The Materials at Hand
By Richard Kenvin
In 1964 Bear Mirandon founded a small surfboard venture in a garage near WindanSea. The name he chose for his business, Surfboards La Jolla, neatly reflects the indigenous nature of the boards he and his brother Nick have designed over the years. These creations are part of a uniquely local lineage of surfboards, and they are as much a part of the collective consciousness of WindanSea as the shack or the infamous parking lot. Bear Mirandon is bound to La Jolla like a gnarled Torrey Pine tree clinging to the bluffs or the coarse white sand, found only here, that blankets the pocket beaches between La Jolla Cove and North Bird. Every WindanSea local has a Bear story, and most have ridden his boards at one time or another. More than 40 years ago, the Mirandon brothers designed surfboards that do not fit comfortably into the standard evolutionary timeline. Raised at WindanSea during the balsa era of the 1950s and mentored by the likes of Al Nelson, Carl Ekstrom, and Mike Diffenderfer, the Mirandons learned early on that experimentation was often more rewarding than following the status quo. Gifted with creative minds and an innate sense of design, they merged the boards of the ’50s balsa renaissance with those of the ’60s shortboard revolution: “Mr. Simmons, I’d like you to meet Mr. McTavish.…”
The story of the Mirandon’s unusual surfboards begins at WindanSea on a summer day in 1957. It was the end of the balsa era, just before the advent of the foam surfboard. Experimental board design had flourished during the balsa days, and in the ’50s it was not unusual to see the WindanSea guys out messing around on a variety of shorter boards. “My brother Bear and I were bodysurfing down at WindanSea,” says Nick Mirandon, “and after a while I went in on the beach, and saw Butch Van Artsdalen out there riding this little balsa board. It had a really wide squaretail, with two fins on it and it was very short. I was just amazed by it. I thought it was a bellyboard at first, but he took it out and started standing up on it and just ripping. I couldn’t believe he was standing up on it. Then Al Nelson was riding it—all the hot guys from WindanSea were out there riding this little two-finned board. I just thought, my God….” It was Al Nelson who had built the little dual-finned squaretail, but Al was not concerned with changing the future of surfboard design. He was merely making use of the leftover five-and-a-half-foot slats of balsa that came with the 11-foot bundles he received from his supplier. He knew that a board so short would need ample thickness and plenty of width in the tail, having been a friend of Bob Simmons, who occasionally rode short, wide boards at WindanSea before his death in 1954. “With a wide tail,” Nelson says, “Simmons’ answer was to put two fins on it…so I thought, ‘yeah, that’s what I’ll do.’ So I put two fins on it and it worked. I used to leave the thing down on the beach so people could ride it. It wasn’t that hard to ride.”
There were plenty of other interesting little boards laying around at WindanSea in those days, including Robert Patterson’s 7-foot Quigg egg, and David Chaney’s little downrailers. But it was the unusual multi-finned boards that captured the Mirandons’ imagination: “My brother and I had seen the double-finned boards that Bob Simmons had built” says Bear, “and we had seen Al Nelson’s little board. I can also remember watching Bobby Burns riding balsa boards in the seven-foot range at WindanSea, and they had two fins on them. He performed very well on them, and they were amazingly small boards for the time [around 1955]. We had also seen that Simmons had used double fins on bigger boards on quite a few occasions.” But the Mirandons would spend a few years going with the flow of conventional design before they got around to their own experiments in the second half of the 1960s. Bear celebrated his 13th birthday in 1960, and like Nick, his teenage years roughly paralleled the early years of foam. His first surfboard was a discarded balsa that he reshaped with the help of his father, who had once watched Duke Kahanamoku shape a board with a drawknife in the 1920s. “From that experience,” Bear says, “I ended up getting a number of old balsa boards—people were just tossing them because everyone was getting foam—the first 10 or 12 boards I shaped were balsa boards, and that helped me a lot as far as learning to shape.” When foam boards first appeared (despite Al Nelson and the boys’ initial rejection of it), the Mirandons, like most surfers, were instantly seduced by the easy virtue of the new material.