Surfing
Surfing
After watching this film, you'll want your only surfboard to be a fish
FISH: The Surfboard Documentary features surfers like Rob Machado and Dave Rastovich and explores the impact the fish surfboard made on surf culture forever.
3 min
Fish
Look at the impact of the fish surfboard design and how it would influence surf culture 30 years later.
In FISH: The Surfboard Documentary, a film about the birth and evolution of the fish design, former pro Rob Machado admits, “I’d say 95 percent of the people that were surfing in the ‘90s were probably on the wrong surfboard.”
Two classic "fish" surfboards
© Something Kreative Studios
As it turns out, the fish – today one of the most beloved alternative boards in surfing – was invented not by a surfer, but by an eccentric, reclusive kneeboarder from San Diego, named Steve Lis. “We were kind of an anti-culture, because we came up as kneeboarders,” Lis says in FISH, which was produced, directed and filmed by Australian filmmaker Joseph Ryan. “The stand-up guys had larger egos… but they couldn’t deny what we were doing.”
FISH goes on to map the evolution and influence of the fish design, and is careful not to leave out the forgotten figures who, without them, the design might not have grown into the cultural phenomenon that it is today.
While for a time it seemed like Kelly Slater's "potato chip" surfboard designs of the 1990s would bury the fish, stylish pros like Rob Machado and Dave Rastovich brought the board back from the brink.
Because of surfers like Rastovich, the fish is one of the most popular boards today. It is is also more diverse, than ever. So popular, in fact, that even Slater rides them regularly. Like the design, FISH is a stylishly constructed film, well worth any surfboard aficionado's time.
