Background
Anderson grew up in the Northern Beaches area of Sydney with three brothers.
Anderson grew up in the Northern Beaches area of Sydney with three brothers.
He is credited with the 1980 invention of a three-finance surfboard design, called the "thruster", which remains the industry standard. His family lived in a house that overlooked Collaroy Beach. In 1975, Anderson started his own surfboard factory, Energy Surfboards, in Brookvale.
In October 1980, after seeing a twin finance surfboard with a "trigger point" finance Anderson had the idea for a new version of the existing three finance design which was later dubbed the "thruster".
Anderson created a prototype for the "thruster" design and took it on tour with him to Hawaii and California. When he returned to Sydney, he made two more surfboards with similar designs.
Anderson retired from professional surfboarding in the mid-1980s and never sought to benefit commercially by patenting his invention. Anderson said: "If I didn’t come up with it right then, there were a lot of other people at the time that were working toward that same end goal.
In August 2010 Anderson was honored by United States Blanks at the Sacred Craft Expo in San Diego California.
In 2011, Anderson published his autobiography called Thrust: The Simon Anderson Story and was inducted into the Surfer"s Hall of Fame. Foreign some time, Anderson was a surfboard shaper at BASE, a Gold Coast surfboard-manufacturer that closed in 2011. Anderson has support many team riders including Kerby Brown, Cooper Chapman, Christo Hall.