OVERVIEW BY MARK INGLEBY

Flexi-time! That shining pearl in the otherwise dark world of those of us who are terminally employed, suffering in job situations that stifle our chances of ever being at the beach when the surf turns on. That little gem that moves you one rung up the ladder, allowing you to look down your nose at the weekend warriors, stuck in the 9-5 hell that consigns them to living out their surfing fantasies in crowded, weekend, onshore slop. Ahh yes . flexi time maybe that's what it means to you, but that is certainly not the way Mitchell Rae sees it.
Mitchell is a Dee Why boy who was sucked into the vortex of Australian surfings epicentre in the late '60s and early '70s. Brookvale was the centre of that universe and Dee Why only one planet away. Flexi-time, yes, we'll get back to that concept, but first some physics. Nothing in the universe can be treated in isolation. Bump into an object and your course is changed, even a close encounter with a foreign body can shift your orbit like a star. When it came to stars, Brookvale had them all at that stage surfing when the waves were good and working odd hours to meet production deadlines. If ever they write a history of Australian workplace practices Keyos, Dillons, Bennetts, Shanes and other surf factories could rightfully claim to be the fathers of flexi-time.
The stars that influenced Mitchell the most were Glynn Ritchie, who taught him lo shape while working at Peter Clarke Surfboards, and Peter Cornish, who was working at Shane Surfboards at the time. Cornish also used to take Mitchell on surf trips to other beaches. Mitchell managed to get away up the Coast, camping at Lennox and Angourie where he encountered his greatest design influence in the form of a foreign body by the name of George Greenough. George was the godfather of flex. Feel the foils, feel the flex, look to nature for perfection in design. Mitchell digested it all and to this day he feels it is just as valid. "Most boards have an amount of flex, but it's not necessarily
in the right place or in the right amount Emulate nature. Animals change their shape and body positions to perform different tasks. Birds pull wings in during high-speed dives, fish sweep fins in and out while manoeuvnng, so why shouldn't a board do the same. Flex is the best way to give an inanimate object life. It allows the surfer to change the formula while riding the wave."
Mitchell believes that a board should have minimal flex under the front foot and maximum under your back foot. "Back-foot pressure achieves a variable rocker curve, therefore a different turning arc." A second variable is also achieved on his current swallow-tail models and that's torque, or twist. The inner rail of the board has a tighter rocker than the outer rail through a turn. Torque was not as evident in his 70s pintail boards, however, both models benefitted from stored energy. "Release the back-foot pressure and the tail unloads the energy. The slingshot effect propelling you out of your turns."
I've ridden a few of Mitchell's flextails over the years and they always seem to surf short for their length, and they make late takeoffs easier. When Mitchell and Glynn were together under the Outer Island label their commitment to quality was obvious. I know that they would often shape two identical boards so that they could both watch and feel the way a board design worked, and their glass jobs have stood the test of time. The 70s pin in this article is the board Mitchell rode in the 1980 OM Bali Pro. He made it to the semis and was eventually beaten by joe Engel. It's an outside the square time-capsule, with extreme down rails and full rice bowl concave (Mitchell's own words). He quips, "You got a free set of chopsticks with each one of these boards".
I doubt that Mitchell has ever been trapped by the 9-5, and flexi-time has served him well. The legacy of Glynn's tutoring lives on in the finally crafted boards and innovative construction methods Mitchell employs today.

I'd say that it is good to be on the outer.