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Many years ago in the Seventies I remember looking through the latest edition of the famous 'Tracks' magazine where I came across the article about 'Skurfing'. I was at that time a fortunate youth who surfed and water-skied, lucky to be in a water-sport loving family and apart from the water-skis, also got behind the boat with the odd surfboard or we rode whatever we found that could give us some fun. I was just one of countless kids around the globe doing the same thing, but, the first authentic 'Wakeboarders' were 'Kiwis'.The 'Tracks' magazine showed guys who had already mastered a concept, who laid over big body-horizontal arcs on keel-finned specialised objects that they called 'Skurf-boards' .The riders were Kevin Jarrett and Allan Byrne and they were showing the world a challenging new sport. Later at age 19, having just come back from a season in the Australian alps at Thredbo, I, while working for 'Darby' surfboards, was fortunate to be with the lads when we borrowed an authentic 'Hot Stuff' 'Skurf-board' from Allan Byrne. As fate had it I was the only one who could get out of the water on it, but we were all pumped on the idea of this newfound concept and were all talking of seeing a future for it. The winter came and I passed another season in the snowfields, but kept thinking of this new concept and wanted to be part of the action. On my return to Queensland, to my dismay I was greeted with a certain run-around as to my participation in the project and was fed some information intended to lead me to believe that the concept was all sewn up and protected; in other words 'No Trespassing'. Darby already had some nice T-shirts with the name 'Skurfer' printed up, and this was four years before the name appeared in the USA (but with a new face claiming responsibility for the product). In between the ski-season I was also working in Sydney with 'Raider-Skis', the leading brand of custom shaped and moulded fibreglass wave-skis in the world at the time, so after not feeling the right vibe in Queensland I decided to try and launch the 'Skurfing' concept in Sydney. With my experience with moulded products I was going to propose to Raider the manufacture of the boards there. I mentioned the idea to the then Australian Champion 'Mick Petrie' who suggested that I join up with him and that the best material to make the boards with would be roto-moulded polyethylene plastic.Unfortunately Mick was a bit tied up financially and couldn't proceed but he was a great help in forming a direction in how to go about setting up the project for manufacture. We did the basic research visiting the sports-stores and ski shops to get a reaction and the reaction was mixed. Mick pulled out and an old friend 'Mitchell Ross' came to the rescue and became my partner in the business which we called 'Ski-Boards Australia' and the board was called the 'Mcski' . We even had a television station backing us financially at the time with whom we accumulated more modifications to the product and more debts.