The boards were fibre-glass long boards and for those of use who used to sneak away illegally for a day's surfing at Fitzroy beach, these presented a storage problem.
Tim Carey-Smith and I got around this thanks to a very kind lady called Miss Anderson who had a cottage fronting the beach and let us store our boards there during the week.
Under the guise of pre-arranged weekend visit to a fictitious destination the two of us would often hightail it down to the beach, changing into civvies in the cemetery en-route.
A can of baked beans would be put in the hot, black iron sand to open for a lunch when it had warmed through.
While it was all good clean fun I can understand, with the benefit of mature hindsight, why such beach activities were frowned upon. It would have been impossible for the masters to police surfing activities and dangers of being drowned in a rip were often real. But of course one can never deter impetuous teenagers.
My board was not in the same pristine condition as "Smog's". I have laboured long and hard for a tight-fisted Rongtea farmer one summer holiday to raise $38 for its purchase.
On my first outing with it I managed to 'pearl' (nose dive it into the sandy bottom) and "dinged" (damaged) the nose. This meant that a crude fibreglass patch was applied, although it hampered the board's performance thereafter.
While I was not the only person in Pridham to be thus motivated, I was one of the few who was told by the Housemaster in no uncertain terms to revert back to normal! The options were few: get gated or dye your hair back. I chose the latter even though Rodney Anyan (holding instructions) misread them - hence my reaction in the photo.
The great irony is that as I look in the mirror now, my hair colour is exactly the colour I sought almost half an century ago through artificial means.
We were of not aware of melanoma in those days and baked for hours in the west coast's black sands. Surfing was, and still is, a clean sport. One never forgets the first time you stand on a board and ride a wave, feeling the full power of the ocean driving you forward (or in my case more often than not, downward)