|
John Kelly
John Kelly was born in 1919 in San Francisco, California. He moved with his family to Honolulu at age four and started surfing at age six. At nine, he had a 7' redwood plank shaped by David Kahanamoku. 
In the summer of 1937 he was surfing on a south facing beach below Diamond Head on a standard, wide tail Hawaiian plank. The waves were of pretty large size and almost every wave he attempted to ride, his board would spin out, not allowing a complete drop down the face. After many long swims to retrieve the board John Kelly and friend, Fran Heath decided that something needed to be done.
“During a lunch break after our first surf session of the day, we examined our boards close up and came to the realization that there was simply too much aft planing surface for the board to hold in the wave. I decided to cut out several inches off each side of the tail of one of the boards, immediately reducing the otherwise wide plane shape to a more streamlined profile,” explains Kelly. “We ended up drawing a rolled, high rail line that reached all the way up to the flat deck. When we finished, the lower part of the board looked like a boat bottom.”
 They rode this surfboard that afternoon with the new shape showing promising results. Kelly called the new design the “narrow tail” but it ultimately became known as the hot curl. Because these surfboards performed better in big waves, many other surfers on Oahu started cutting down their surfboards like John Kelly’s new design.
These surfboards enjoyed a near two decade run. In 1949, John Kelly, with friends George Downing and Wally Froiseth, brought their hot curls up and down the California coast. This design influenced more changes to come.
|
