Bill Johnson

Bill Johnson

Bill Johnson began surfing at the age of ten when his family moved to Cocoa Beach Florida in 1976. Surfing and competing along side the likes of Matt Kechele, Todd Holland and Kelly Slater. By 1986 had earned many amateur East Coast Championship titles as well as having been the #1 seed on the 1984 World Champion U.S. team. Eight time world champion Kelly Slater had to say of Bill in his book Pipe Dreams “In the final, I faced Bill Johnson again. By then Bill was charging big waves. I had seen pictures of him surfing Pipeline when it was big. So to me he was like a god. He had far more experience in competition and intimidated me with his aggressiveness”. Bill capped his amateur career with a U.S. Championship title in 1986 at that point he began his Professional surfing career.

In 1990 Bill hung up the competition jersey and began shaping surfboards under the Quiet Flight label. Within a couple years he started a new label with Ed Leasure Extreme surfboards. In 1996 Bill moved to San Diego and started working for Rusty Preisendorfer as a shaper and brand liaison. Bill’s shapes became very popular with the team and ended up hand shaping all the Hobgood’s personal and tour boards. With the introduction of shaping machines, Bill will probably be the last shaper to single handedly shape a World Champions quiver having done the job for CJ in 2001.

Bill started a new brand called Teqoph Surfboards at the end of 2004. Bill introduced the Stealth tail quad in 2007 in which CJ Hobgood was the first surfer to win a 4 star WQS event on a Quad fin board. CJ also won all the major events on Bill’s shapes in the continental U.S. in 2007 including the US Open in Huntington Beach.

For more info on Bill Johnson, please visit www.teqophsurfboards.com.