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SURF WIRE
May 14, 2014

Breakthroughs in Board Design: Steve Lis' Fish


By: Paul Holmes
Adding to the irony is the Fish's point of origin -- one of California's most aggressively localized surf zones -- and the fact that its innovator wasn't a 'surfer' at all, but a kneeboarder...an incredibly talented kneeboarder whose skill and imagination was fostered both in exceptional, relatively uncrowded waves and during an era that exhibited little of the bigotry shown today toward alternative forms of wave riding.

In the early 1960s, young Steve Lis was already experimenting with prone paipo boards in his local Sunset Cliff lineups, home to some of San Diego's best and most fiercely protected surf spots. Working in marine plywood, Lis, who eschewed the cumbersome longboards of the day for more intimate involvement, tried various combinations of foil, concaves and fin templates. But it was his first foam board, hewn from a cut-down longboard blank in 1967, that featured the characteristic twin-pintail, twin-keel fin design. Riding pintail kneeboards by this time, Lis noticed that his swim fins caused plenty of drag. His answer was to kneel on butcher paper while wearing his fins, then tracing the template around them to establish the width necessary to eliminate the drag. Deep, curved swallowtails reduced the area between the twin-pins, and the first Fish was spawned.

Further refinement followed, and by 1970 Lis was one of the most progressive wave-riders in the world, ripping in obscurity on the classic 4'6' x 21"x 2/1/2" twin-keeled mind machine that would go on to define the breed.

But it wasn't until Lis shaped a stand-up version for fellow Cliffs rider Jeff Ching (credited with dubbing the design "The Fish") that stand-up surfers began to take notice. The Fish's notoriety reached a crescendo at the 1972 World Contest, held at San Diego's Ocean Beach. Riding a borrowed homegrown Fish, Hawaiian Jimmy Blears took first, while David Nuuhiwa, who rode his own version of the design, took second. But not after a group of still-unnamed OB locals, outraged at what they perceived as the crass co-opting of their indigenous species, stole Nuuhiwa's favorite 'Fish' and hung it in effigy off the Ocean Beach Pier.

Given the xenophobic nature of the OB/Sunset Cliffs surf tribe this well could have been the Fish's last gasp before disappearing into regional obscurity: with the exception of Nuuhiwa and Florida's Mike Tabeling, few top surfers embraced the Fish and as the years passed kneeboarding's early-70s halcyon faded. By 1976 plenty of surfers had heard of the Fish, but not many rode one.

The evolution of surfboard design, however, is a funny thing, often favoring the random element over methodical adaptation. In this case that element was Hawaii's Reno Abellira. Reno, also a competitor at the '72 world contest, cataloged the Fish's qualities of acceleration in mushy surf, another irony considering Lis' design was initially intended for use in his area's hollow reef breaks. Headed to Australia for the 1976 Coke, held in Sydney beachbreak, Abellira shaped himself a 5'7" Fish-type twin-fin, featuring canted, flat-foiled fins and concave wings.
"At first the Aussies only snickered," wrote Abellira in a 1978 SURFER magazine article. "But in that points-for-maneuver system, and eventually in that surf (two to three foot) the board paid off to the tune of $3000."

One Aussie who didn't snicker was a young Mark Richards, a fellow competitor at the contest.

"I saw Reno...doing what I wanted to do in six-inch waves," wrote Richards in the same story. "I was so impressed with his surfing on that board that I wanted one and asked him to suggest some measurements for me, which he did."

Any student of surfboard history knows what came next. Under his talented feet, MR's hyper-maneuverable version of Reno's version of David Nuuhiwa's version of Steve Lis' Fish freed the surfing world from the stiff grip of the 7'4" winger pin, and by 1980 Richards was the most dominant contest surfer the sport had seen.

An arms race ensued, eventually won by Narrabeen's Simon Anderson, whose three-fin Thruster design resulted directly from an attempt to match MR's twin-fin maneuverability. The Thruster, of course, went on to standardize surfboard design like no innovation since foam replaced wood.

And all because of a Sunset Cliffs kneeboarder who didn't want his fins to drag.

Steve Lis currently lives on Kauai where he still handcrafts modern, multi-finned versions of his Fish design. Perhaps chuckling at a final irony, Steve surely would have noticed that, after goofing around on a Skip Frye-shaped, authentic Fish in 1992, three-time world champion Tom Curren began experimenting with shorter, wider, three-fin Thruster designs. While erroneously labeled "Fish" by the surf media, these boards triggered a slow but steady trend toward shorter, wider, more flat-rockered boards, the latest versions being ridden to great effect by the likes of 11-time world champ Kelly Slater and free-surfing phenom Dane Reynolds - both attesting to the Lis Fish's lasting, albeit obscure, influence.