After that game-changing ‘81 Bells win. Photo: Joli

April 19, 1981, and the car park at Bells Beach was fizzing as surfers scratched, begged and borrowed for a surfboard capable of dealing with the waves confronting them. It was 12 foot, 15, maybe even bigger, and in the days before forecasting surfers had turned up to the annual Easter classic comically undergunned, although few of them at that point were laughing. There were pocket twin-fins, the occasional Jurassic single-fin dug out from under a nearby house… and one lone, curious, 6’6” tri-fin that it’s owner had dubbed, the “Thruster”. When Simon Anderson paddled out for his heat against Hawaiian Bobby owens, not even he was quite sure how the board would go. Thirty minutes later and board design had just taken its great leap forward.

Simon had his Eureka moment the previous year while surfing a prototype at his home break at Narrabeen. At 6’3”, he had been looking for a board that married the drive of a single-fin with the twitchiness of a twin. “It allowed me to surf the way I wanted to surf, and it improved my surfing. I recognised the Thruster was a design that would allow surfing to go to another level.” you know the rest, and 30 years later you’ll more than likely go surfing today on a board Simon inspired.

Famously laconic, Simon has remained completely unaffected by the gravity of his design, and the importance of that day at Bells in validating it to the world. “If I’d have lost at Bells that day? yeah, I dunno, the Thruster wouldn’t have been such a great story then, would it? How would things be different if it hadn’t taken off then? I’d be poorer. I’d probably be happier – that’s hard to imagine, isn’t it?” Simon harrumphs in his trademark deadpan. “I’d be just in the same place I reckon. It was one good idea. I was lucky. It was right place, right time. If I hadn’t come up with it at that time six months later someone else would have come up with it and that would have been fine.

I’d still be where I am now, here on this beach; only you’d be around the corner with the other bloke interviewing him.”

– Sean Doherty