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Traction Pad |
 The Largest Surfing EncyclopediaA-Z: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Advertisement
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Herbie Fletcher remembers when it started. "I'm not into leashes, and we just had paraffin wax in Hawaii in the mid '70s. When you're surfing Sunset and your wax is slick, you don't wanna know about it." There had to be a better way, and he set out to find it. What he didn't know was that he would revolutionize the bond between surfer and surfboard, inventing what has come to adorn the majority of boards in the water today. The traction pad has become a way of life for most surfers.
Surfing's greatest living inventor, Tom Morey, had developed a spray-on traction in the mid '60s, a product he called Slip-check. It never found wide appeal, leaving paraffin as the only option. Then Fletcher got in the game. "We'd tape off the board, squeegee polyurethane on the deck to get a flat coating, then salt it to create pores," he recalls of his earliest concoction. He had a surf shop in San Clemente, and he'd do a couple decks per day. His mind was still bouncing around in the "way-out '60s," so he called the invention "Astrodeck". He knew the stuff worked, but the general public wasn't buying it. However, some of his good friends, who just happened to be the best surfers in the world -- guys like Gerry Lopez, Rabbit Bartholomew, Mark Richards, Shaun Tomson, Michael Ho and Cheyne Horan-- were digging it. "Shoot," reasoned Fletcher, "we should get everybody stoked on it." By 1977, he was making sheets of the polyurethane patches, keeping them sticky with glue and transfer tape. Then came the development that put him over the top -- punk. That's right, the music/lifestyle that turned the disco establishment on its blow-dried head. "Punk was pretty heavy by then, so I made some little squares, blacks and pinks and grays, and they started going off. Pac Man, Space Invaders -- kids' stuff." The funny thing is, Herbie thought the traction would go over bigger in bathtubs, on boats and around tennis racquets, only he couldn't afford to advertise in those circles. Anyway, by the early '80s, everyone who was anyone had Astrodeck under his feet. The rip, shred and lacerate era of surfing was here, and mere wax was no longer enough. If you wanted to surf like Potter, Kong or Carroll, you bought traction. Inevitably, there soon came knock-offs. Huntington surfer Jeff Kelly started whacking out a similar patch from his garage in 1984, calling his invention Gripdeck. A couple months into it, he was perusing a surf expo and ran into Argentinian brothers Fernando and Santiago Aguerre. It seems they had their own line of traction also called Gripdeck, as well as some snazzy sandals of the same name. Kelly ending up selling them the name and changing his own company to Trac-Top, while the brothers canned their traction and focused on sandals. (They decided to call them Reef Brazil.) Kelly and partner Gary Ward focused on a softer, closed-cell foam that would prevent chafing, and the product was a hit. In 1985, they introduced the "Arch Bar," a raised strip designed to form with the bottom of your foot. Astrodeck countered with a kicktail, and the battle was on. Gorilla Grip, X-Trak, On A Mission, K-Grip, Sticky Bumps and an untold number of mom-and-pop surf-accessory companies added traction pads to their line, flooding surf shops with a daunting array of choices. Front-foot pads came and went, proving too abrasive to the torso. Every pro surfer has a signature model for one of these companies, and every grom forks over $30 bucks to stand on the same pad as his hero. There is a color and style to fit every taste, from the gaudy to the mundane. And through it all, there is still Herbie. "I still work on the product myself, dealing with the surfers and testing out new ideas," Fletcher says. "None of the other guys do that." -- Jason Borte, September 2001
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