THE OUTER ISLAND STORY

By Phil Abraham
MITCHELL RAE INTERVIEW

The Australian surfing world in the late Sixties and early Seventies saw the evolution of the short board, the migration of surfers to the North Coast, the explosion of psychedelia and the rise of the soul surfing movement. It was a golden era.
The counter culture trends of the day were characterised by drug inspired creativity, and a rejection of conventional social values. In 1969, Mitchell Rae, a hot young kid from Dee Why, found himself at the core of the country soul revolution.
He was the protégé of design innovators Glenn Ritchie and David Chidgey, a couple of older Dee Why surfers who were at the forefront of short board design development at that time.
Three decades later, Rae, located on the NSW Central Coast, is still building remarkable boards. Living in accord with country soul principles, Rae has consciously avoided any sort of promotion of himself or his product. Despite his reticence, the man and his Outer Island surfboards have created an international mystique, a reputation for innovation and excellence which few other shapers in the world have achieved. Thirty years ago, the Outer lsland crew produced boards out of such unlikely locations as surf band Taman Shud’s Newport garage, Midget Farrelly’s old Palm Beach boatshed, and later a north coast farm. They blew minds with their radical approach to board design.
While Bob McTavish was revolutionising surfboards with vee bottom progressions, and his fantastic plastic machines, the Outer Island crew was experimenting with deep concaves, pintails, hard rails and flextails. As Mitchell Rae says, “People used to just look at them and shake their heads. They looked like something out of the space program.”
The Outer Island crew blew minds with their surfing too. Gold Coast identity Andrew McKinnon remembers the first time he saw Rae surf at Burleigh. “I first saw him surfing with Glenn Ritchie at Burleigh in 1971, and I was impressed with the speed they were generating on their little concave slabs. They were carving. Mitchell was always a most impressive surfer in Bali too. A lot of great shapers have been good surfers, but Mitchell was an advanced surfer from way back. He had to prove himself at Dee Why, which was a heavy school. That gives him credibility. He speaks from real experience.
“I think he is one of the unsung shaping heroes of Australia,” Andrew continues. “Others have learnt to sell themselves, but Mitchell has always been a humble, low key guy.”
McKinnon rode a Rae flextail in the early Eighties, but it wasn’t until 20 years later than he picked up another Outer Island surfboard. He takes up the story. “I was watching a Brothers Nielsen contest semi at Burleigh last year between local David Rastovich, and Central Coast surfer Drew Courtney. Drew is an incredibly gifted surfer. He is very under-rated.
“Rasta looked like he had the semi sewn up, but then, with just a minute to go, Drew took a wave. I couldn’t help notice how fast he was going. He connected a series of insane manouevres, including a huge roundhouse cutback and finished when he hit the lip, went vertical, did an air rebound, came back down and made the wave. He blitzed Rasta.
“As Drew was walking up the beach after his semi, I noticed the Outer Island label on his board, and realised the reason for the speed of his surfing.” McKinnon had a trip planned to Indonesia, and his usual shaper was away. He ordered a couple of Outer Islands, an 8’4” and a 7’8”, with double vee concaves.
“They were two unreal boards,” he comments. “The first day I got to G-land, it was eight to ten foot. I pulled out the 8’4” and thought, no worries. I had a couple of days of incredible surf and I felt like I was charging, but I put it down to those boards. They are special and I know I’ll hold onto them forever. “And everywhere I went on that trip, everyone was saying, ‘God, those boards are going fast.’ Camel, a stand out Garajagan regular, who’s got more credibility than just about anyone at G-land, said, ‘I’ve always liked Mitchell’s boards. His lines are so pure.’ At eight foot G-land one day, a couple of Hawaiian guys from Kauai recognised the Outer Island label, and the eyes on my board. One of them remembered Mitchell from when he was a kid. At the festival of surfing at Noosa this year, everyone from McTavish down was giving Mitchell’s boards great kudos. Mitchell has never tried to promote himself, but he has a grassroots reputation all over the world. He’s paid his dues over three decades, and he’s still cutting edge,” McKinnon concludes. Rae is a great interview subject. Intelligent, articulate but understated, he has no desire to beat his own drum, but does display a conviction and commitment to his personal and professional principles that is rare in a  business where bullshit rules. Until this interview with Surf Adventures, Mitchell Rae always let his surfboards do the talking
SA: Do you think you have suffered as a result of being so extreme and uncompromising in your attitudes to surfboard design?MR: A lot of my stuff has been too futuristic for the mainstream. But that’s the way it is if you’re exploring design. You have to take new ideas to their extreme. Then maybe you’ll come back from that extreme to some central point. But the design process demands that you take things to extremes. It’s like tuning guitar strings. You go up, and then you come back a little.
My stuff has diverged from the mainstream for a long time. By and large the shaping community in the Seventies and Eighties said “you can’t have those hard rails, you can’t have deep concaves.” But virtually all mainstream boards in recent years have featured concave permutations and people are all using much finer edge control than they were.
So I feel that many of the design concepts I’ve worked with for decades have been vindicated.
SA: Dee Why must have been an exciting spot for a young surfer to be in the late Sixties.
MR: It was a magic place to grow up in. Back then it was pretty much the epicentre of surfing on the northern beaches. Anyone who was anyone in surfing then came to Dee Why at some time. Midget was there, Mick Dooley, David Chidgey, Lovedog McManus, Mac the Natural: he was a really good surfer.
SA: It must have been inspirational to grow up watching those guys surf.
MR: Very much so. On a big day at the point, you would see a lot of different approaches to wave riding. There were the old guys with a wide-legged survival stance, but I also saw the first of the hot-doggers come through and liberate surfing as they moved into vertical manoeuvres.
McTavish was down there a lot. Peter Cornish was another stand out surfer.
SA: I wonder why the focus went off Dee Why?
MR: That’s a hard question. The place has always produced a high standard of surfer. I guess they started running a lot of contests at Manly through the late Sixties, and a lot of surfers started shifting further up the northern beaches. When I first started surfing at Dee Why, going up to Avalon was a big trip.
SA: Who were the better surfers of your generation at Dee Why?
MR: Jimmy Sasse was probably the guy I surfed with most. We were chronically absent from school. I think we held the world school wagging record. I got it up to where I took a whole month off. I figured that it didn’t matter how long you were absent, as long as you had a note. I kept getting the older guys down at the beach to forge my old lady’s signature, and I’d rock up to school with a wicked suntan and crusted with salt, trying to say I’d been sick.
SA: Were you competitively inclined in those days?
MR: I used to be very competitively inclined, and I did quite well in junior competition. I made it through all the rounds of the first schoolboys event. In the final there was Mark Richards, Stephen Cooney, me, and couple of other guys. Stephen had a really good board, made by his brother Butch. It was a foot shorter than mine. He took that event out, Mark Richard was second and I was third. I did all the club events, joined Manly Pacific and did all right.
SA: That was the beginning of the country soul era, and the rejection of the competitive ethos by a lot of surfers. Did you get caught up in that trend?
MR: The whole hippy revolution was taking place, and I was one of the kids who were heavily influenced by those times. It really put a different slant on your attitude to competition. I took a completely different tack from guys like Mark Richards who went down the straight, sporting path.  I left competition behind in my teens, and I didn’t get in touch with the mainstream again until the Om Bali Pro in 1980.  To some extent I still hold to the tenets of the soul surfing era.
SA: So you walked away from the mainstream and moved first to the northern beaches peninsula, and then to the North Coast. What directions did your designs take?
MR: We were developing all sorts of stuff that was genuinely revolutionary in surfboard design. We had a different approach. People used to look at our boards and shake their heads.
SA: What characterised them?
MR: We were doing really deep concaves, pintails with really hard rails going way up the board.
SA: Surf culture was heavily associated with drug use back then. Were you a part of that?
MR: Much of our research and development was done under the influence of pure LSD and giant blocks of hash.
SA: At first you were the test pilot for Ritchie and Chidgey’s designs. How did you progress into board building yourself?
MR: People always ask you want to do when you’re a kid. I had no idea.
I just wanted to keep surfing. Back then there was no professional circuit or the opportunity to make money as a competitor. The only way to make a living out of surfing was to become a board builder. That’s what I did.
But originally, I was the junior member of the team. I was only in my teens, and my function at first was to ride Glenn and David’s designs. Glenn shaped all my boards early on until I developed the skills.
We were working out of the Peter Clarke factory in Brookvale, until 1969, when we decided we wanted to do something more pure and more based on the surfer’s approach than a business formula.
SA: The late Sixties and early Seventies must have been inspiring times for a surfboard designer.MR: Some radical design breakthroughs were made in that era. McTavish was a key figure. The first time I ever surfed Forresters was with McTavish. That was in the mid-Sixties with Paul Witzig. It was maxing at 12 feet. McTavish had just got back from Hawaii and he was in his prime. He was just carving the guts out of it on a short board. We went to The Box later the same day, and it was the first time I surfed there too. That was just an incredibly inspiring experience.
SA: Have you ever tried to ascertain the origins of any of the design initiatives you developed?
MR: As far as I can ascertain, the hard-edged down rail came from Bunker Spreckles in Hawaii. They reckon he just rocked down to the beach one day with a board with a dead flat bottom and hard rails all around it.
A lot of different people have tried to lay claim to that innovation. It was such a radical departure. Chidgey and McTavish were in Hawaii around that time, and were obviously influenced by what they saw. Back home, we’d been looking at Greenough influences like hulls, that were characterised by rolled bottoms and egg rails, boards with no traction. From there, people started looking at getting their boards planing, they started looking at rolled entry which was Greenough influenced, based on boat hull design. Then Chidgey busted one out based on the Bunker Spreckles idea – dead flat bottom, bottom curve and down rails. It was a radical departure. Then we added the concaves.
SA: Whose idea was that?
MR: I’d have to say it was Chidgey who pulled that one out of the bag. That was pre 1969. We had a board shaped like a rocket. It had a broad eight inch half moon tail and a hell concave through it with a hard rail. It was extremely revolutionary. We all rode it at The Wedge on a good swell. It had mind-boggling acceleration and drive.
SA: At the same time as you were doing concaves, others were getting into vee bottoms.
MR: That was basically a McTavish influence. They were the first departure from the rolled bottom, and the vee was a positive design progression.
It’s funny, I’ve got a lot of opposition and ridicule about concaves. Over the years, people have often rubbished them. Then they go and ride one, and they come back in and they’re all over you like a rash. Because concaves really do work. They’ve been a quest for me. I’m still experimenting with concave technology because it’s the most exciting development to happen to surfboards. There’s a lot of subtlety involved in them. Even a lot of shapers don’t understand the blending of fluid dynamics that is happening with these boards. Balancing the concaves, developing the thrust while still maintaining control over the board is the challenge.
SA: Where did the name Outer Islands come from?
MR: It was probably Chidgey’s doing. He came up with it as a result of spending time in the islands. It’s always been a really good handle, with a great mystique. I used to hand paint every individual sticker on the original Outer Island boards. I did that for a long time.
SA: What about the eye or eyes that are on all your boards?
MR: That’s a nifty thing. I got the idea from the boats in Bali which all have eyes. The eyes are a protective device against evil spirits. It animates the board. In the old days before leg ropes, your board would end up on the beach and you’d walk up to it, and there it would be with its eyes looking up at you. There was something very appealing about that to me. It’s become a cult thing. The first ones I did were kind of humanoid, X Files like. Then an old friend of mine, Ross Ellis, did this archetypal image which I’ve used ever since. The eyes represent man’s connection with the spirit world
SA: You were one of the lucky guys who found their way to Bali in the early Seventies. It’s obvious Indonesia’s waves affected your design perspective. And you must have a myriad of memories.
MR: I filled a lot of passports with Bali stamps. And we got a lot of surf. I think one highlight was a summer season, I think it was 1980, when Sanur broke overhead for more than 28 days. But we had epic waves all season at Nusa Dua, Sri Lanka and all the quality rights. Indo waves are perfect. Even the small stuff has power. So you can build really racey, fine-tuned designs for Bali. Everything you make is for optimum conditions. Back then it was so easy. There were no roads out at Uluwatu, no drink sellers. I got the tide charts from Benoa Harbor, and knew the water conditions that different breaks worked in. We had it figured out, and we got a lot of waves.
SA: Your boards always seem to have been ridden by a high calibre of surfer.
MR: In Bali, in the Seventies, Joe Engel and Thornton Fallander had a couple. They surfed them really well, but they also had some trouble. My designs were very polarised then. I was completely focused on speed, and not too interested in hot-dog manoeuvres. That’s not the case today. More recently, Luke Egan has ridden some of my boards.
But generally, you have to play the commercial game if you want to attract top name surfers to your product. If you don’t have the support of those names, it is difficult to receive credit as an innovator. But by the same token, I’ve made boards over the years for some very fine surfers, surfers who are as good as anyone on the pro tour, but surfing on another level. High calibre travelling surfers wanting quivers have been a major and most rewarding part of my business. 
SA: When did you, Ritchie and Chidgey move to the NSW North Coast?
MR: We pulled up stakes at Palm Beach after we’d been doing a lot of surfing in Bali in 1972/73. We’d also been doing a lot of surfing at Lennox and Angourie, but by some strange twist of fate, we ended up at a place north west of Coffs Harbour called Nana Glen.
SA: That is way out there.
MR: It was real hippy country. There were some respectable waves around there, but we used to drive to Angourie, Valla and some lesser known breaks. We were living on a farm making boards. It was a pretty idyllic existence. You didn’t have to make too many boards to make a living. But at that stage we were making very advanced surfboards, deep concave, hard rail pintails with chine entry and single fins.
 SA: Are you still working with these principles?
MR: My whole thrust with design has been about speed. My quest is for speed and the ability to use speed. The faster you go, the more you can do with your board. It’s all about accessing more speed quickly. My concave flex tail designs allow you to take off on a wave, fade way late and just snap it around using the recoil energy off the flex to go into warp factor through your turn, straight into the weightless part of the wave. Off one turn, you can generate great speed. Most boards require a couple of turns to get that energy out of the wave. Speed, power and the ability to do extreme manoeuvres at high speed is the key. The flex tail gives you propulsion and whip. The reaction time is instantaneous.
SA: Why hasn’t flex become more popular?
MR: One of the reasons it hasn’t been exploited in mainstream design is the cost. It’s so labor intensive, it’s just a really expensive exercise. They’re costing at least $300 on top of the base price of a board.
SA: Where did the flex concept come from?
MR: I was first exposed to it through Greenough’s kneeboards. I saw what George was riding on the north coast in the late Sixties and early Seventies. I made a couple for various people and eventually tried one standing up. You could feel the power and drive, the ability of the board to conform to the shape of the wave. They do things normal boards don’t do. Not long after that, in about 1973, I made my first stand-up flextail, a 6’9” pintail.
SA: Have you progressed their design?
MR: The most recent change I have made is to put that sealed cell rubber foam into the tail, restoring the board’s original foil and line. So they look a little more aesthetically pleasing than the early versions which were straight, glass, flex tails. It also improves bouyancy at low speed and there are no razor sharp edges.
SA: Are you still doing a lot of boards for travelling surfers?
MR: I do a lot of boards for guys going overseas, a lot of mid-range boards, 6’8” - 6’10”.
SA: Any unique qualities?
MR: The first thing I usually do with most mid-range boards is use a decent stringer, a quarter of an inch or something, and hard foam. I’m using Burford blanks, which by and large I’ve found to be extremely hard foam. Also when laminating boards for guys who are travelling, I tend to enforce the usual necessities like slightly wider laps to give the board more snap resistance.
Outer Island boards tend to outlast a lot of others. That’s due to a few processes which get the most out of materials. One is to use the chemicals within their boundaries. The board shop mentality is fast process work using a lot of catalysts – fast construction – you can end up with a board that will not stand up to the rigors of travel. Also, my skill with glassing is to get the fibre on the board with tension. If you can get a stretch factor into the fibre, so the whole board is like a drum skin, then if you press one point the fibres are loaded over the whole matrix. If you can do that you’ll get a stronger board. But I employ tricks like that through my whole range.
Although once you get into high performance boards, you’re not too worried about their longevity. At present I’m building extremely light boards for Drew with extremely tight skin, and maybe an extra rail strip to keep them in one piece for a while. But most guys want their boards to last, so I try to build them that way.
SA: Has shaping in Japan for decades been anything more than a money making experience?
MR: Japan has been a great learning experience for me. Adam Faunce, who is originally from around here, has been competing on the Japanese circuit for years with great success, and I’ve been making his boards since before he moved there. They’ll run contests in ripples over there and I’ve had to put a lot of work into making boards that will go well in really small, gutless waves.
I’ve had to come up with equipment that will allow Adam to exploit these waves, and he’s a pretty big guy. I refined my twin vee system as a result of working with Adam in Japan.
Also in Japan, I’ve had the opportunity to see a lot of other top shapers’ work. The best work I’ve seen recently in the mainstream has been Al Merrick’s boards. When I look at his boards I can see the subtle but fundamental changes he is making for each one of his team riders based on his understanding of each surfer’s qualities. And I’ve found that as a result of my work in Japan, many of the little things I’ve put into small wave boards to make them go will creep into my standard designs, even my guns.
SA: Like what?MR: Rockers in particular. I’ve spent a lot of effort fine tuning rockers, in particular the accelerated planing areas under the front foot. Often the difference between those that work and those that don’t is very subtle. It’s funny where your design influences come from. Greenough took much of his inspiration from observing ocean creatures and translating his observations of fluid dynamics into foam and fibreglass. His other great talent is his ability to articulate his concepts. In my quest, the best breakthroughs have also come from my observations of nature.
SA: As someone who has been perceived as an old school craftsman dedicated to the personal touch, how do you feel about the computerisation and mechanisation of your shaping trade?
MR: It’s here to stay, and it’s changed the industry. The concept is fine and I’ve done a few. If you spend the time to key in a perfect shape, you’ve got it there and you can do a sweet, favorite board every time. But there are drawbacks. The majority of boards are computer cut and then cleaned off by guys who are relatively inexperienced shapers. Also, you need to have the shapes over the complete range of permutations. That is, you’ve got to have a range that will cover a broad spectrum of factors, including body weight.
What is ending up in the surf shops is often a very homogenised product. The product is usually based on a mean body weight – say 70 kilos. If you are outside the norm, in weight, ability and in other areas, then it can be difficult to find the right board on the surf shop racks.
But the best current computer systems available still cannot replicate my current shapes. They can get the basics, but they can’t do the concave and the ‘control planes’ or chines. So there is still a lot of hand tuning in my boards. When you carve in the chine against the concave, a vital new line is formed, and it is beyond current technology. And it has to be remembered that the basis of all the computer technology is still a hand shaped board.
SA: What’s been your reaction to the long board boom? Some people say that’s where all the design innovations are happening now.
MR: Yes, but that’s mainly the application of short board concepts to the long board format. I went to the Noosa event this year. I made myself a mal, stuck it under my arm and infiltrated the long board ranks. They thought I was a long board rider, but I’m still a short board fanatic. For me, if the waves are anywhere near good, I want to be surfing a high performance board and getting barrelled and going fast. Wheeling a long board about isn’t my gig. But they have their place.  A lot of guys ride them really well. What’s really good about the long board scene is the number of really young guys who are just ripping on mals. There are some red-hot kids who have got all the moves, the turns, walking the board – they are great to watch.
SA: Do you regret avoiding the spotlight?
MR: The spotlight never attracted me. I’ve had a good and interesting life. I’ve ridden so many good waves, usually with only a few people around. I wouldn’t trade my life in.
SA: Are you still trying new things?MR: At present, I’m doing some strapped surfboards, I’m also building tow-in boards for Namotu Island, and I’ve been working on kite boards with Yared. The best thing about working with all this new stuff is that I get to use my package of go-fast ingredients on all those boards.