The Innermost Limits Of Pure Fun, With A Modern Twist
Luke Condon talks his Lennox Point-bred, sweep-tested handshapes.
Ever been swept away?
Not in a romantic sense, Romeo.
I’m talking literally being stuck in a rip that has your arms turning to spaghetti while you fail to close the distance between yourself and the lineup.
It’s a fairly common occurrence around the pointbreak regions of Northern NSW and Queensland, particularly during large south swells synonymous with spectacular Superbank events.
It’s surfing’s answer to Sisyphus and his boulder, basically — and your arms, legs, shoulders, and neck all hate you for it.
It’s no surprise then that local shapers have baked some counter-sweep features into their boards — one example being Luke Condon, a 25-year-old who just hand-finished his 400th surfboard or thereabouts.
He specialises in blades you can still spank the lip on, but that will also get you back up the point without paddling into the shipping lanes.
“What’s been getting me excited lately?” ponders Luke. “Mainly that round-nose quad I’m riding in the video. It’s just a nice shape with a lot of curve off the tail. Pretty much shortboard dimensions, but as soon as you get up you’re like, ‘holy shit,’ you’ve got this amazing speed and scoop under your feet straight away.”
“Piggy,” as his mates call him, is born and raised in Lennox Head. Home to one of Australia’s most iconic pointbreaks, which, as you can gather from the opening tubes in his clip, offers otherworldly visions when the stars align.
“The first couple waves in the clip are from when it was really pumping last year. Weirdly, it actually had a reverse sweep because of the swell direction,” he recalls.
These days, Luke works out of a factory in Ballina, doing everything by hand (glassing, sanding, shaping) between torture-testing his totems at the local beachies and soaking up wisdom from the resident shaping Yodas who share the space: Gunther Rohn, Neal Purchase Jr. and James Woods, to name a few.
“There’s so much variety, and I’m learning heaps from all of them,” says Luke. “I can show Purcho or Gunther a board I’ve made and they’ll give me some pointers. Ellis [Ericson] was blowing his own blanks when he was based up here, so I’ve been super blessed to be in the orbit of that crew.”
While Luke’s not a purist about handshaping, he doesn’t feel the need to fire up a CNC machine while he can still touch his toes.
“Gunther can do it, he’s old and used a planer his whole life. I’m 25, so I may as well start from scratch and learn the proper way. Good things take time. Plus, can you imagine going to do a shaping residency somewhere without ever lifting a planer? Embarrassing…”
Condon’s shaping origin story begins where it should: sweeping floors. He left school in Year 10, dodged the hammer, and wandered into a shed in the hills looking for an apprenticeship. Glasser Steve Subonj gave him his start and opened his eyes to the deep rabbit holes Chris Brock and George Greenough have been living in for decades.
“I was captivated by that innermost limits of pure fun era. I probably would’ve been written off riding one of my boards when I was younger, but the reality is it’s all stuff that’s been around since the ’70s. I feel like culturally performance-driven alternative shapes are having a bit of a moment too, so that’s all changing.”
And performance-driven alternatives they are, although in this clip they’re pretty much exclusively going straight. “Yeah, the waves were actually too good to see how the boards perform on the face,” laughs Luke. “I swear they work outside the barrel too.”
Luke says it took a couple-hundred boards to feel truly confident in his skillset. Now he’s ready to open his designs to a wider audience. He’s working on model names, “but fuck, it’s hard landing on something you’re happy with.” For now, custom orders come via the DMs.
His logo, though, is unmistakable — a masterstroke from Shinya Dalby, Stab’s art director. At first glance: a cairn of Lennox rocks (perhaps the cruellest inanimate objects plonked along the east coast — complete with their own sadistic Instagram account), stacked like a grom’s after-school fort.
Look closer and the initials resolve: LC. A logo scavenged from the point itself. It drops in the clip with tiny clacks of stone — a local sigil for a local kid who carved his hooves across those same rocks while learning Lennox Head’s many moods.
Anyways, if you do come across his clever logo, squint first, then give it the armpit test.
You can find more of Luke’s designs here.
