Boards were long wooden relatives of surf skis then, in the 1950s, and some were stockpiled in a shed where the Merewether surf life saving club is now. 

Life saving clubbies would guard them from the surfers, with whom they shared a mutual loathing. The boards were off-limits.

“We were told never to touch them,” Mr Nelmes, 74, now the owner of a wood and fibreglass board collection that dates to the 1940s, said.

“But then we started buying them. Some of us started making them.”

Surfing’s explosion in the 1950s as a pastime and the Hunter board makers who stoked the endless summer, Mr Nelmes said, form a story worth telling “while some of these blokes are still alive”.

The knots in Mr Nelmes’s shins were from the edges of boards and from having “a foot in both camps”; he was a champion life saver and a surfer. 

He straddled the border of the competing tribes whenever he stood on a board, and those early boards were heavy.

After the war, Newcastle surfers rode 16-foot longboards built from sea ply, glued, nailed, screwed together, with metal handles and cork bungholes from which seawater would gush. No leg ropes. Murder on the flesh.

 “Those longboards could only be ridden straight into the beach. They were cumbersome and dangerous in a dumping surf,” Mr Nelmes said.

“And so the Malibu boards were something like a space age improvement.”

A troupe of Californian life guards had swept south-east Australia in the summer of 1956 with muscular demonstrations of fast, nimble Malibu boards of balsa and foam fibreglass. They had fins, and suddenly surfers could ride across waves.

In the two years Newcastle surfers waited for bulk shipments of balsa from South America, the board to have was the timber, nearly-as-good Okanui.

They were a bit slow and easily damaged, Mr Nelmes said, “but at least we could turn them”. 

First in Merewether to own one was John “Ben” Gillette. Many followed. Backyard workshops sprouted overnight, and the air filled with the scrape of glass and wood.

Laurie March, who still lives in Merewether, crafted a reputation for the beauty of his wooden boards.

Stuart Heaton of New Lambton was another pioneer of the “wooden era”, Mr Nelmes said, and the 16-foot creations of Merewether’s Ian Peden adorn the museum at Freshwater surf club.

Cliff Pratt, a policeman and member of Nobbys surf club, seamlessly switched to fibreglass in the 1960s, as Mr Nelmes’s neighbour Warren Johnson grew his home workshop into a factory in Hamilton.

Sam Egan became a “legend” long before his pro tour son Luke for the boards he first started shaping in Merewether in 1962, Mr Nelmes said.

He deliberately doesn’t have a favourite of his 30-board collection, which includes a 10-foot 11-inch “Elephant Gun” shaped by Hawaiian master Dick Brewer (as seen sliding down glass ocean mountains in The Endless Summer).

But if there’s a board Mr Nelmes can get lost in, despite his last surf being more than a decade ago, it’s a balsa Malibu etched with the nicknames of his mates from the ‘60s.

“Bones Cogan, Bob Busted, Legsweak Armstrong, Gugs Nelmes...”

They’re scattered now, across the city and the globe, but it’s a relic of their endless summer.