Family heirloom rides home on social media waves
|Published
Durban — Surfing the web has helped a Durban family come across a family heirloom that they might not have found without logging into Facebook.
The family of well-known surfer Colin Doveton has been collecting the many surfboards he shaped by hand since the 1980s. The surfer with an engineering background pioneered the shaping of channels onto surfboards to make them more aerodynamic, according to his daughter Michelle.
Doveton died a few years ago.
Another well-known figure in the surfing community Jean-Marc Tostee, the owner of Surf HQ in Durban’s city centre, said he recently stumbled across an iconic Doveton surfboard made under the Hot Skins brand. He posted messages on social media inviting anyone who was interested in the surfboard to reach out to him. And that’s when the Doveton family heard about it.
“I collect old, unused surf equipment which we fix up and repair if people are throwing it out to prevent it going to landfalls, said Tostee.
The refurbished boards are mainly donated to disadvantaged surfers, many of them street children, and the foundations that support the growth of surfing.
“But every now and then somebody brings in something that they want to just clear out of their garage or whatever because it’s old,” said Tostee.
Because he is au fait with surf products, boards and the names of surfboard shapers, a board that came to him recently snagged his attention.
“I recognised straight away that it was from the early or mid-80s. It had the specific channels that were pioneered at that time, in that era. And so I recognised the shaper’s name on the bottom, Colin Doveton, because I used to surf with some of the Dovetons when they were young,” he said.
Tostee said because this surfboard, under the Hot Skins brand, was special he wanted to give it to a collector for free so he created a marketing post which was put on social media. The responses on Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp were overwhelming and, as he had promised, he committed to giving it to the first person who responded.
But then a Doveton family friend contacted Tostee and said he collected those boards because they were unique. Because the board had already been promised to someone else, Tostee gave that person another board and the Doveton went to the collector.
“And then I saw that Michelle Doveton messaged me to say, ‘hey, that’s my dad who shaped that board, I’d love this as an heirloom for the grandkids’. So I had to unwind everything and go back to the guy I’d given the board to and say to him, ‘let me give you another board’,” said Tostee.
This week the Independent on Saturday met Tostee and Michelle Doveton, who was at Surf HQ to collect the surfboard shaped by her dad.
“She’s here with the kids to pick it up, take it home and they’re going to have it cleaned and fixed up and she’s going to hang it as a wall mount.
“This board is mid-80s, so it’s probably about 35 years old. It’s hard to date them exactly because they don’t have numbers on, just the name and the size,” said Tostee.
Michelle said she and her three older brothers grew up in an ocean loving family in a “total surf-life vibe” and they were trying to collect all the surfboards their dad had shaped.
“There’s a few of them floating around because my dad used to shape quite a lot of them. He came up with the idea of channels in the surfboard back in the ’70s or ’80s and then he started shaping all these boards. As far as I know, there are a few floating around. And then I saw him (Tostee) post this board on Facebook.”
Michelle said they would have the surfboard reglassed and then mount it on a wall. Her sons, Tai and Reef, would not use the surfboards even though they had learnt to surf at a very young age.
“They’ve got boards already, they don’t want to damage it. It’s quite a vintage family heirloom.”
She said they had tracked down a few Doveton surfboards and she hoped that through the Independent on Saturday, they would be able to find more.
Michelle believed her dad might have shaped about 100 surfboards and said he worked closely with her stepdad, John Eldridge, who used to glass the boards.
She said the channels – which her dad raved about – were Doveton’s “signature thing and he lived and breathed for it”.
Tostee said it was hard to determine the monetary value of vintage surfboards, because factors like whether it was wanted by a collector or whether it was of sentimental value impacted on the price.
Independent on Saturday