How A CT Alum Fell For An Incorrectly Sized 1970’s Skate Template

After presenting SITD winner Britt Merrick with an enlarged Kinko’s photocopy of a curvy skateboard he saw in a book, Dane Gudauskas planted the seed of a collaboration between him and his two brothers — Tanner and Pat.

The resulting surfboard was the G-Skate, the first ever triple design effort between the brothers.

“The idea was always for this board to be radical,” the crew at CI tells me. ”It was never meant to be a cruiser. Of course, an average level person can get on it and rip, but the brothers wanted the highest level guys to be excited about a unique shape.”

So what did each of the brothers bring to the table?

“I showed Britt the skateboard because I wanted to feel that curve on a wave face,” Dane says. “The boys were down, and they refined it technically. They both come from a very high performance background, and designed it through that lens, whereas I was trying to get the initial flow and ease into the board.”

Britt Merrick follows, “The board had a lot of speed and flow from what Dane and I were doing, but Tanner and Pat wanted more performance in the pocket. I added a bump in the tail and the trailer fin, which made it magic.”

After this adjustment, the crew decided to bring two G-Skates each to Hawaii for a month — to be used on the micro days while filming for the Vans Triple Crown.

As it happened, there weren’t any of those days.

So, the boys loaned out some of their boards to fellow team riders, in hopes they might be able to accumulate some clips on the freshly minted sleds.

“All we’d originally hoped for was to get a couple minutes of them on the really small days, and there just weren’t any when they were there,” Britt remembers.

The result? 13 minutes of proper tubes and full-tilt sending on randomly sized boards.

“Every board you see in the edit, aside from Ewe’s board, was shaped for us,” Dane says.

“It made us realize that the board is really user friendly from a dimensions perspective,” his brother, Tanner, adds. “The blue board Imaikalani DeVault is riding at Honolua is the exact one Luke Swanson is riding at Rockies. Imai is a large human being, and Luke is like a pro-junior [laughs].”

For reference, Luke’s shortboards are 26L and Imai’s are 31L. The G-Skate they shared? About 29L.

“Imai was so impressive, it was the first time he ever rode a 2+1, and the board looked so connected to his feet, like a savant. 

Pretty sure he actually took that board to Oz with him [laughs].”