Blade Surfboards Before my time

Surfing was started in Europe by Joel de Posnag in Biarritz, France, in 1957.
Eight years later the Guernsey Surf Club was formed, making it one of the earliest surf organisations in Britain, Jersey started their club in 1959.
  The club was formed primarily to protect the needs of surfers in Guernsey, to provide them with designated areas in which they could surf and other beach users and to develop the sport competitively and socially.
  In the 60's the pioneers of surfing, Dave Fletcher, Roger Blanchford, Tom Woodford, George Head, Barry Hughes and Paul Burtwhistle among several others all used 10ft long boards.
But by the mid 60's boards were rapidly reducing in length to 7ft and then down as small as 6ft and under as everyone started making their own boards. In the 1960's surfers had started building their own boards, using polyurethane foam and fibre glass cloth and resign. The Islands first efforts at making boards was by Max Gaudion and George Warren Ex members of the Centre Steps Mob. They built a few boards under the label Gaudion, Warren Electra Surfboards. Pastel pink and lilac coloured Groves Foam blanks proved unreliable after long exposure to the sun and it's ultra violet light soon made them go brown.
Everyone has their own idea's about surfboards and from time to time ideas, like fashions, change and a surfer would acquire a new board. Barry Hughes was the same but could not afford a new board, so with the use of my dad's (Bob Warry) cellar at my child hood home "Douhallow" in the Villa au Roi, they stripped the glass off a Rodney Sumpter Competition Model longboard and rebuilt it. With dad's help the board turned out a really neat little board and that's how "Blade Surfboards" started some 40 years ago.

Bob Warry, Guernsey surf champion
1966, '68 and '71.

Their first customer was Pete Hart. Dad and Barry built him a spear, which was the fad at the time and soon had other guys by for them to build whatever they fancied. Initially using Groves foam and Simplex fin system, they progressed to more reliable foam and waveset fin systems. Blade Surfboards went from strength to strength and even sent boards to "Joe Morais Surf Shop" in Biarritz. In today's commercial world their major success would have been Willy Wilson's winning of the European Junior Championships in Jersey on a Blade Surfboard. Working evenings in dad's cellar to the sounds of "Led Zeppelin" and "Deep Purple" brought many surfers calling by just to check out what they were doing. Juniors would sweep up shavings and tidy up the workshop to help pay for their boards and the order of the day was shoulder length hair and coats that came down to their ankles. Levitation, meditation and the writings of Lodsang Rampa were their meat of conversation. Whilst shaping, glassing, sanding and polishing for three to four years most evenings a week helped the two surfers towards a deposit on a house. It was work but also fun.

Old Advert from 1970's surfer magazine

Dad's boards that were made and in regular use were generally ahead of those in use in the UK and on one trip to Bournemouth his short board was laughed at. By the following year they were all using similar boards. Guernsey was put on the surfing map by Peter Dixon of Malibu Beach California, in a book entitled "Where the Surfers are" which covered in main the top surf spots in the world. On the three pages devoted to the Channel Islands he reported that ''the surfers of Guernsey are the best organised in the world''    

The pictures above and below
are taken from an old advertising campaign in the early 70's

In the cellar







Last two boards made by Blade 2010

Old Contest Program

It's impossible to mention everyone by name but all those involved in surfing during the last four decades can take into the future some great personal memories of waves and time shared, of good days at Perelle, T'others and Portinfer