Despite Davey’s Bonzer accomplishments, the stall in the mid 90′s looked like it was going to get serious. Kelly Slater was coming on strong. Duncan saw a few of his North Shore sessions and gave me a call and told me, "it’s not hype, he is going to take surfing to a whole new level." My first thought was, "well that’s it, if the Bonzer 5 does not make big inroads quickly, we might as well put the project on the shelf for awhile." That is exactly what happened.
Duncan and his wife Jaquie created and have owned and operated Café Haleiwa since 1982. Over the years they have gotten to know a lot of the top surfers. During the 90′s, Duncan became good friends with Brad Gerlach, Taylor Knox and the Malloy’s. Brad would periodically give the 5-fins a go. He had some great sessions on them, which gave us more visibility and credibility. By the late 90′s, Taylor, Joel Tudor, Donavon Frankenreiter, Rob Machado and others would grab boards from Duncan and take them for recreational spins now and then. Some pretty insane sessions materialized and people began to realize that the Bonzer 5 fin was not some oddball design.
In 1999, Billy Hamilton asked me to make him a 7’10" semi-gun for Hanalei. He was one of my surf heroes and I was a nervous wreck shaping his board. I was more than a bit relieved when he told me that he loved the board and wanted to make some of his own. A couple weeks later he called back and said that on a few waves he found that the board had "a sacred 5th gear". He also paid us the most gracious and meaningful compliment we could receive. He acknowledged the difficulty of sticking with this for so many years and thanked us for doing it.
Around this same time Rusty announced his C5 contest to promote his ‘new’ 5-fin design. Taylor Knox and Joel Tudor offered to ride for us in the event. Taylor was injured so Dan Malloy volunteered to take his place. Brad wanted to ride a Bonzer style 5-fin to support us, so we showed Doc of Surf Prescriptions how to make one. All three of them ripped and Dan finished 5th over all. They made a major statement for us.
A year later at the second C5 contest at Blacks, Taylor Knox and Donny Stapleton rode for us. They completely tore it up on the first day and were the talk of the event. Unfortunately, on second and final day it was not quite "Bonzer Time", and they got knocked out before the finals. Donny got a special cash award for highest scoring ride. Do to all these guys stepping up to the plate for us and their shapers allowing them to do it, we were finally back in the game.
The next big break came when the Bonzers were given great visibility in Chris Malloy’s film Shelter. A few waves of Taylor and Donavon ripping it up on the boards had a much bigger effect than I ever expected. In the winter of ’01-’02, more top surfers began to ride the boards with great results. Some of them even ordered a couple. Momentum continued to build that year with the Bonzer being a prominent part of the promo on ESPN2 for the "Kelly Slater Pro Surfer" video game. We had got word back from Derrick Dorner that the Bonzer 5 tow board we made him went great in Tahiti.
