A CROOKED PATH

Deep within the DNA of nearly every surf-board ever made, there has been a single unchanging rule: The Rule of Symmetry. It’s a sacrosanct law that has guided the hands and planers of board builders for the last hundred plus years of modern surfing. Longer, even, if you include the ancient Polynesian craftsmen carving boards from koa wood using flaked stone. Lengthwise from the center, their boards were beautifully symmetrical from tip to tail, save for knots and grain in the wood—a task devilishly difficult to accomplish with rudimentary tools. That their boards were in balance physically and aesthetically clearly mattered to the world’s first shapers. Even the Peruvian artisans weaving their reed surfboats called Caballito de Totora, thousands of years ago, were careful to shape their craft to a pleasing symmetry. Regardless of length, width, thickness, bizarre bottom contours, performance characteristics or eccentric fin placement, the rule of symmetry has always applied to surfboards—still does today, in fact.

Aesthetically, it’s irresistible. The very notion of human beauty is oriented around symmetry—the more symmetrical the face, the more beautiful the person. Symmetry is balance. Our eye craves it. It’s deeply satisfying. Perhaps that genetic pull toward balance is why the same principles of symmetry apply to surfboard construction. As you set out to build one, it’s intuitive, natural: Make each side as the other. But, a wild question: What if everything we thought about this rule was wrong when it comes to surfboard building? What if the long-sought-after next phase of surfboard design, stagnant since the thruster was developed 40-ish years ago, is to reject the idea of symmetry altogether and to normalize what has until now been considered fringe? After all, the one board-design constant that has persevered since the first human built a