There are two board specifications for taking part in the Burleigh Boardriders Single Fin Festival. First, your board must have been made before 1985. Second and most obviously, it has to be a single fin. Check those two boxes and boom, you’re set.
There’s undoubtedly something cool about digging an old board out of somebody’s garage and bringing it back from the dead. Watermarks, sun damage, cracked glass and all. I’m not going to pretend I’m old enough to know what it was like when thrusters started taking over the world and became the only board anybody would put under their feet. I’d imagine surfing as a whole grew pretty vanilla over time. And that’s exactly why something like the Single Fin Classic is so refreshing. In any random year you can find anybody from Mick Fanning to Occy to former MotoGP World Champ Wayne Gardner cruising a dilapidated, beat up, barely floating single fin they dug out of a garage. So here’s Joel Parkinson’s 2017 contribution to the annual celebration. It might make you want to find something with a couple less fins before your next session.
