In original museum condition, an iconic surfboard, one of a kind collectors item, and a living part of New Zealand's rich surfing history. This Dragon Board has been featured in Slide Magazine, Australian Amateur Boatbuilder magazine, Pacific Longboarder magazine, and New Zealand's Swell TV when ridden at the 2002 New Zealand nationals at Raglan.
Since 2003 the board has been stored in a temperature controlled surfing museum.
The design is a development of the highly successful Future Primitive 12 footer, and is a return to the displacement tailed pintails of antiquity and more recently Tom Blake's hollow wooden boards of the 1930's. The 13'9" length as chosen as a tribute to Tom Blake's legendary 13-9 'Lifeguard' model
" Roy Stewart's colossal artistic personality, design genius and unflinching commitment to universal hydrodynamic principles are applied relentlessly in his quest for Pure Surfing.
He has the courage to question and distill the spirit of surfing and understand it as the source of his work. "What is essential to surfing?" is a question he asks himself constantly. Flight, maximum speed, an aspiration to perfect efficiency, and unity with the energy of the wave is what his work pursues.
Roy's boards are beautiful because they are true organic works whose purpose, apearance, structure, material, method of construction, performance and even symbolic potential are tightly woven into a cohesive but infinitely flexible whole, conceived after great analytical and synthetic effort of the imagination in an attempt to create as nature does.
Elegance defines Roy Stewart surfboards : the use of foil sections for templates; having considerable area with significant rocker forward, creating an optimum configuration to get up and planing as soon as possible; a narrow tail for maximum control and rail to rail ease which works mostly in displacement, supplemented by the efficiently generated lift from the fins in a brilliant balance of the best of many worlds.
Being one with the wave is the essence of surfing, it is radical, it goes to the root, and it is heir to Duke Kahanamoku's spirit. Roy Stewart's boards are unsettling, but the spirit behind them, their source, what he is saying through them that surfing should be, is even more so. His boards caused a stir in Hawaii by expressing surfing's lost vital essence, the one which the great Duke valued more highly than his olympic gold medals. "
With thanks to Pablo Diaz for his writing
