The Surfers Journal
Light / Dark
Eggs, hulls, and midlengths: At their core, they’re Transition Era–inspired shapes with relaxed, full outlines and lengths somewhere between 6’6″ and 8’0″. Not P-51 Mustangs and not B-52s.
The resulting surfing is both conventional and groundbreaking. Skip Frye gliding at the Point. Devon Howard styling through Malibu. Torren Martyn deep and committed at Nias. Joel Tudor perched in a Pipe tube, or banging off-the-tops at Cardiff. It’s classic and clean, like a well-fitting watch.
Timeless, eggs have remained a constant in lineups since their debut, inspiring cult-like followings, and their disciples have continued to refine and push the designs for decades. However, recent years have proved a renaissance for the egg and its various iterations—a product of an increased interest in “alternative” shapes, the declining influence of competitive surfing, and a renewed attention and commitment to trim, deep bottom turns, and drawn-out lines.
The following pages examine these designs through the individuals—both the shapers and the pilots—who have played an integral role in the egg’s inception, development, and enduring popularity.
—CH
The first Egg, I probably made in 1969. I had another shape that was kind of a speed shape, you know—the nose was pulled in a little bit.
Then I stuck the egg tail with the speed-shaped nose, and then it looked like an Egg. That first one was 7’6″.
The predecessor to the Egg was a vee bottom that I’d made. I made a template and sawed it around. I sawed the tail right through the glass. It was a yellow board, but I hung green glass over the tail and the nose. That board was, like, unbelievable, man. The vee was in the middle, and the nose and tail were flat. So, you could stand over the middle and just carve these big turns, but you could also pivot on the tail. It was the board that I probably did the best on in competition. That was in ’68.
See, the modern roundtail came out of Australia, right after the vee bottom. It was the era where boards went short, like ’67, ’68. I always watched what the Australians were doing. I’d read their stuff. That was the beginning of it, you know. A few of us Americans went down on a trip to Australia—it was the Windansea Surf Club who went down—and we had a competition. Then we brought it back, and it just went ape. By 1970, they were full on.
The best one I had was a little green egg, 6’3″. It was “Green Eggs and Ham.” That egg was so good, man. Nine-inch single-fin. And Steve Seebold shaped this thing I called “Eggbold.” Seebold, Eggbold. It was a purple egg, 7’3″, single-fin, and it was made out of real soft foam. The tail kind of worked down into a concave. The tail would flex. That thing would torque and launch. It was unbelievable, man. I rode the crap out of that thing.
They’re overlooked as a shape. Most people want something sleeky and pointed, but the egg is like—you’ll outperform all those boards in most surf. It’s just the roundness. The roundness is so free. Eggs, for maneuverability and the whole thing, man, are hard to beat for everyday surfing.
Skip’s eggs were more of a glider design. And then we took that design and made it a little more
high performance—we made the nose and tail about an inch and a half difference, so the nose didn’t get in the way. We all loved Skip’s boards. It’s just that he had a certain style—he had Skip style. He was super smooth. We were contest guys and had to go a little more vertical. We had to do things a little more aggressively. So we thought, “How can we encompass some more high-performance feel into a surfboard design that was pretty conservative?”
The Australian boards—they called them “Stubbies”—they had a really wide, full nose and a pulled-in tail, and they kinda pushed water. That design worked better at a pointbreak. And Greenough surfed those pointbreaks up in Santa Barbara—you could see him work the thing down the line, right in the curl. But when you’re riding beachbreaks, they didn’t work. With the round bottom, they just didn’t get up on plane enough. So we modified that. The Australians’ [Stubbies] were more high performance. I picked up on some of that. And then, because of our conditions, I flattened the bottoms out and gave the boards more rocker, and I pulled the tail in to make them work better in more high-performance situations when you needed a little tighter tail. So I took Skip’s influence and the Australian influence.
The board tends to smooth you out. You have to plan ahead. You can’t cheat. It forces you to look at the wave in a different way. You see longer, bigger chunks of it, rather than a short little pocket.
When I taught my son how to surf, I made him ride bigger boards, and I started him out on eggs. I worked him down 2 inches at a time. So he’d get a board, ride it for two or three months, and then I’d chop off 2 inches. And then another one, chop off 2 inches. In the long run, it gave him more of a powerful, smooth surfing style. He can skip a month and then go out and surf the same he did the month before because his style is tried and true. It’s a down-the-line pumping motion with big cutbacks and big bottom turns. Real simple but smooth and graceful. The board he started out on wouldn’t allow him to whip it around and cheat. He had to learn to turn it.
The difference between a hull and an egg: Every surfboard is a hull, essentially. You either have to have curve down the stringer, which is through the rocker, and the bottom is flat, or you have very little curve down the stringer and, instead of longitude curve, you have it going lateral across the bottom. You can only have so much curve in a board.
I think people would identify the hull as the board that has a flatter rocker out the back and rolled forward. And an egg has a natural rocker with a flat bottom. They both look the same. I always laugh when people say my board, the Vaquero, is an egg, because it really is not. It’s a hull. But they look the same—you can’t tell. You got the same outline—a full, relaxed outline—and that comes from the longboard era.
So an egg and a hull are first cousins.
A traditional egg has a light, natural rocker and essentially a flat bottom and a low, soft rail. It’ll have an edge in the back and a low, soft rail forward. They’re very neutral, they’re really easy to ride, and they’re really fun, which is why they call them “fun shapes.”
With a displacement hull, although all boards are hulls, the main difference is that because you have less rocker out the back end, it forces the board to drive more across the wave. And you roll the bottom, so instead of having a down, soft rail, the rails are down in the tail and they’re raised up to the deck as they arrive to the nose. The bottom is flat in the tail to rolled forward.
What that does is when you lean into a turn, the straight bottom is driving you across the wave, and the rolled, forward section puts the board on rail and keeps it up there. It stays on the rail for a long time because the board doesn’t want to come back to the center. So a hull is going to have more of a fully engaged rail and a longer-drawn turn, where you’re more down in the water and more connected to the wave. You’re more in the wave than skimming, doing smooth, rounded-out turns on top of the water, driving through it. It’s a more connected experience, which is why I’m really drawn to them. It’s the feeling that you get from it. You feel like a million bucks, even though it doesn’t look like you’re doing anything.
There were the egg guys, and then there were the hull guys, of which there were very few. I’m one because of Greenough, so making a flat-bottomed egg was—I don’t want to say the wrong word, but you wouldn’t even consider doing that, because where we lived in Santa Barbara, you have these waves that are whipping around the corner. They are down the line, high pocket, and you need a lot of across-the-wave speed. Whereas an egg was made for waves that are coming more straight in. They’re rolling, and they’re softer. And the hulls would probably feel sluggish in those kinds of waves because they’re made for a hollow wave. The boards that rode really well in those waves had way less rocker. All of our waves require you to get your ass down the line.
“You feel like a million bucks, even though it doesn’t look like you’re doing anything.”
I moved to Northern California in 1980, just before thrusters and the whole world went upside down. I just loved hulls. I’d made flex-tail single-fins, maybe a dozen of them, in the ’70s. Not too many of them. But I made myself a 7’9″ vee-bottom outline—like, a really round nose and a wide-arc tail. I made it a flex tail, so the last 8 inches of the board had flex, and I glassed on a Volan fin. The flex pattern in the fin matched the flex pattern in the tail. And so super foiled, rolled bottom.
I surfed that board at 4 Mile in ’83 or ’84. There were maybe, like, six guys out. I was out on a day that was pretty good size, a couple feet overhead. Green waves with the sun shining through the back. Beautiful surf. And I’ll never forget, probably one of the greatest turns I ever did was on that board: a bottom turn down in the bowl. That thing was on the rail, and it just had this driving acceleration through this turn that felt so good, I’ll never forget it. I wish I still had the board.
“You feel like a million bucks, even though it doesn’t look like you’re doing anything.”
The first one that came into my life was a 7’9″, what we now call a Massive. Essentially, a fuller nose outline, rounded tail. The board had channels and was a twin-fin—a little different to the traditional egg and midlengths. Funnily enough, that board wasn’t originally shaped for me. It was shaped for a mutual friend who’d recently had a hip operation and wanted to get back in the water and just be out there. He didn’t end up riding the board, because he wasn’t up for it. At the time, I was riding really short fishes—little boards.
I got my hands on it just before a trip to South Africa. I got to ride it out at J-Bay, and that’s where my whole world opened up. The waves were pumping—there was a lot of water moving.
It was 10 foot, big roll-throughs. It was really hard—unmanageable—to even get out on a smaller board and paddle against the rip. So I just took the big board out, and I could do these big, great, wide paddles back [and] just get to surf a different part of the reef and point than other people. It was a significant moment in my surfing life. It put this whole new aspect of surfing into my life that I guess I’d been missing. It gave surfing a whole new path for me—just being able to approach waves differently and have a lot of fun, really. It was hard to go back to a smaller board after that.
I really like that easy transition from rail to rail on a twin-fin. The outlines are somewhat similar to a single-fin. When you imagine surfing from one side to the other, there’s always one fin in the water. I also tend to surf a little more front-footed, so I think two fins work in my favor. And they’re fast, pretty forgiving, and can handle exceptionally in quality, hollow waves.
I love the idea of just traveling with one or two boards. I think stripping it back and simplifying—just having one or two boards in your life at a time—is probably better. Your surfing gets more tuned in. Some of the most memorable trips I’ve been on, I was limited to boards that I wouldn’t traditionally ride.
Simon Jones is such an incredible shaper. He explores so many different theories and designs. These days, nothing is really new. It’s just sort of revisiting concepts and ideas of other people that are doing the same thing. They’re all sharing ideas—not copying each other, but seeing how other people surf. It’s like a give and take. We’re just learning as we go. It’s never finished. It’s always evolving. There’s no perfect board, ever. Because the waves are always changing. So it’s just up to the person who’s riding them.
The Transition Era shapes all morphed into certain types of boards because of the areas where we were surfing. San Diego led to Skip and Tony Staples and some underground guys. And Malibu had Greg Liddle and Tim Bowler and all the surfers from that era.
The San Diego guys leaned towards what Skip was doing. Narrower noses, not as hull of a bottom—kind of a combo. And Skip’s boards worked better down there. Where the Greenough stuff that we were inspired by was a little more extreme on the hull. We had more refined waves to work with, like Malibu and Rincon and the Ranch. But I think all those boards work anywhere if you’re dedicated to them. I had a stringerless 7’1″. It was a board we call a GL/PB. It’s got a soft-arc tail on it, and the nose isn’t quite as wide as a Death Machine. I used to add maybe a quarter to half inch more rocker in the tail for me, because I’m goofyfoot. And riding hulls goofyfoot is a whole other—I mean, I grew up surfing Malibu and Rincon, so you either learn to do it backside, or you’re not going to surf. So I forced myself to do it and figured it out.
I think they feel good for certain people that aren’t interested in going out and looking like a monkey with its ass on fire but instead are interested in surfing for the feeling of the wave and trying to surf smoothly. I think that’s why it stuck.
“I think they feel good for certain people that aren’t interested in going out and looking like a monkey with its ass on fire.”
When you go through the thruster era, man, those boards were—I rode them too, when I was young. They’re so back-footed. The thruster will really be known as one of the most stagnating designs. I mean, how long have the guys that surf contests been riding thrusters? Thirty years now? To me, it’s boring. I mean, I appreciate good surfers no matter what, but…
“I think they feel good for certain people that aren’t interested in going out and looking like a monkey with its ass on fire.”
Why are we surfing? Are we surfing to rip? Are we surfing to destroy something? That’s not why I’m surfing.
Donald Takayama made me a Takayama Egg. It had kind of a silly logo, like a little duck coming out of an eggshell, like Donald Duck. I just got really hooked on that board. It was a tri-fin with glass-on large side fins. The center fin was the same size, but it was adjustable. The Takayama Egg is a long-standing design that Donald had in his line since the ’80s, but I think it existed sooner than that in different forms. It’s a Skip Frye–style egg. It just has a very similar outline. They’re pretty balanced. The Takayama outline, I feel it’s even more balanced than the Skip one.
I don’t ride a midlength because I want to go straight and cruise. That’s not interesting to me. I come from a longboard background, primarily, so I have a very good understanding of longer rails and trim and timing. The longboards I rode in the ’80s and ’90s were primarily two-plus-one high-performance boards. We were trying to emulate shortboarding, but we thought, “The cool thing is, we can noseride,” so it was like shortboarding-plus. In my mind, when done in a way that I liked, there was a beauty to it.
It looked like a type of surfing you would see in the ’70s if you turned on Cosmic Children, when everybody was riding a long-rail board of some kind. It either had a full nose—maybe it was an egg—or maybe it was a Dick Brewer–style gun, but all of them were doing similar things. They were putting a lot of rail through the water. There was a dance. They were on top of, like, a ball bearing. It had a really beautiful flow to it.
High-performance longboarders were continuing that line. The shortboard surfers had abandoned it. They were attacking the lip in a more vertical, up-and-down manner. A lot of high-performance longboarders would attempt to do that, but it was just unwieldy. It was a lot of board, and it was realistically a lot more horizontal surfing and redirects and utilizing high lines and trim.
Then, later on, came Joel Tudor’s influence. It’s just hard to deny. He just kept banging on about traditional logs. And then a lot of movies came out from 1999 to 2010 that reinforced traditional longboarding. I always liked it, so I embraced it even more. I put aside the two-plus-one longboard, and instead I got that fix through a midlength.
Back in the mid-’90s, Donald gave me one of those eggs, and I went, “Whoa. Everything I want to do on the two-plus-one longboard, it’s so much better and sharper and exciting on this.” I had this two-board system: Head-high and under, ride a single-fin; head-high and over, ride a midlength. So, as the years went on, it was just, “How could I refine that ride? How could we refine the feeling and the sensation of it?”
If you’re lacking style, a midlength actually works against you. The board works if you ride the board the way it’s meant to be ridden. It forces you to have style because it’s “less is more” with these boards. It can be a quiet type of surfing, but what excites me about riding them is pushing them as far as I can without shortboarding.
I started learning about eggs when I was 12. Someone gave me a VHS copy of Pacific
Vibrations. There’s a particular part where Rolf Aurness surfed Cottons, and it’s psychedelic—the footage is all fucking crazy. I literally called Donald [Takayama] after I saw it. I was like, “Holy fuck, Rolf Aurness.”
I started riding for Donald in the summer of ’88. He gave me his 6’4″ egg that summer. Then I just always had one. In the summer of 1990, I had a quad egg. Devon Howard actually got to borrow it, and he was like, “That one’s fucking crazy.” The light was always on, right? And then, growing up watching Skip—because you’d see Skip around town, riding eggs—his eggs were bigger. He was riding 8’8″s and 8’9″s and 9-foots. One egg was 9’3″. But it looked like a 7’6″ the way he rode it.
It’s maybe the most user-friendly surfboard in existence. Longboards are hard to ride. They’re big and clunky, and they’re limited in maneuverability. Whereas an egg, you get on it and you’re like, “Well, that was nice.” I’ve never heard anyone ride one and complain about it.
It’s just such a practical design. It falls into George Greenough’s shit, where he’s like, “You don’t need a pointed nose. That’s just some aesthetic bullshit that makes no difference. You can put a round nose. It does the same thing.” I just like the round nose because I like the area under my chest. I hate narrow, pointed noses because you go to paddle and there’s no fucking area, and you feel like you’re always sinking. Which is cool, if that’s what you’re into. But for me, I don’t want to miss waves. I’ve never had ears on the board that hindered me—I rode them at Pipeline for 30-some years. The idea is to fucking fly like a bird, you know?
In the late ’60s through mid-’70s, I was riding California guns. Everybody was into that. Everybody wanted to be like the Hawaiians and ride those things.
I borrowed an egg from a friend of mine, Bob Berney. He had a bunch of Skip Fryes, and he had this 7-foot one that I really liked the looks of. It was the summer of 1975—a really nice, hot summer day. The waves were kinda small. I went out, and on the first wave, I went to turn it and fell on my face. And so the next wave, I took off at an angle, and I noticed that the thing was super fast down the line, super fun, but I couldn’t cut it back.
The next day, I went and got a blank and did one with a lot more rocker, and I pointed the nose out. That worked a lot better. So, after riding the board for a while and coming into winter, I took it up to PB Point. We were walking out on the rocks, and all the PB guys out there asked, “What the heck is that thing?” I had to think fast. I told them it was an egg. They said, “That’s not an egg. It’s pointed.” I said, “Well, it’s a speed egg!” I don’t know if I heard that someplace or it just came to my head, but that’s the first time I said it. It seemed like everybody called them speed eggs after that.
Right around ’82, when the tri-fin came out, I had a 7’2″ speed egg with a single-fin. I ground down the back fin and glassed on three fins, and it was all over. I never went back to the single-fin. It rode so good. I’d let people borrow them, and they wouldn’t give them back. I’d have to go hunt them down. Then, by the mid-’90s, I started putting four fins on them. Now I mainly ride them with four fins, but tri-fins for bigger days.
The one that was a magic carpet is hanging in my garage. It was built in 2000. It’s a 7’1″ quad-fin. I rode the thing into the ground. I must have rode it for five years. The deck’s all caved in. It has no life left in it. I’ve just been making the same thing over and over again, just doing a little bit thicker in the middle as I’m getting slower.
When you start getting into your late fifties and sixties, it boils down to wave count and how much fun you’re having without getting frustrated. And that’s what the egg and speed eggs are all about, without having to go to a longboard and trying to paddle out on days where it’s 5 or 6 foot.
You can’t go wrong with an egg. It’s just a timeless outline. I’ve made mine a little narrower, and I try to not have too much forward ear in it. I want it really balanced. You look at the outline and your eye doesn’t stop anywhere. It’s just the smooth, flowing curve of the outline and the bottom.
I’ve taken the San Diego egg, which is a really nice outline, and I’ve done them in channel bottoms, put little different tails on them, short ones, long ones—all that kind of stuff. I stayed with the same kind of basic outline inspired by Mr. Frye, but I’ve kind of tuned mine in with the rockers. I like a relaxed entry rocker. And then, with the tail, I like that last 20 inches to come up a little bit, so it fits in the wave. Performance-oriented.
The surface area in a board is a big thing. With the egg, you’ve got that area in the tail, and when you’re paddling, you can feel the wave grabbing that tail and pushing you right into the wave. I like a board that catches waves, because if you’re not catching waves, you certainly aren’t surfing. I think the egg will always be around. It goes back to just being a good utility board. You can pretty much ride it in anything.
[Feature image: Egg pilot and shaper Tony Staples was all in on the round boards. Ripping at the Shores and working from his shop in Eden Gardens, he refined the egg, leveraging his experience at Gordon & Smith working on the originals with patient zero (Skip Frye) as well as co-developing the Modern Machine. Photo by Craig Stecyk]
Dig this slice of The Surfer's Journal? We've got a lot more stacked for you.
The Surfer’s Journal is made possible with sponsorship from:
