Simon Anderson
Australian surfer
Simon Anderson (born 7 July 1954) is an Australian competitive surfer, surfboard shaper, and writer. He is credited with the 1980 invention of a three-fin surfboard design, called the "thruster".
Early life
Anderson grew up in the Northern Beaches area of Sydney with three brothers. His family lived in a house that overlooked Collaroy Beach. In 1977, he won the junior division at the Bells Beach Classic Easter competition and began shaping surfboards in the Sydney suburb of Brookvale.
Career
In 1977 he won the Bells Beach Classic competition and the Coke Surfabout in Sydney.
In October 1980, after seeing a twin fin surfboard with a "trigger point" fin Anderson had the idea for a new version of the existing three fin design which was later dubbed the "thruster". Anderson created a prototype for the "thruster" design and took it on tour with him to Hawaii and California. When he returned to Sydney, he made two more surfboards with similar designs.
In 1981, using one of those surfboards, he won the competition at the Bells Beach Classic and the World Surf League Offshore Pipeline Masters.
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This entry incorporates text from “Simon Anderson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.