Bob McTavish
Bob McTavish
www.mctavish.com.au
There is a lot of Bob McTavish in Surftech, and a lot of his surfboards. Bob McTavish was the brains behind the shortboard revolution coming out of Australia in the late 60s. Thirty years later, in the late 90s, McTavish took a respectable run at the dangerous business of cloning surfboards with his Pro Circuit Boards. It was some of his McTavish's successes with PCBs and some of his failures that inspired Randy to take on Surftech. And now Surftech and McTavish are working together to produce ????
McTavish was born in Mackay, northern Queensland and took to the sea completely by the age of 18, exploring the endless miles of good surf along the coastlines of New South Wales and Queensland. McTavish was so keen to see the world that in 1962 he and another Australian stowed away on a ship bound for Hawaii, and got in a month of surf on the North Shore before they were transported back to Australia. One of the few work opportunities for a committed surfer-just as it is today-was surfboard building. McTavish's natural tool skills and curiosity led him into board design, a skill matched by few people worldwide. In 1965, he hooked up with Nat Young and George Greenough on a trip to Noosa. This resulted in Young's extraordinary thin-railed, high-aspect-finned board dubbed "Magic Sam." Nat Young rode that board at the 1966 World Contest in an era-bending clash between longboards and shortboards. Young won, on a McTavish design.
While working for Keyo Surfboards in Sydney, McTavish produced the first true vee-bottom boards, short- and broad-tailed, which he named Fantastic Plastic Machines. On a trip to Maui in 1968, he and Young rode the vees at Honolua Bay, showcasing the flipside of a great design debate that went on for many years-what worked better: the vee or Dick Brewer's mini-gun? A meticulous record keeper, McTavish kept notebooks of information on his design work, only to destroy them later in an attempt to shed his ego after a conversion to Krishna. By the mid-'70s, he'd been married, divorced and was living at Byron Bay on the NSW north coast, designing the first production swallowtails.
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