in the late 80s as an easy entry point for beginners. In doing so, it soiled the mid length’s reputation. “It was a bastardisation of a really cool design, which was the egg or what people would nowadays call a mid length. It took the idea of a shortboard but gave it more foam and more length and stretched out the rail line to around seven feet,” Devon says.
“So, at this point, when core surfers saw one of those come down the beach or in the lineup, it was looked at the same way we see Wavestorms now; it symbolised kook-dom or giving up. Because of that, 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. So these mid-sized boards just existed as a bit of a joke for a long time. The only people who really rode them were your obscure types of people like Joel Tudor.”
The modern-day mid length is distinctly different from the funboard; it’s a performance-oriented design that will make a long, stretched-out point come to life with a speed-line that a shortboard could never make so graceful. Think Mikey February in J-Bay. Still, the user-friendliness of the design likely means that it may never fully shake the stereotype that it symbolises a regression. Like getting back together with an ex. The shortboard fundamentalist would feel shrouded in shame if spotted walking down the beach with their arm around a board so tall.
Simon Jones, who has become one of the world’s most in-demand shapers of alternative crafts since working with Torren, believes there is a best-practice attitude in approaching this type of design.
“If you’re an average surfer, all of a sudden you’ll be thinking: ‘holy shit, I’m getting so many more waves on a bigger board. And I can actually throw this thing around a bit.’ But I think anyone who paddles out on a mid length should always temper their ego. If you swing around and you’ve already had a wave, it’s very important to tell someone else to go,” Simon says.
He presents a demeanour with similarities to both Devon and Torren: calm and reflexive. Simon takes his time to choose his words.
“With Torren, it’s not just his surfing ability — it’s the way he moves in the world. He’s very quiet and you’ll never see him abuse his ability in the lineup. You might be sitting somewhere, and someone says, ‘oh, Torren’s out there.’ You might not see a peep out of him for half an hour or something, then, all of a sudden, he’s on the best wave of the set. So, he has a particular way of holding himself in the world without ever being intrusive. So a lot of people have looked at him and gone, ‘he’s cool — that’s how I want to move in the world.’ And I think part of it is his ability to ride a lot of different craft and just be who he is. If you’re on the mainland and there are a lot of people around you on shortboards, you’ve got to be really diplomatic and very careful. I think he’s shown a lot of people that you can be like that in the ocean. You don’t have to get every wave. And I think that even that one thing in itself has done a lot for surfing.”
Simon, despite his high demand, chooses to keep his business small so that he can oversee every board that’s sent out. It’s just him and his son, Dash, at the helm. He splits his week between his space in Byron Bay and the Glass Lab in Tweed Heads, one of the Gold Coast’s busiest hubs for high- performance, shortboard brands. Because his operation is small scale, Simon’s able to maintain a good understanding of where in the world his boards are most frequently sent. Besides the obvious factors such as wave profiles and affluence of a region, it’s interesting to pay attention to which zones seem to gel with his boards from a cultural standpoint. His boards can be seen all around New York City beaches like Rockaway, on the opposite end of the world, but very seldom across town from where they’re shaped at D-Bah or Snapper. While New York tends to surprise people with the strength of its core surf community, it’s certainly not a Mecca of high-class point breaks. Can we reduce this one to the fact that New York is full of rich hipsters who can afford the international shipping price, love something exotic, and will latch onto anything that they deem to be non-conformist? Maybe.
But Simon also reckons, generally speaking, that his boards do tend to gravitate towards free-thinking pockets. “If you’re from New York, not that I’ve ever been, but I’m pretty sure I’m right in saying that you’re going to be pretty open-minded. We have sent a lot of boards to that region, Hawaii, and the West Coast, USA. West Coast of Aus, too.” There are a lot more in the Byron region than there are on the Gold Coast, which are just 45 minutes away from each other.”
Simon suggests those prone to nostalgia will be drawn to the mid length because of its cyclical story. “A lot of people see bygone eras as being better than the present for some reason.
When I discovered surfing, I was 10 in 1974. And so, I know deeply how it felt to be there. But if I think back to that era, yeah, it was cool, and everyone had cool clothes and single fins and all that sort of thing. But I actually do think, despite everything that’s going on in the world at any given time, that things are better now,” says Simon.
“Music, film, and art: surfboard designers were really great at bringing those things forward in surf culture. Those things are okay to be recycled. A lot of the stuff that I make is a direct reflection of the childhood boards I grew up on. But all the behavioural stuff of that era can be left behind.”
The surfboard shaper is an expert in the relationship between feeling and form. At risk of sounding too esoteric, there really is a perfect parallel between the evolution of the modern-day mid length and the story of ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’, the cult-favourite philosophical memoir from the 70s by Robert Pirsig. In short, a university professor of philosophy goes on a cross-country motorcycle journey in an obsessive attempt to define the nature of ‘Quality’ at the deepest level. He uses his relationship with the maintenance of his motorcycle as a metaphor for his thought process, ultimately concluding that quality is the moment of direct experience with something beautiful that you understand intuitively before thought kicks in.
Simon was onto that when asked how the mid length feels: “What really stands out to me – it’s been very important – is the moments in between a manoeuvre. It’s as equally exhilarating as going through a really critical turn. It might be the projection you get out of a bottom turn that throws you really high onto a wall that you normally wouldn’t make on a shorter board, but all of a sudden, you’re outrunning that thing and all you’re doing is maintaining yourself above the board, just running with it. It’s almost like a horse ride. You’ve done not a lot to get there — it’s actually the board doing it. You’re just following its flow. But then, when you do engage it, it follows you. If that board can then too do a big cut down and you can put it in the tube, that makes it the best tool.”
Devon elaborates on the same vein of experience: “When you watch someone surf it, 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 be ridden. It’s very positive and intuitive. 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 was riding for Donald Takayama in the 90s, he had a model that he called the tri fin egg. I never rode it; I just scoffed at it. But the first session I did try it; it was like a door had opened into this whole new world I didn’t know existed. I was tripping out on it because it solved all these problems I was having between bouncing between shortboards and longboards in a way that didn’t fit together. I was able to draw beautiful lines like the surfers did in the 70s on the single fins. So, on a deeply personal level, I just felt this profound connection with that line of surfing,” Devon reflects.
So why has the mid length taken hold now and didn’t in the past? In places like the Gold Coast, where world champions are groomed from childhood, you see a different reality. High-performance shortboards still dominate and the industry still revolves around selling progression. Maybe the mid length isn’t a sign of a larger shift but just a niche for those who no longer feel the need to constantly prove themselves.
But if that were the case, Devon reckons it would have faded by now “I don’t see the mid length going away. Unlike past revivals, this doesn’t feel like a passing trend.” It’s akin to the longboard’s endurance in the face of shortboard domination. It sits in a way that suggests there has finally been a balance struck between reconciling roots with the drive for progress.
“All of this stuff ties back to what I’ve learned: no matter what happens in society, especially in American culture, we’re always sort of progressing to the new, next, best,” Devon adds.
“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. 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. But I think natural, good style usually blends and bleeds right into good form. It’s easy on the eyes, and it’s inspiring.”
“There are no slick marketing campaigns here. If you go to C.I.’s YouTube page and click on popular, look at the top 10 videos, then look at the views, and then do the math on how many of them are on mid lengths. We just put out basic clips with Dane Gudauskas, or Mikey February, or myself. There isn’t a lot of talking. The board is just flowing and working. So I think what it tells us is that surfing at large, globally speaking, has had people voting with their eyeballs. And that all tells me that people are pulling back from noise and explosives. The proof is in the pudding: quiet is the new loud.”
Is the mid length the ultimate manifestation of ‘Quality’ in surfboard shaping? It’s probably not concerning itself with big claims. For a board that many people can surf at least half decently, it carries a quiet confidence — one that rewards those who take the time to master its subtleties. For those who do, the payoff is high: a style that isn’t recycled but is unmistakably their own.
