Zack Flores found a Steve Lis single fin and rode it at the wave it was made for. Photos: YouTube//Screenshot
Steve Lis is generally considered the creator of the fish. His shapes are the stuff of legend, and Zack Flores got his hands on one that was buried in a random house in San Fransisco for years. But it wasn’t a fish. It was an old single fin from the early ’70s that was shaped for one wave and one wave only: Black’s.
“I’m not really sure where it came from or how it ended up in some building up in San Francisco, but that’s how it was found,” Flores explains. “In the surfing world, it’s like finding a Ferrari… I’ve only surfed it maybe three times, and it’s pretty sick. It’s pretty insane. We’re going to go and surf it on the wave that it was made for in the conditions that it was made for, and we’ll see how it goes.”
As the history goes, the fish changed Lis’s whole way of shaping, but for a very select few, he’d dip his hands back into the single fin game.
“After the fish blew up, Steve stopped shaping single fins in general for people because he didn’t like them,” Flores says in this video from LogRap. “There was a group of 10 dudes — apparently; this is what I’ve been told — who surfed Black’s, and they were the only people that he would shape these single fins for.”
The board in the video is a beautiful surfboard to be sure, but it would take a certain kind of surfer to ride it properly. Luckily, Flores is that type of surfer.
