Stephanie Gilmore has surfed a lot of heats at Bells Beach. She’s won a lot of those heats, too. In 2018, the Australian rang the Bell for the fourth time in her career but those wins don’t even tell the full story of her success considering she had appeared in four other finals throughout her 15-plus years on tour at the time. In 2017, Gilmore put up a 16.33 two-wave heat score against Courtney Conlogue and still finished runner-up (Conlogue posted a monster 17-point heat score). In 2012, Gilmore’s final heat score was less than half a point lower than her competition, Sally Fitzgibbons, in the final. In 2015, the difference between her score in the final heat and Carissa Moore’s was just shy of three-quarters of a point. In other words, her tremendous competitive success at Bells was close to being something even greater.
Nonetheless, all those heats, all those podium finishes, and all those years of ringing the Bell included a lot of getting dialed in with the iconic right-hander. And having Darren Handley as a collaborator is a solid match for such things, having contributed to over a dozen wins at Bells throughout his own career. One of Gilmore’s magic boards was The DNA, which Handley designed for Mick Fanning.
“My first two I won on squash tails,” Gilmore told Handley about her relationship with the board. “The outline you were using with Joel (Parkinson) was where I always wanted to get.” She evolved toward roundtails over time. “I feel like they were pretty versatile. You could use them when it’s small Winki. And then even if it was Bells Bowls, you could fit your maneuvers into the face of the wave when you needed to and still draw it out.”
Gilmore explains that her evolution at Bells was different from the men for a simple reason we arguably still see on tour today: the men were called on in better, bigger conditions and the women were out competing on the smaller days. That means she’s scored a Bells heat or two on some decent days, but by her estimation never bigger than about six feet. Getting dialed with her magic board and with Bells over a CT career that began in 2007 took patience.
“(I) didn’t get to open up in the Bell until the later years of my career. I think that was when I finally got to figure out what I like to feel in a board.”
