The Humble Merrin

(Merrin mat courtesy of Florian Morlat collection. Frame grabs from Greg Huglin's classic surf film, Fantasea.)

Surfboards had a transition era -- in the late '60s between longboards and shortboards -- and so did the surf mat...although less famously.

When the Converse/Hodgman mats went out of production in the mid-70's, mat surfers scrambled to find a suitable replacement. The Morey Boogie had displaced the surf mat market, and durable, high quality mats were a thing of the past. Our remaining stash of Hodgmans became threadbare leakers by the late 70's, and the only new mats available were useless dime store cheapies.

Merrins, a high-end chain of surf shops in Australia, came to the rescue and began marketing mats made in Asia under their name. Those rafts came with fins and handles, which could be removed with a little warmth from the afternoon sun and some elbow grease. (Note the glue stains from the handles on the mat pictured above...)

The petite, somewhat flimsy Merrins turned out to be great mats from an educational point of view. They opened our eyes to the advantages of mat which was narrower and more compliant than the Hodgman.

As our first batch of Merrins became worn, Greenough tore off the bottom canvas of his mat, leaving only the rubber inner liner. The Merrin with no canvas (George called it "The Peeler,") was so pliable that it would jump gears without any input from the rider. The bottom would conform the wave face, and the mat would just keep accelerating.

The Merrin "Peelers" were extremely fragile because of their thin rubber bottoms, but they became the basis for the future of mat design. We learned for a fact what George had suspected for some time...that the thinner and more flexible a mat's skin was, the more performance a rider could wring out of it.