A few days before the deadline, my colleague Stephan asked me if I could do the interview with Keith Teboul. He was still in the middle of testing the old and new freeride boards at Lake Neusiedl and had his hands full. Keith had already agreed to talk to him about the history of waveboards, I just had to ring through.
As a big wave fan and child of the nineties, it felt surreal to dial the number of the famous shaper of all my Maui heroes. Due to the time difference of exactly twelve hours to Hawaii, I called as agreed at 6pm, i.e. 6am on Maui. Keith is an early riser, I thought... until nobody answered, not even on the second attempt. I could already see the story bursting in my mind's eye when suddenly an email fluttered in: "Sorry, I got super busy in the shop, lets call tomorrow, same time?" All right, same time!
When the interesting conversation the next evening with a very nice, open-minded Keith Teboul was all about Kauli Seadi and the innovation of the Twinsers, I was taken back to my childhood when I looked at the old pictures of Kauli from that time. In 2008, when I was eleven years old and stood in awe in front of star guest and trainer Kauli Seadi at the Young Guns Camp on Rhodes, which was co-organised by surf magazine, and hardly dared to ask for a tip for the Spock... Who would have thought that I would one day work for SURF and talk at length with his shaper about these crazy boards that I marvelled at in pictures in the magazine as a child and that were to herald a whole new wave era. Crazy.
You can read Julian's interview with Keith Teboul again here: Quatro shaper Keith Teboul on waveboard evolution - from singlefin to quad and thruster
