Wake surfing has been around for a really long time. I've seen pictures of guys riding longboards without a rope behind a boat as far back as the mid 1960s. It was something to do for surfers on a flat day. My friends and I used to do it all the time when I lived in southwest Florida.
Here's a pic of me wake surfing on my surfboard back around 1980
There was one guy in our group that rode like noone else and was pulling off stuff we couldn't imagine. His name was Joey hayes. He would bury his rail on deep gouging turns and could jump across the entire wake and then lay down another turn with ease. keep in mind this was on a regular surfboard since there were no " wakeboards " back then.
Here's a few pics of Joey Hayes pushing the limits and going beyond
Surfboards are pretty fragile and are only made of a foam core covered with a few thin layers of fiberglass. They're made for riding waves and not the extreme stress that Joey was putting on them. As you can guess he broke a lot of boards and we hated lending him ours because we knew there was a good chance it would end up in two pieces.
It was about 1984 and Joey ran out of surfboards so he decided to come up with a better design and something more usefull for his style of wake surfing. He decided that he would take the construction materials and process that went into making the popular Hydro Slide ( knee board ) and make a strong surfboard specifically for riding the wake behind a boat. It was at that moment modern day wakeboarding was born.
Joey took a trust fund set up by his Father and poured it into R&D on his new design and he would take us out and let us test ride it for feed back. We came up with something we thought would cover all the bases and attract a larger market. He called it the " Wakemaster "
Here's a pic of the finally design
While Joey was light years ahead of everyone in the riding department he had very little business experience which proved to be his downfall. Once he started talking to industry leaders about distribution the word was out about his new design and others scrambled to come up with their own version. Yes, he had filed for a US patent but the competition found ways to work around that. Soon it was him against the giants like O'Brian and for him it was a losing battle. He placed an ad in water ski magazine in 1997 and I did the photography for him. Three other companies had placed ads of their own wakeboards in that same issue and it looked like Joey had lost his dream.
He finally gave in as he was unable to keep up with the big boys and began to focus on a pro tennis career instead. Wake surfing went on to become " wakeboarding " and Joey's origional design with it's surfing influence was supposed to let the rider stand up and surf the wake or ride on your knees. It eventually morphed into what is now just a trick ski.
Wakeboarding got huge and has it's own tour now but it in the begining it was just something for surfers to do on a flat day. Modern wakeboarding started with us guys out on Joey's Ski Natique looking for a way to keep him from breaking our boards.
