FISH ON!
So what is that feeling?
"We used to call it a 'Bar of Soap,'" says Gephart. "The first time you stood up on it, the thing squirted out from under you."
The Fish emerged during the late 1960s, a tumultuous time to be a surfer. Design and style changed radically moment to moment and surfing seemed to be as much about imagination and innovation as it was about actually paddling out and riding waves.
In 1966, Steve Lis was a teenage surfer from San Diego who'd been making kneeboards in his Point Loma High School woodshop class. He later graduated to skinning broken longboards for shorter foam blanks, deciding that what he needed to surf his favorite wave at Sunset Cliffs was a pintail. Lis solved the problem of a kneeboard's twin fins extending over the rails on a traditional pin by taking design elements from one of the early split tails, the radical "Superboard," designed by "Bear" Mirandon, that sported twin pins and a deep "V." In essence, what Lis created was a double pintail with a fin on either rail. The board was flat and fast and was capable of drawing dynamic new lines, especially compared to the more restrictive longboards still in the line-up. Under the knees of Lis, himself a fantastic wave rider, the Fish represented a quantum leap toward taking this new generation of surfers where they wanted to go.
"I wanted to cover as much ground as I could, make close-outs and backdoor tubes," he says, now living on Kauai.
Still, it took Lis a few years to tinker with the 4' 8" design before Jeff Ching, one of his stand-up surfing friends, decided to ride the thing for a laugh. "We were all on the beach one day, and [Ching] said he was going to have go," says Gephart, who describes what they witnessed during Ching's first session as, "amazing acceleration."
After Ching proved the Fish was a viable design for surfing erect, an immediate demand for the Lis Fish sprung up among his friends. Lis made a 5' 1" for Gephart who split the $21 cost of the board with his friend Mike Thorton, and the two shared it before going on to make Fishes of their own. While making skateboards, Gephart found that sanding a foil into the laminated birch used for skateboard decks produced a lighter, more flexible fin than the recycled fiberglass fins of Lis' early models. Today Gephart's fins and Lis' design are synonymous.
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