Here's the most recent addition to the board shed, in as found condition. A 1968/9 transitional hully shape made by Westcoast of Woolacombe in Devon, not a make you see everyday and this is the first one I've seen in the flesh. On first meeting I liked the shape with its slim delicate 50/50 rails, hully underside, and it still feels amazingly light for its size - 7'6 x 20 1/2 . Not a heavy glass job. It also still has what looks like hard paraffin wax on the deck and an ancient leash made of string and rubber gone hard and cracked, and a healthy amount of dust. On the down side, someone has sprayed black paint over it, luckily not keyed in, and it looks like the logo must have delamed , cos its been removed and replaced with a layer of car filler. And so begins some tlc ,a bit of work and it will be sliding again.
I don't know much about Westcoast so I have borrowed this piece from the Surfing museum's facebook, written by ex employee and rider Tony Cope,"Westcoast was run by the late Clinton Fitzgerald, known to everyone as just ` Fitz `. He had around him a few people who did bits & pieces to help, one being Roger Lyndon, from Piha, NZ, who was a beachguard in Woolacombe . Roger came to the `factory` ( old wooden stables in South St.) in the evenings to sand & finish boards. Clive Barber had his own surfboard company in South Africa, but spent the summers in Woolacombe shaping Westcoast boards. Fitz & I were best buddies & shared a house, until we both got engaged & lived with our girls. My job was to show surf movies summer evenings on a circuit of village halls in the weekday evenings. Weekends I went to every surf contest, riding & showing the boards. We were hoping it would take off big time, but it didn`t, & Fitz hated the weather & short season so eventually emigrated to SA to work with Clive.".
