Obviously I was not the first one to wakesurf, as surfers have been attempting to ride wakes since there has been surfers and wakes to ride. However, I’m likely one of the first to consistently pursue something that resembles modern wakesurfing, and probably like the other’s that fit that bill, I did it in relative isolation. Now most of the credit here really goes to my Dad, who being a lifelong surfer as well as a lifelong boating enthusiast had been riding surfboards behind boats since the 70’s. While he had tried all versions of the Skurfers, surfski’s and early wakeboards that emerged through the 70’s , 80’s and 90’s; he always found the greatest fun in riding a regular surfboard with a short rope at a slower speed to simulate ocean surfing. So, I grew up doing this too, but the combination of relatively small wakes and heavily rocker boards kept the idea of losing the rope just out reality until 1999. This year my parents bought a new boat, a Tige 21i, and while that thing didn’t make the biggest wake, it throws a weirdly good shaped one. Now it wasn’t just the boat. During the same year, my Dad had been teaching me how to do ding repairs and I had taken on the project of restoring a 1950’s era, 11ft long and nearly 40lbs Joe Quigg long board. When the repairs were finished I was so excited to try the board out, that we decided to take it out behind the boat on Big Bear Lake.
Low and behold, within seconds of standing up, the board caught the wake and the rope went slack, and moments later I tossed the rope and the dream was realized. Prior to this day, we had never thought to take longboards up close behind the boat because it seemed to defeat the fun of radical turning, but that day we saw the potential. Over the next few months, we gradually took out a variety of different boards ranging from longboards and mid lengths that could easily surf without the rope, to 90’s potato chips that could rip some turns with the rope, but only survive a few moments of intense pumping before losing the wake. Then for the next few years we begin stacking ballast bags in the corner to grow the wake, and finding fishy short boards that could keep up better. We went 3+ years before even hearing of other people doing it and 3 more before we actually saw another boat trying it. Somehow, our 99’ ski boat with ballast stacked in the corner seemed to keep an edge over bigger dedicated wakeboard boats that emerged through the early 2000’s and hadn’t dialed in the right blend hull shape and ballast placement for wakesurfing.
In 2003 we got one of the Hyperlite Landlock boards when they came out as the first production wakesurf board to hit the market. That was the first time we realized other people were trying to wakesurf too. That board was fun enough, but paled in comparison to what we were already doing. Such doggy turning and requiring you to ride close to the boat at much slower speeds. After that we gave up on following what other board makers were doing, as we felt we had dialed it so much better.
And the funny thing is, as I started making my own boards through the years, with no knowledge of what others in the industry
were doing, my shapes along with those of the industry gradually evolved into something very similar. I still feel like my boards have the edge over the competition, but that may be because I continue to desire a more surf-like feel. More uniquely, we never stopped riding longboards. Just like a surfer needs a longboard in their quiver for certain types of waves, riding a longboard on the wake has always afforded an equal but completely different type of fun on the wake. These boards have also been refined to more wake specific designs through the years, that are smaller and lighter than a typical longboard for better turning, but still have enough size for longboard style cross-stepping and hanging toes off the nose. Just as building and riding surfboards has influenced my wakesurf designs, building and riding wakesurf boards has influenced my surfboard designs. And through recent experimentation, I actually have made designs for both short and longboards that I find are perfect for using both on the wake and in the usual type of Southern California ocean waves.
The real fun of the story was that we did it in isolation, with no outside influences, and through random chance even recreated a similar experience to the original wake surfers of the 50’s by having our breakthrough moment riding the same type of board. We remained ignorantly blissful in our assumed superiority through most of the past 20+ years, being the only surfers on Big Bear Lake and at the north end of Lake Mead. Then over the past 10 years we’ve witnessed the gradual explosion of the industry, the giant expensive boats and the overly hyped boards. Kind of funny to watch the novelty sport you feel like you pioneered for keeping the stoke alive and bolstering your surfing skills, while living 2 hours from the coast, become taken as seriously as it is today.
Having tried to find other accounts of wakesurfing history when writing this, I came across some claims of people getting going with it in the mid 90’s, but mostly just references about bringing them to the first wakeboard event around 2004. I’m curious how similar the other’s experiences were to mine. I wasn’t able to find any footage of the early stuff though, so if anyone find some I’d love to see it. I hope to recover an old camcorder, lost in the abyss of a childhood home, and just maybe I can dig up some of the original footage of our early days , but until then you just have to humor my story.