I don’t remember when I first heard the name Mike Hynson. It was probably a caption in Surfer Magazine, which in the ’60s was a bi-monthly publication. Other than Surfer, the only other media were the surf films that rolled through town a few times a year.
And Hynson was in those too, most notably as the co-star of the best surf film of all time, “The Endless Summer.” From La Jolla to Hawaii, Hynson was at the top of the class as a surfer and a board maker. His specialty as a surfer was the bottom turn, something made possible by the unique boards he built.
One Hynson photo in particular stands out in my mind. In it, he is laying his board over on rail on a good-sized Hawaiian wave. I had never seen anyone turn that hard in person, and always wondered how he did it. Roughly half a century after Mike carved his initials on that aquatic wall, I asked him about it.
“I made that board super thin and found that it turned better than anything I had ever ridden,” he said. Of course, there was more to it than that. It took someone with Hynson’s unique abilities to push a board that hard. He was on to something, and the rest of us quickly followed.
We lived in the inland town of Montebello where all things surf filtered down to us through the town’s best surfer, Gordon & Smith team rider Darryl Diamond. He informed me that the G&S Hynson model was thinner and therefore made turning easier.
In the mid ’60s I bought a used Hynson Model, which went by the alternate name the “Red Fin” because those single fins were, you guessed it, red. The board was far thinner than anything I had previously ridden, and the rail was sharp, what they called “knifed.”
From the jump, this board was faster than other boards I had ridden. When I first tried turning it, the rail dug, and I fell. That happened again and again, until, in frustration, I laid into the hardest turn I could muster and felt the board come to life.
My surfing took a quantum leap on that board, and I kept it until it was stolen a year or so later. It hardly mattered, however, because by then boards had dropped several feet and many pounds and Hynson was again in the business of refining them.
He concentrated again on the board’s rails, something that according to many, including Pipeline King Gerry Lopez, opened the door to tube riding at places like Hawaii’s Banzai Pipeline. Once the down rail caught on, it opened the surfing world to the idea of hydrodynamics.
All of the surfboards I own, and nearly every surfboard on the market today, features a modification of Hynson’s down rail. Because of it, water releases from the board rather than clinging to it. Sorry for getting so technical.
All I really mean to say is that next time you ride a wave and hit a satisfying turn, you might consider that it was made possible, in part at least, because of the innovative mind of Mike Hynson.
Mike Hynson is heavily featured in the book, “Windansea: Life. Death. Resurrection.” Hynson, along with other Windansea standouts including Carl Ekstrom, Joe Roper, Debbie Beacham and Hank Warner, is invited to attend a reading of the aforementioned book at D.G. Wills Books in La Jolla at 7 p.m. this Jan. 8. Hope to see you there.
