Tom Curren stands on one side of the photo, Maurice Cole on the other, both are smiling. Between them rests the famous 7'8” logo-free Reverse Vee that Curren rode when he won the '91 tour from the trials and, perhaps more famously, the board he was riding when he did that cutback at Backdoor - the one captured so perfectly by Tom Servais. The photo of Curren and Cole was taken at the recent California Vintage Gold Surfboard Auction and the smiles betray something more than an old boy reunion; of the 50 boards sold, the 7'8” is one of the few boards to boost the bank account of the shaper who created it. The hammer price was $16,500 (US) shared between Cole and his famous pilot.

More commonly, the windfall from the sale of collectable surfboards benefits a collector only. The person who shaped the board, or the person who rode it, are left far down the sales chain often staring with wry bemusement at the notoriety they gave to a piece of foam and fibreglass that would otherwise have trifling value.

“I kick myself everyday that I let those boards go so many years ago,” says Mark Richards of his biggest regrets, two Reno Abellira-shaped guns he rode in Hawaii during the mid-70s. “But at the time,” explains MR, “I was paying for all my boards and really needed the money from the sale to buy the next season's boards.”

Nowadays the price for an authentic Reno-shaped Hawaiian gun starts at $3,000 and if you can see your reflection in the gloss coat then the price rises sharply. MR says he had no idea that boards he shaped or rode during that era would be worth so much one day. And how could he have known? Though an embryonic collectable board market has existed since the 1960s, it's only since the 1990s, well after MR sold those boards, that the market developed to a point that surfboards attracted significant money.

Geoff McCoy watches his old boards change hands with similar curiosity – though he's the first to admit it's with a degree of frustration. McCoy's Lazer Zap's are some of the biggest money pullers on the collectable board market. Like a Reno Abellira gun, the price for a vintage Zap in good condition starts at $3,000 and heads north depending upon its history and condition.

“Yes, it's frustrating,”says Geoff when we spoke. “They got howled down by the media when I first made them, and now they're in huge demand..?” Geoff's voice trails off, though the silence is soon filled by a sly chuckle. Frustrated he may be, but Geoff is acutely aware of the irony in his once-scorned boards becoming highly sought antiques.

Considering Lazer Zaps now fetch top dollar on the second hand market I ask Geoff if he has any old ones to sell. You know, just to take advantage of their newfound popularity. “I didn't keep any,” says Geoff with resignation. “I'm just not nostalgic...unfortunately.”

In 1996 Danny Brawner ran what's considered the world's first collectable surfboard auction in Newport Beach, California. Brawner's auction was quickly followed by a series of larger auctions by Allan Seymour, again in Southern California, which were succeeded by Randy Rarick's Hawaiian Islands Vintage Surf Auctions that ran throughout the 2000s.

All of these auctions serviced - and perhaps further encouraged - what Matt Warshaw calls “nostalgia-affected baby boom surfers looking for a connection to the sport's oft-cited but vaguely described “golden age”.” Warshaw considers the golden age to be anything prior to the shortboard revolution and indeed that's where the big money lies: the top hammer price at the aforementioned California Gold Auction was a Greg Noll 1967 gun that drew $42,000, while a George Downing balsa gun from 1954 sold for $40,000.

Yet the nostalgia charm – if indeed that is the reason people collect surfboards - isn't only confined to baby boomers; a cursory search of the Vintage Surfboard Collectors page on Facebook shows many younger surfers are now involved. And similarly, the boards being sought are also coming down in age. This can't be explained solely by the passing of time, after all the aforementioned Reverse Vee was only shaped in 1990, 30 years after the shortboard revolution. A more likely explanation is that the collectable surfboard market has matured and become more sophisticated; a board simply doesn't need to be that old for its value to be recognised.

This is not a completely welcome development for some. Australian Mick Mock has been collecting surfboards since he was a young kid and was way ahead of the curve when the market developed and surfboards began to appreciate in value. Mock recalls a board he bought as a teenager, a solid timber board from the turn of the 19th century. He saw it for sale at an inner city auction house. Mock asked how much it was and the seller told him $50, adding gruffly, “I just want it the fuck out of here.” Mock promptly paid the man, then sat outside in the sun waiting for a friend with a driver's license to come and pick him up. He won't say how much it's now worth but suffice to say it'd be a few orders of magnitude above his initial outlay. He has many such examples of good finds.

Mock doesn't shy away from the charge that nostalgia plays a part in his collecting. “Yes, but it doesn't explain everything," says Mock. “I've been collecting since I was eight!” He counts the tactile experience of holding old boards as one its greatest appeals. “I just love old boards! The construction of them. The feel of them.”

What he doesn't like, however, is the shift in mindset that occurred around the early 1990s. “That's when collecting began to get attention through small articles in magazines. People came in and began collecting for ego and financial gain.” Mock spits the last two words out with venom.

I softly point out to him that he's also employed in the field; Mock ran a series of auctions in Sydney around the turn of the century and he now holds the key to Little Dragon, a second hand board store on Sydney's northern beaches that operates with very flexible hours. “Well I'm not gonna get a fucken job if I can help it,” says Mock by way of explanation. And by now you might have gathered he's also quite forthright in his opinions.

He's adamant about the change in attitudes, though. “It used to be like a bunch of surfers talking about history and design and now it's like a bunch of bankers, “How much is this worth?', “How much is this worth?” I get them in here all the time” says Mock and as he does Oscar Wilde's quip about cynics comes to mind.

Like Mock, Randy Rarick is neck deep in the business. Rarick ran the aforementioned Hawaiian Islands Vintage Surf Auctions, he's brokered the sale of hundreds of vintage boards, as well as restoring hundreds more. "I've had the most valuable boards in the world pass through my hands," says Rarick. "I've been involved in the transaction of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars worth of vintage board sales."

All of which means he's well placed to comment on the developments in the market and he takes a philosophical approach to the less savoury side of collecting. "Much the same as vintage cars, there will be the specialists, collectors, and the aficionados who appreciate the art of collectables, and then there'll always be the mercenaries, hucksters, shysters, and hurdy-gurdy film-flam artists who only see the dollar signs." I get the sense Rarick spends little time thinking about the latter.

Though the market has matured and attracted people with varying intentions, Scott Bass believes the criteria for collectable boards remains the same as ever. “Provenance, pedigree, and condition,” says the organiser of the aforementioned California Gold Auction. “The vintage surfboard market is organic and hard to predict,” says Bass, “but those three things should be on every buyer's checklist.”

Aside from being an organiser, Bass is an expert appraiser of vintage boards, it's his job to discern what boards are worth. The job involves assessing the tangible qualities of a board – its condition, who shaped it, who rode it – but it also involves the assessment of a board's intangible elements. He explains this by using MR's Reno Abellira as an example.

“The emotional pull of MR's Freeride bottom turns at Honolua Bay on that Reno pintail are strong. Because it was captured on film, every surfer from that generation has the same connection. Lots of surfers with emotional ties equals lots of hands in the air at auction.”

It's no accident that Bass uses the word 'emotion' twice, as everyone I speak to - save the fiercely nostalgia-free Geoff McCoy - gets emotional when talking about old boards. Take away the monetary value and old surfboards become a conceptual history trip for many surfers. They're fibreglass DeLoreans that transport surfers back to their prime surfing years. How comfortable surfers are with looking backwards dictates how they view vintage boards, and how many old boards they themselves keep in the rack.

Bass' mid-70s example also raises another point, one that pertains to media as much as emotion: When MR was first attacking Hawaii there were only a handful of print publications and perhaps the same amount of films made. Compared to today the surfing culture was uniform and shallow; surfers largely came from the same demographic, they consumed the same media, idolised the same heroes, and shared the same values. Contrast this to 2015 when surfing has fractured in a thousand different ways. It begs the question of what will happen to boards from the internet era. Where are the emotional touchpoints in a media-saturated world? What will be the metrics that future collectors use to value boards?

I ask Bass about specific modern-era boards that collectors might have their sights on. “The Brewer that Bruce Irons rode to victory at the Eddie,” says Bass. “That is a special Brewer. Everyone knows it.” Other modern boards include Kelly Slater's 'Iraq' protest board, Slater's 'Wizard Sleeve' and 'Deep Six' designs that pre-empted wide high performance shortboards, or any of Andy Irons' world title boards. Outside of those it's very hard to say with any sort of authority which boards will become valuable.

The conversation leads Bass to ruminate on the value of computer shaped boards. “Those computer shapes have yet to ripen, but when they do, will they hold any collector cachet?” The question isn't rhetorical, Bass genuinely wonders how computer-age boards will be valued. He believes that Kelly Slater's and Andy Irons' boards will have cachet but question marks hang over other boards: “Many of todays boards are disposable commodities rather than collectable assets. Like furniture or guitars, if it's hand made it's a part of the 'culture of authentic.'”

When considering the extraordinary amount some old boards sell for at auction I'm reminded of Vincent Van Gogh. Though he would become one of the world's most influential and sought after painters, Van Gogh spent his life broke and destitute. In 1888 Van Gogh painted a self portrait and gave it to his mother. In 1998 that painting sold for $71 million.

The analogy may be overblown but the similarities are there and they apply across the board; struggling artist sells his wares for nix only to see its value compound over time. In Australia the government has instituted a form of artist recompense in the Royalty Resale Scheme - artists receive 5% from any future sale of their works over $1,000. Since it started in 2010, 610 artists have benefited from the scheme – none of them are surfboard shapers.

“Giving a portion of the proceeds to the shaper would be great, but it rarely if ever happens,” says Bass when I mention the program to him. “Sad, perhaps, but they gladly took the money from the original buyer back in the day.”

Some shapers are beginning to capitalise on their famous moments by creating replicas of the original boards. Maurice Cole is making a limited run of his Tom Curren Reverse Vees and selling them through his website. Similarly, Geoff McCoy is currently shaping versions of the very first Lazer Zap – same planshape, same construction, same graphics – and selling them for $7,000 each. McCoy has already sold two. Scott Bass is unsure how these remakes will be valued in the future, though it's worth pointing out that a remake of Martin Potter's famous 'Saint' twin fin fetched a nice sum at his recent California Gold Auction. The fact is, the number of antique surfboards is dwindling yet the number of collectors is increasing so it's causing the market to look at boards in new ways. The 'culture of authentic' need not apply as long as the emotional component is intact.

As I run these esoteric concepts past Geoff McCoy I hear another sly chuckle. It's not impolite but I can tell he's humouring me. It dawns on me that such matters run counter to McCoy's pragmatism, that he could care less about guessing the movements of an invisible, amorphous market. All he knows is that his Lazer Zaps are finally in demand and that this time he's the one who'll benefit from the sales.