The Gordon Woods 'tracker' design: Remembering a favourite surfboard

Back in the late 70's my friends and I shared a stringerless 'Atlas Woods' 7 foot 6 inch pintail from the 'tracker' era. It was such a good board that everyone was always after it, it just ruled in average beachbreaks compared with the little six foot singles we had.When it was flat we used to take the fin out of the finbox and ride it by towing it behind our VW beetle through the tracks in the sand dunes at papamoa, the glass job was so tough that it just scratched up a little bit. I sold it for 10 dollars, then regretted it and tried to get it back. . no way ! The fin always hummed, a clear sort of lexan job.The 'tracker boards developed from the McTavish 'plastic fantastic' V bottomed boards, instead of a heavy Vee the tail was pulled in. They were and are classic examples of narrow tailed and pintailed boards which work well in small waves. Once the boards became shorter and widths declined to the 18 and 19 inch region, the myth that pintails are only for big hollow waves became established.Atlas Woods boards in NZ were made under licence by Wayne Parkes surfboards,This board is almost identical apart from the squaretail, I'm keen to make a wooden parallel profile version, the trackers didn't have a lot of profile taper anyway as I recall. In fact we have had such a board designed since 1995, we called it the 'Superwoody cruiser' .http://www.surfresearch.com.au/00000305.html Picture from Surfresearch.com