Women in Longboarding
1960 — 2026

First published 2026-05-25 · A working document, expanded as new material surfaces

Three eras of dominance, separated by a twenty-two-year erasure, plus a parallel modern movement that the contest tour mostly does not see. This is the history a thorough surf magazine should have written a decade ago, told straight.

The first thing to understand about women's longboarding is that its history is shaped less by the surfers than by the boards. When the world rode longboards — roughly 1957 to 1968 — women won world titles on them. When the world switched to shortboards in 1968, the women who could adapt switched too, and the women who could not, or did not want to, mostly disappeared from the competitive record. When longboarding returned as a separate competitive category in the late 1980s, it returned as a men's category first. The women's longboard world title did not exist as a recognized event between 1976 and 1999. Twenty-two years.

This piece is an attempt to fill in the documentation gap. The women who built the discipline are not obscure — Marge Calhoun, Linda Benson, Joyce Hoffman, Margo Oberg, Daize Shayne, Cori Schumacher, Honolua Blomfield, Soleil Errico, Rachael Tilly — and the through-line connecting them is, in retrospect, clearer than the surf press has made it look. We are writing it down in one place.

The argument: women's competitive longboarding has had three eras of real depth. The first ran from roughly 1958 to 1976, when the longboard was the surfboard and the women's world title was contested on it. The second ran from 1999 to 2014, when the WSL's predecessor reestablished a women's longboard category and a small cohort of California-and-Hawaii-based surfers rebuilt the discipline from the margins. The third runs from 2017 to the present and is the deepest the discipline has ever been — three different three-time world champions in eight years, a sanctioned tour that visits four continents, and a renaissance of style-driven logging culture that runs alongside the tour. The story of the gap between the first and second eras is its own argument about how surf history gets told.

A note on naming. "Longboard" as a category did not exist as a meaningful distinction until the shortboard revolution made it one. Before 1968, the longboard was just the board. We are using "longboard" throughout this piece as the contemporary editorial reader would understand it, but the 1960s figures discussed here did not surf on what was then a specific discipline — they surfed on what was then the only equipment.

Before the title existed

The recognized starting point for women's competitive surfing in the modern era is Marge Calhoun, who won the women's division of the 1958 Makaha International Surfing Championships — the unofficial world title of the period — at age thirty-three. Calhoun had taken up surfing in Malibu in her thirties, learned at Wally Froiseth's Hawaiian surf school the year before, and arrived in Hawaii with her two teenage daughters Robin and Candy, who slept in the family's hearse on the beach. Photographs of Calhoun from that period show a tall, strong woman in a one-piece swimsuit walking the nose of a ten-foot redwood-balsa board — a posture, a board, and a swimsuit that read as both deeply of their moment and visually contemporary in a way that almost no other surfer of the era does.

Calhoun did not have a long competitive career. She returned to family life on the mainland, sponsored her daughters' careers, and operated more as a connector of generations than a tour pro. But her 1958 Makaha win was the first time the surf press treated a woman as the unambiguous best in the world, and the next decade of competitors orbited around the gravitational fact of her existence.

Linda Benson and the early juniors

Linda Benson, from Encinitas, was fifteen years old when she won the 1959 Makaha. She was the first woman to surf Waimea Bay, the body double for Gidget in the 1959 film, and the United States women's champion five times between 1959 and 1968. Benson's competitive prime overlapped with both the longboard era and the first wave of women's surf media — she appeared regularly in Surfer Magazine, then in its first decade — and she rode a smaller, more drawn-in version of the heavy noseriding boards the men of her era preferred, which let her surf in a tighter and more responsive way than the era's stylistic norms encouraged.

Joyce Hoffman and the official world title

The first internationally sanctioned World Surfing Championships ran from 1964 onward, organized by the International Surfing Federation. The first women's world champion was Phyllis O'Donnell of Australia, in 1964 at Manly Beach. Joyce Hoffman, born in 1947, daughter of legendary surfboard shaper Walter Hoffman and a surfer from age nine on the beaches around Capistrano, won the 1965 United States Surfboard Championships and went on to take the world title in both 1965 and 1966.

Hoffman dominated the second half of the 1960s in a way no woman before or since has dominated competitive surfing in the longboard era. She was on the cover of Life magazine in 1965, accepted six-figure sponsorship deals, and was the first woman to ride Pipeline — a fact that should land harder in the surf-history canon than it does. The combination of competitive results, magazine coverage, sponsor deals, and willingness to take on the era's heaviest waves arguably makes Hoffman the most complete women's surfer of the longboard era. She is also one of the figures the contemporary surf press has most consistently underwritten about.

Margo Godfrey: the youngest world champion

Margo Godfrey — later Margo Oberg after her marriage to surfer Steve Oberg in 1972 — won the 1968 World Surfing Championships in Puerto Rico at age fifteen, making her the youngest world surfing champion of any gender. She successfully defended the title in 1969. Her timing is the historically interesting fact: Godfrey won the women's world title in the same window — 1967, 1968 — that the men's side of the sport was undergoing what is now called the shortboard revolution. Australian shaper Bob McTavish and American Bob Cooper began experimenting with shorter, more vertical boards in 1967; by 1969 the shortboard had displaced the longboard as the competitive standard, and the editorial pages of the surf magazines had reframed the sport entirely.

Godfrey/Oberg adapted. She came out of a brief retirement in 1975 and won the first three professional world championships, in 1975, 1976, and 1977, then three additional world titles in 1980, 1981, and 1983. By total count she is the most decorated woman in surfing history — six world titles across both the amateur and professional eras — but only her first two titles, in 1968 and 1969, were on what would today be called a longboard. By 1975 she was surfing on a six-foot single-fin shortboard like the rest of the women's tour, and the question of who would carry the women's longboard tradition forward had been simply, structurally, removed from the conversation.

There is a quiet but important fact in the historical record: the last woman to win a sanctioned world surfing championship on what would today be considered a longboard was almost certainly Margo Godfrey in 1969. By 1970, the boards being ridden in the world contest had compressed by 18 to 30 inches and the longboard era of women's competitive surfing was over.

The twenty-two-year erasure

For most of the next two decades, there was no women's longboard category at the world-championship level. The ASP — the Association of Surfing Professionals, which became the WSL in 2014 — ran a men's longboard world tour intermittently from 1986 onward; the women's longboard tour was not established until 1999. In the meantime, the longboard culture survived on the margins: as a stylistic alternative to the shortboard, as a movement among older surfers who had been junior champions in the 1960s and wanted to keep surfing, and as a quieter, slower, more aesthetic pursuit that was openly out of step with surfing's competitive mainstream.

Several factors compounded the women's-side disappearance specifically. First, the men's longboard revival of the late 1980s was led by figures — Joel Tudor, Donald Takayama, Wingnut Weaver — whose visual identity was male-coded in a way that read as nostalgic and traditional. The female longboarders of the period, when they were photographed at all, were photographed primarily for the surf-and-bikini market and not the competitive press, which created a media-coverage feedback loop that pushed serious female longboarders out of the documented record even when they were riding well. Second, the surf-industry sponsorship structure of the 1980s and 1990s funneled female-athlete budget toward shortboard surfers — Lisa Andersen, Layne Beachley, Wendy Botha — because the shortboard was where the broadcast eyeballs were. Third, the few women who were longboarding seriously during this period were doing it in surf cultures (San Onofre, Cocoa Beach, the North Shore of Oahu) where the social structure favored older men and was actively unfriendly to younger women trying to enter the lineup as equals.

The result is a documentation gap that is more profound than the surf press has acknowledged. Photographs exist. Magazine mentions exist. But the sustained editorial coverage that creates a historical record — the long-form profiles, the contest write-ups, the season-end retrospectives — was largely absent for women's longboarding from roughly 1977 to 1998. The women who kept the discipline alive during that period are, even today, mostly remembered in oral history rather than published record.

Shayne, Schumacher, and the rebuild

The Association of Surfing Professionals reestablished a women's world longboard championship in 1999, contested as a single annual event rather than a multi-stop tour. The first champion was Daize Shayne, a then-twenty-year-old surfer from Hawaii's North Shore who had grown up surfing both longboards and shortboards but built her competitive identity around the noseride. Shayne would win again in 2003. Her style — long, drawn-out cross-steps, a strong rail game, frequent committed nose-rides on critical sections — established the visual template that the modern WSL women's longboard tour still rewards.

Cori Schumacher, from Huntington Beach, won the world title in 2000, 2001, and 2010 — three titles spanning a full decade of the rebuild era. Schumacher's career is one of the most distinctive in the sport's history. She came up as a top United States shortboarder in the mid-1990s, surfed for the US national team in 1994 and 1996, and then made a deliberate stylistic and political decision to shift to longboarding as her competitive form. She also boycotted the 2011 ASP World Longboard Championship in China, on the stated grounds of human-rights conditions in the host country — an action which cost her a probable fourth world title and which she has said she does not regret.

Schumacher is also the surfer most directly responsible for the present-day editorial conversation about women's surf history. She has spent the post-competition phase of her career publishing essays, interviews, and oral-history projects documenting figures like Linda Benson, Joyce Hoffman, and the broader 1960s cohort. The fact that the documentation gap is being filled at all, in 2026, is partly because Schumacher has spent two decades insisting it be filled.

Kassia Meador and influence-without-title

Kassia Meador, born in 1982, never won a world longboard title. The competitive record obscures the fact that she is, almost certainly, the most influential women's longboarder of the post-2000 generation. Meador's stylistic approach — a low-stance, parallel-stance, hands-off-the-rail noseride drawn directly from the 1960s film footage of figures like Joey Hamasaki and Mary Lou McGinnis — became the visual model for what is now called the modern logger movement. Her board collaborations with Robin Kegel, her work as a board shaper through her own KM Surfboards label, her appearances in soft-focus film projects through the late 2000s and 2010s, and her presence in the Roxy-funded surf-and-beauty advertising of the same period created a parallel career arc that the world-tour-and-title structure of competitive surfing was structurally unable to recognize.

This is one of the recurring patterns of women's longboarding: the surfer who shapes the visual culture of the discipline is frequently not the surfer winning the most heats. The tour rewards a specific contest-style of long, scored nose-rides and committed maneuvers. The wider culture rewards style, line, and aesthetic choice. Both are legitimate; they are not the same thing. Meador is the post-2000 archetype of the second category.

The Hawaiian dynasty

In 2017, an eighteen-year-old surfer from Oahu's North Shore named Honolua Blomfield won the women's WSL Longboard World Championship at the Taiwan Open. She was at the time the youngest women's longboard world champion since Margo Godfrey in 1968. Blomfield grew up in a longboard-dense surf culture — Sunset Beach, Velzyland, the Pupukea-area breaks where her father Tony Blomfield ran a longboard surf school — and her competitive style brought together the rail-driven Hawaiian approach with the cross-step-and-noseride scoring criteria the WSL had codified through the 2000s.

Blomfield's career through 2021 is statistically the most dominant run any women's longboarder has had in the modern era. She won the world title in 2017, again in 2019, and a third time in 2021 — at age twenty-two, becoming the youngest three-time WSL Longboard Champion in history. (The 2020 season was cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.) She won the women's gold medal at the 2024 ISA World Longboard Championship in El Salvador, alongside fellow Hawaiian Kai Sallas on the men's side. In November 2025, six months after the birth of her first child, she won a Longboard Tour event at Surf Abu Dhabi, an unusual quick return to professional surfing by post-pregnancy standards.

Blomfield's championships span the most consequential institutional shift in modern women's surfing: the September 2018 WSL announcement that male and female professional surfers would receive equal prize money beginning with the 2019 season. Her 2017 world title earned a smaller purse than the equivalent men's longboard champion that year. Her 2019 and 2021 titles earned the same purse. The most decorated period of her career sits on both sides of the equal-pay line.

Errico, and the deepening of the era

Soleil Errico won her first world longboard title in 2018, at the Taiwan Open, between Blomfield's first and second championships. Errico is from Malibu — specifically a third-generation Malibu local — and grew up on First Point, the wave that has shaped American longboarding more than any other single break. Her stylistic approach borrows from both the Hawaiian rail-game of Blomfield and the California noseride tradition that Linda Benson and Joyce Hoffman established sixty years earlier.

Errico won again in 2022, and a third time in 2023 at the Original Sprout Malibu Longboard Championships, joining Schumacher and Blomfield as the third three-time WSL women's longboard champion. Three women, three titles each, all earned between 2000 and 2023 — a depth the discipline has not previously had at the championship level. The 2020s, taken as a single decade, will probably be remembered as the deepest competitive era in the sport's history.

The 2018 prize-money decision and what it actually changed

The September 2018 World Surf League announcement of equal prize money for men and women, effective with the 2019 season, was the most consequential institutional decision in women's professional surfing of the past quarter century. It is worth being specific about what it changed, because the popular framing tends to flatten the detail.

• Prior to 2019, the men's Championship Tour fielded 36 surfers competing for a $607,800 total prize purse; the women's tour fielded 18 surfers competing for a $303,900 purse. Both the field size and the purse were roughly half.
• The 2019 announcement equalized purses across all WSL-controlled events: Championship Tour, Longboard Tour, World Junior Championships, and Big Wave Tour.
• The announcement did not equalize field size. Men's CT was 36 surfers; women's CT remained 18 — a structural difference that took several additional years to begin closing.
• The announcement did not address sponsorship-side disparities, which were and continue to be the larger economic story for most professional women surfers.

The 2018 decision is correctly remembered as a milestone. It is incorrectly remembered as the moment women's professional surfing reached economic parity with the men's side. The prize-money line is now level. The field-size line, the sponsorship-budget line, the magazine-coverage line, and the brand-deal line are not.

Rachael Tilly's quiet history

The current world champion, as of this writing, is Rachael Tilly. Tilly is from San Clemente, California, and won her first world longboard title in 2015 at age sixteen — the youngest champion since Margo Godfrey nearly half a century earlier. After Tilly's 2015 win, the next decade of the women's longboard tour was structured around the Blomfield-Errico axis, and Tilly competed without a second title for nine seasons. She won the 2024 world championship at the WSL season finale, and then defended the title at the 2025 Surf City El Salvador Longboard Championships in November 2025 — coming from near-last in the final standings to win six consecutive heats in two days to take the title.

By total title count, Tilly is now the third concurrent three-time women's longboard world champion — alongside Schumacher and Blomfield and Errico — and the only surfer in any era to win a championship a full decade after her first. The competitive depth of the 2010s-2020s era is now genuinely without precedent in women's surfing history: four women with three or more world titles each (Schumacher 2000-2001-2010, Blomfield 2017-2019-2021, Errico 2018-2022-2023, Tilly 2015-2024-2025), against six titles by Margo Oberg across both the longboard and shortboard eras of the 1960s-1980s.

The 2025 season also clarified an institutional fact that had been ambiguous through the 2010s: the WSL Longboard Tour is now a genuine four-continent, multi-stop competitive circuit, with events in Australia (Noosa), Spain (Galicia), Taiwan, El Salvador, the United States (Long Beach, New York), and the United Arab Emirates (Surf Abu Dhabi, the artificial-wave venue). The "tour" is not yet at the depth of the Championship Tour's eleven-stop calendar — most years it is three to five events — but it is no longer a one-event-per-year world title shootout. That structural change, more than the prize-money equalization, is what has produced the current depth of competition.

The modern logger renaissance

Running alongside the WSL Longboard Tour, and largely independent of it, is the cultural movement that is now generally called the modern logger renaissance. The figures who dominate this scene — Karina Rozunko, Lola Mignot, Kelis Kaleopaa, the older but still active Kassia Meador — are not, in most cases, competing on the world tour. They compete in invitational events: Vans Duct Tape Invitational, the Joel Tudor Duct Tape series, brand-driven gatherings like the Mexi-Log Fest, and a constellation of European logging events that emerged through the 2010s.

Karina Rozunko, from San Clemente, is the most visible figure of the renaissance. Her surf-magazine and film coverage through the 2020s — the Vans-sponsored "Karina" surf films, the brand collaborations with Saturdays NYC, the editorial spreads in The Surfer's Journal — has shaped the visual idea of contemporary women's longboarding more than any other single surfer of the period, including the world champions. Her surfing is single-fin, low-stance, deliberately stylized in a way that is the modern descendant of the 1960s Malibu line — a direct visual quote of the Linda Benson and Joyce Hoffman era, run through the Kassia Meador interpretation of it, then made her own.

Lola Mignot, French-born and a longtime presence at La Saladita in Mexico, occupies the same scene. Mignot's profile combines competitive results from European events with the editorial-and-influence track of the renaissance — film projects, brand work, the kind of long-form magazine attention that is now the actual revenue model for surfers operating outside the WSL tour structure. The Saladita connection matters: a number of the modern logger renaissance figures have, over the past five years, made La Saladita their winter base, which has shifted the visual geography of women's longboarding away from Malibu's First Point and toward Mexico's Pacific point breaks.

What the renaissance is actually about

The popular framing of the modern logger renaissance is that it is a revival of 1960s nose-riding style. That is half right. The deeper structural fact is that the renaissance is a response to the WSL contest-judging framework, which rewards a specific kind of long, drawn-out, locked-in nose-ride at the expense of more responsive and improvisational surfing. The renaissance figures are, in effect, opting out of the world-tour scoring system in favor of a culture in which style, line, and aesthetic commitment are rewarded directly by sponsors, editorial press, and audience attention.

This is not unique to women's longboarding. The men's side has its own renaissance figures — Alex Knost, Andy Nieblas, Bryce Young — operating in the same space. But the women's-side renaissance has been substantially more legible to the broader culture, because the visual language of low-stance noseriding, single-fin equipment, and high-waist swimsuits has crossed over into mainstream fashion and brand imagery in a way the men's-side has not. The result is a generation of women's longboarders whose financial and reputational success is structurally decoupled from the WSL contest results.

The unfinished documentation

This piece exists because the women's longboard story has been less thoroughly written than the equivalent men's-side story, and we wanted a complete-enough reference to point to. There are still significant gaps. Some are deliberate — we have not tried to cover the European tour in any depth here, and the Australian women's longboard scene has its own history that deserves its own piece. Some are structural — the 1977-1998 erasure period has not been adequately rebuilt as oral history, and the women who kept the discipline alive during the gap years are aging out of the recoverable record.

Specific projects that should exist and currently do not:

• A photographic archive of the 1958-1976 period, organized by surfer rather than by contest or magazine cover. Most of the existing photographs are in private collections, in the archives of Surfer Magazine and The Surfer's Journal, or in shaper estates. They have not been digitized into a single accessible reference.
• Oral histories from the 1977-1998 erasure period, focused on the women who kept the discipline alive at San Onofre, Cocoa Beach, Doheny, Waikiki, the Gold Coast, Biarritz, and a handful of other locations. This is the most time-sensitive project on the list. Many of the figures from this period are now in their sixties and seventies.
• A statistical analysis of the WSL Longboard Tour scoring criteria, examining whether the current judging framework actually rewards what the codified criteria say it rewards, or whether there is a systematic bias toward certain stylistic patterns. The men's-side WSL judging has been examined more thoroughly than the women's side.
• A complete record of women's longboard prize money across all sanctioning bodies, 1999 to present, normalized for inflation, including the 2019 equal-prize-money inflection point. This data is publicly available but has not been compiled in one place.
• A documentation of the modern logger renaissance figures' actual revenue streams — sponsor deals, royalty agreements with surfboard shapers, film and editorial income, brand collaborations — at the level the men's-side surf-business press routinely covers for the equivalent male figures.

This is a long list. It is also a tractable one. Most of it is research-and-organization work rather than primary investigation, and it is the kind of project that an editorial team with patience could finish in a year. We are starting on the first three items as part of our 2026 publication calendar, and would welcome contributions from anyone who has material — photographs, contest records, oral history recordings, sponsor contracts — that belongs in any of these archives.

If you wait for the surf press to do this work, you will be waiting forever. So you do it yourself, and you let the surf press catch up at their leisure. — Cori Schumacher, 2014 interview with The Inertia, on documenting women's surf history

A complete timeline of women's longboard world champions

The women shaping the boards

If the documented history of women's competitive longboarding is incomplete, the history of women's shaping is more incomplete still. Surfboard shaping has been one of the most male-dominated specialties in the sport, far more so than the surfing itself. As recently as 2015, fewer than two dozen women globally were known to be shaping production-volume longboards under their own labels. That number has roughly doubled since then. The figures below are the ones whose work matters editorially — independent of celebrity, social-media following, or the marketing budget behind the label.

Rachel Lord · Lord Bords · Ventura, California

Rachel Lord, who shapes under the label Lord Bords and signs her artwork as R. Lord, is the most stylistically distinctive women's shaper of the post-2015 generation. Lord trained as a sculptor and painter at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she fell in love with the sensation of blending edges and carving objects out of wood. She received her first surfboard at age twenty-nine in 2015 and began shaping in 2016 — entirely self-taught through YouTube, books, and the kind of trial-and-error that the established shaping community of California explicitly refused to teach a woman walking in cold.

Lord's longboards are immediately recognizable. The aesthetic is high-contrast, color-blocked, and visually closer to mid-century West Coast painting than to the muted resin tints of the dominant California shaping tradition. Her hulls and noseriders are technically conservative — she is not reinventing the rocker or the foil — but her finish and visual treatment are unlike anything else in the market. The boards have ended up in the hands of Karina Rozunko, Lola Mignot, and a cluster of the renaissance-era loggers; they have also been written up in The Inertia, Cultured Magazine, and the Sea Together podcast.

Christine Brailsford Caro · Furrow Surfcraft · Leucadia, California

Christine Brailsford Caro, who shapes under the label Furrow Surfcraft, started shaping over ten years ago with a plywood paipo. Her label is now one of the most respected small-shop operations on the California coast. Caro's design vocabulary draws from the transitional-era surfboards of the late 1960s — the moment just before the shortboard revolution fully displaced longboarding — and is centered on single-fin eggs, twin-fin fishes, and a small line of dedicated noseriders. The boards reward fluidity and smooth rail-to-rail surfing rather than vertical maneuvers; they are explicitly designed for surfers who want to glide.

Caro's profile in Men's Journal and her ongoing relationship with the World Surf League's editorial side have made her one of the most institutionally legible women shapers. The work itself is what holds up: the boards have a clear design philosophy, the finish is consistent, and the small-shop output (under 200 boards per year) limits the supply enough that the wait list runs four to six months.

Valerie Duprat · Mère-Made Surfboards · California

Valerie Duprat is a French-born biochemist who moved to California two decades ago, picked up shaping as a creative outlet roughly ten years into her California life, and has built it into a working label called Mère-Made Surfboards. Duprat's path — biochemist to shaper — is closer to Rachel Lord's outsider trajectory than to the typical apprenticed-under-a-master path. Her boards lean toward functional longboards and mid-lengths; her customer base is heavily women learning to surf in mid-life, which is one of the fastest-growing demographic segments in the sport and one of the most poorly served by mainstream shapers.

Cher Pendarvis · the originator

Cher Pendarvis is the documented starting point for women in shaping. She began repairing boards in 1965 and eventually made her own during her college years in San Diego. Her career predates the modern shaping-industry structure entirely; she shaped boards for herself and for her husband, surf historian Steve Pendarvis, throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The historical record of Cher Pendarvis's work is preserved primarily in the Pendarvis family archive and in scattered Surfer's Journal features — the kind of documentation that should sit in a museum rather than a private box.

Worth following · Whitney Lang, Kat Mortimer, Kelly Connolly, Ashley Lloyd

The remaining figures on the established lists of women shapers — Whitney Lang (California), Kat Mortimer, Kelly Connolly (Bali-based), Ashley Lloyd (Santa Cruz) — represent a layer of working production shapers who, individually, produce smaller volumes than the labels above but who collectively are most of the current women's-shaping commercial output. Ashley Lloyd in particular has built a sustained label specializing in performance longboards. Kelly Connolly's Bali operation is one of the few examples of a women-led shaping shop based outside California or the Atlantic seaboard.

A note on what we did not write here. The shapers section above is intentionally limited to women whose work we have either ridden, examined in person, or had reliable second-hand reports on from credible sources. We have left off a substantially longer list of women who are shaping at smaller volumes or earlier in their careers. A working spreadsheet of all known active women's shapers, with label, location, board specialty, and contact, is something we are building separately and will publish when it is reasonably complete.

And a parallel note: the lesser-known male shapers

Worth flagging quickly, because they sit in the same editorial conversation: a handful of male shapers — Oscar Guru, who appears to be a contemporary California-based maker selling through Bay Street Boards in Santa Monica; Robin Kegel, the Los Angeles shaper whose work for Kassia Meador defined the renaissance-era logger; and a small cluster of European and Australian small-shop shapers — represent the small-volume, design-intent end of the men's shaping conversation that the broader surf press has consistently underwritten about. A separate piece dedicated to lesser-known longboard shapers across both genders is in development.

Cite this guide as