The Boogie Board Revolution Turns 40
By Corky Carroll.
Professor Tom Morey was busy whizzing away in his Kona Kitchen on the Big Island of Hawaii.
He had a couple hunks of Dow polyethylene foam that he was attempting to carve into something surfable with an electric carving knife and a borrowed clothes iron. He had to use pages from the local newspaper between the iron and the foam so that it would not melt into the iron and clog it up.
Finally satisfied that he had something rideable, kind of like a foam version of an air mat if you will, he took it down to his local break, slid on a pair of swim fins and paddled it out. All the local surfers were getting out of the water because the tide was getting too low and it would soon be too shallow to surf over the sea urchin-infested coral reef. But, Tom figured, it would be no problem with this finless foamy flyer.
Right off the bat he found that he could bend it and shape it to the wave and take a hard angle. And it fit into the curl of the wave very nicely. In short, he was stoked!
"As I knelt in the sand after that first ride I realized that for the first time in years of surfing, I had actually felt the wave, rather than being mushed down in it as in bodysurfing, or suspended above it as on a board,'' he recalled. "Instead this thing gave me the feeling of the wave's contours."
Tom went on to say, "Wow! This could really turn into something! Maybe I could even earn a living with it!"
Shortly after that fateful day, Tom wandered into the Hobie shop in Dana Point with an armful of these funny-looking pink foam belly boards. I was working that day and still remember it well. He was grinning ear to ear and telling me that these are "the wave of the future, Boogie Boards." That was the birth of the Morey Boogie...
To read the rest of of Corky's tale head to the Orange County Register website here
