The Shaper

The Story of Bob Rasby

When I wrote this story for Beachlife magazine in 2009 Bob Rasby was still alive. After suffering a debilitating stroke in 2006 he tried his very best to get on with life as much as he was able. His unassuming manner and wry Aussie sense humour were still at work when I interviewed him in his quaint little beach house in Pare Street. The beach house has gone now and so has Bob, but his legend will remain.


Two years ago Bob Rasby was sitting at his desk at work. The next thing he knew he was lying on the floor. He had suffered a stroke. It was a cruel blow. He has been left partially paralysed and forced to use a mobility scooter to get around for the past two years. He hates it. And when you find out what a large life he has led, you can understand.

Bob, also known as “Razza”, is Wainui Beach’s surfing royalty. He has the credentials. He’s Bob the Shaper. He worked with McTavish. He made surfboards for Lopez and  Brewer. He was part of the shortboard revolution. He got around in his day.

It all began in the Brisbane suburb of Rosalie where Bob was born in 1947. It was a long way to the beach but Bob had an uncle who owned one of the first motels to be built down the coast at the blossoming new tourist town of Surfer’s Paradise. Two-storied. One of the tallest buildings on the strip.

“I used to get down there every weekend I could. I hated being in the city. I would go down to the surf club at Surfer’s beach and rent a “surf-o-plane”, a kind of air mattress.

“Then one day just after I had turned 15 my mum said, ‘Bob, I’m going to buy you a surfboard’. So we drove down to South Brisbane to Joe Larkin’s Surf Shop. I was a kid, a total kook. But for 34 pounds and 10 shillings mum bought me a 9’6” surfboard. Joe lent us some roof racks to get it home.”

 From his first job as a fitter and turner’s apprentice at Queensland Government Print, Bob saved up and bought his first car. An FJ Holden. Every Friday afternoon he escaped Brisbane and went south to hang out surfing the beaches around Coolangatta.

In 1966, 18-years old, he chucked in his apprenticeship and escaped Brisbane for good. He decided the Gold Coast was getting too crowded so he and a mate moved on down to Byron Bay and shacked up in a rented tent in the Byron Bay camping ground. He later moved in to a guest house run by Mrs Bertolli, an Italian matriarch who had 18 children.

At Byron Bay’s main beach one day he asked someone who was the red-headed guy out in the water carving it up?

“That’s Bondi Benny,” he was told.

From that day on Ben Hutchings and Bob Rasby started a friendship, and became a team that would eventually have a huge impact on the surf culture of Gisborne in years to come.

Bob followed Benny down the coast a bit to Ballina where they both got jobs building fishing trawlers at the Ballina Shipping and Engineering company. Benny was finishing off a plumber’s apprenticeship and Bob was able to continue with his fitting and turning.

They rented a couple of beach shacks with no hot water near the point surf break at Lennox Heads on the coast road between Byron and Ballina. For eight months they lived a spartan existence surfing Lennox, travelling to Ballina to work. Then it was back to Ballina where they moved in to a big flash house overlooking the surf with local surfboard maker Ken Adler who owned the San Juan label. It was here both surfers got their early grounding in the board making business.

When Ben finished his apprenticeship a year later they caught a train to Sydney and then flew over to Auckland with two brand new San Juan surfboards in their baggage. After buying a cheap 1948 vintage Vauxhall, they strapped the boards on to the bare roof, and headed south. At a fork in the road they tossed a coin and turned east instead of west and ended up in Gisborne early one Saturday morning in April of 1968.

At Mo Currie’s Gisborne Service Station they were given  directions to the beach by two local surfers, Denzil Owen and Glen Sutton and, after a quick stop for fresh fruit at the Lee Brothers fruit shop in Peel Street, headed out to Makorori Beach. 

Benny remembers that first surf morning at Makorori, but Bob remembers more vividly the afternoon spent over the hill at the Tatapouri Hotel: “It was absolutely crowded. I’d never seen anything like it. We met some Auckland guys there and ended up staying in their flat in Salisbury Road and then later moved into a Roberts Road flat.”

Bob stayed the winter in Gisborne, working at the bottling factory in Palmerston Road, surfing and partying-up with the locals and other transient surfers hanging out in the Waikanae Beach vicinity.

“Ben stayed on in Gisborne and I went back to Byron to find we had missed the best-ever winter of surf at Lennox Heads. A group of hot Hawaiians had been there and had brought with them a whole pile of boards that were different shapes than what we were all riding at the time.

“I made some paper templates from these boards and posted them over to Ben back in Gisborne. It was with these designs that he started Surfboards Gisborne.”

While Ben was making a life in Gisborne, having married Glen Sutton’s sister, Bob started shaping boards for their old mate Kenny Adler at San Juan. At the end of ‘69 he flew out to Hawaii where he stayed for three months.

In Honolulu he caught up with friend Dick Hoole (who later made the famous surf movie Tubular Swells with Jack McCoy in 1975). Dick had been the manager at San Juan back in Byron. He told Bob they were looking for a shaper at Surfboards Hawaii. Dick rang up Dick Brewer at Surfboards Hawaii who said, “tell him to bring round one of his boards and we’ll check him out.” At the time Hoole was working at the Dewey Weber surf shop in Honolulu recently opened by Randy Rarick. 

Bob didn’t have anything decent to show off so Dick Hoole arranged for Bob to quickly shape up a board at Dewey Weber. Dick glassed the board and when it was ready they chucked it on the car and drove over for the job interview. It was Gerry Lopez who checked out Bob’s board and said: “Yep, you’re the guy.’” So Bob got the job of making Gerry Lopez and Dick Brewer labelled surfboards for the retail trade.

With this on his resumé Bob flew out to California a few months later with an introduction to San Diego boardmaker Don Hansen, who had earlier taught Ken Adler to shape. Here he worked at a large factory in one of eight shaping bays turning out up to 10 boards a day, five days a week – with 30 illegal Mexicans doing the glassing.

Then it was back to Byron Bay for 1970 where he lived and worked for a few months with Bob McTavish who was working out of Adler’s San Juan shop.

McTavish, the man often credited with inventing the shortboard, told Beachlife: “Bob’s lively spirit was captivating and his willingness to be taught the stuff we were doing shape-wise was admirable. Not saying he was a total follower, he stood up for his own ideas and theories. His craftsmanship was excellent, probably better than mine in those days.

“We were in the middle of the reduction process. The Plastic Machine era had passed, as had the Trackers, and we were shaping stuff for Lennox with pointed noses and friendly squashtails. Lengths under seven feet. Bob took over from me shaping the boards at San Juan when I took off to California for a while. He was a clean, happy, honest shaper. A really good guy to be around.”

In September of ‘71 Bob decided to return to Hawaii and chose to head back via New Zealand, calling in to Gisborne to see how his mate Benny was doing with his Surfboards Gisborne operation.

“When I called in to the factory in Disraeli Street, Ben’s shaper Jimmy Croskery had just left, and Ben had hundreds or orders and no one to shape them. So I ended up staying to help out.”

Bob stayed longer than he planned and never made that trip back to Hawaii. He married local girl Cathy Priestly at the end of ‘72, had his first child, Saren, and later son Brent, and went into a business partnership with Ben as part-owner of Surfboards Gisborne. 

So Gisborne by chance scored one of the top surfboard shapers of the time in the middle of the shortboard revolution, someone who had been working with the likes of Brewer and McTavish who were redirecting the future of surfing through innovative redesign. 

Bob stayed on, shaping hundreds of surfboards, until the end of the Surfboards Gisborne era in 1978 when they sold out to Des Delaney. In that time he gave encouragement to younger guys keen on shaping, surfers like Ray Dalton and Doug Stewart, who went on to have their own board making businesses in Gisborne. 

With his young family Bob rented a house at Kaiti Beach and went to work at the freezing works with his fitting and turning skills. With Benny as the inspiration again, Bob got involved in the Midway Surf Life Saving Club which he says, “was one of the best things I ever did, really something special.”

In 1985 he got a job with the Housing Corporation and when his marriage broke up in 1986 he moved out to rent a beach house in Pare Street. Here he got in with the local crew of Kim Gunness, Bernie Martin, Mark Barker, Ian Francis and started an affair with the game of golf, aided and abetted by good mate Peter Goodwin. He bought a house and moved to Douglas Street for a while but missed the closeness of his Pare Street buddies. He sold up and was able to buy the Pare Street house he had previously been renting.

It was at the Poverty Bay Golf Course in 2002, on the second green, that he suffered a severe heart attack which resulted in a five-way bypass heart operation. This slowed Bob down a fair bit and while he couldn’t really surf any more, he got back into golf, went back to work at the Housing Corporation, and generally got on with things.

Then, on November 15, 2006 a blood clot went walkabout in his brain leaving him severely disabled. He has learned to walk again, but with difficulty and needs the scooter for the trip down to the Tsunami Bar to catch up with his mates Pete, Peter, Goody, Gunner, Griff, Fred, Kelly, Scott and the rest of the Tree Hut Club. His left arm and hand are next to useless, but he is going to physiotherapy three times a week and looking to the day he can hold a golf club again. 

Bob is generally embarrassed about having this article written about him and I have been worried he would ask me not to print it at the last minute. 

Just when I thought he was going to pull the plug he said to me: “I’ve been thinking about what all this really means and at the end of it all there is a message for parents and their kids. When mum took me down to Joe Larkin’s and bought me that surfboard it changed my life. It got me out of hanging around in the city where I was bound to have got into trouble. Suddenly I had a surfboard and it was mine and it gave me a whole new life – Rainbow Bay, Kirra Point. 

"So I say to parents, buy them that first surfboard, get them into the surf. It’s got to be good for them. And it’s got to be good for the surfboard industry too.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bob Rasby with Lorraine Allan at the 2014 50th jubileee of the Gisborne Boardriders Club

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