Daniel was wandering around watching me shape surfboards since he was in nappies,” says Mark while we stretch out on rocks post surf at the Point.
There was nothing out of bounds and there were no rules. “From Al Byrne’s channels to McCoy’s Lazer Zaps to twinnies – we just grew up through that whole change and we were just doing everything we could. “The area was just fizzing with everything,” says Mark. It was nothing to ride something at Broken Head and snap it in the tube, go home, shape another one and come back to the Point the next day to test it. Mark says he and Dan “cycled through every design you could think of: singles, twins, concaves, no-nose thrusters. The Byron-Ballina area was then, and still is, at the forefront of design experimentation. Mark is an unconventional man and the family compound, a sprawling hippy-type affair nestled in rainforest at the base of Broken Head was about as far from the typical nine-to-five urban upbringing as you could get.
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The upbringing was, how to put it, unorthodox. No, you could say he’s been groomed for this for a long time, maybe since birth. He’s not some dude who, with a flare for marketing and a partner who could build a website, learnt the intricacies of AKU shaper before he could swing a planer. And Mark’s enjoying every second of his son’s success.ĭan’s position at the vanguard of surfer-shapers and shaper-designers, somehow who is as comfortable flaring fins along the coping as they are experimenting with the possibilities of shape and the limits of space age materials, isn’t an accident. Hit the big-time with Firewire and his collaborations with Slater. Stretched out across a rock beside a cave-like clump of pandanus palms the father of Daniel Thomson, Mark, is baking like a lizard in the winter sun, a look of deep contentment etched across his face. His brain was strong and he knew what he wanted but the hands couldn’t translate what was in his head. And I know it works because I just spent an hour watching Daniel put it all over the six-foot walls roping down the Point. It looks fast with a ton of control built into the engine room. This one has the parallel outline with a pulled in tail and a quad setup. There hasn’t been anything as radical in form and concept as the “Modern Planing Hull” since the shortboard revolution. Something that justifies the term work for a shaper/designer, maybe Australia’s best, certainly the most innovative. Under the arm, some new foam-and-fibreglass creation has been put on the test track. Peddling a bike along the dirt track underneath the whistling she-oaks beside the frogs croaking in the swamp that lays just behind the basalt boulders of Lennox Point. What are you up to? Making an honest living somewhere? Trading your time/labour/expertise in exchange for a handful of shekels to help pay for the sky high cost of living near the ocean?ĭan “Tomo” Thomson is at work too or at least riding home from work. Monday morning a couple of weeks ago, late winter to be precise. Life outside the mainstream work-a-day culture.
Designer of boards for Kelly, Dan Thomson, and the influence of his pops, Mark…īike.
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