Rusty

Last blog, John Elwell, a friend of Bob Simmons during the last five or six years of his life, shared stories from this great innovator. Here is Elwell’s discussion on the planing hull:

Aspect ratio is a proper width and length ratio. Naval architect Lindsay Lord said the most common factor in a good planing hull was the width in the stern. If you divide the width into the length you’ll get the Aspect Ratio. It will be a decimal number. Good numbers are .3 to .5. Wing design uses this depending on how much it is designed to lift with a power plant. With extraordinary amounts of power, a lower aspect number will work. (At Windansea, Simmons went to the shortboard because of the more powerful wave. He already did this in powerful shorebreak at Hermosa.)

In summary, there is a good ratio between length and width. Things too narrow don’t plane well and shapes that are too wide are handicapped also. Examples are the U2 spy planes that are like gliders and can fly high and sustain themselves, as well as longboards that will pick up on big, fat waves and have increased resurgence at low speeds. These features also work against these shapes at high speeds. The tow-in boards are adapted because they can get a low aspect ratio up to planing speed where a paddler can’t.

Archimedes displacement steps in for hydrostatics for the “plate” as it is called to support the load it is to carry. In other words, the optimum plate must float enough to not hinder lift…or too much, like paddleboards. Simmons was able to reduce a lot of extra weight by reducing flotation to a minimum. The boards in static position just barely floated with the tails squatting in the water, which is the attack angle. Moving a planing hull slowly, such as with a surfboard gets the kinetic energy (water flowing) to get initial lift to get it over the “hump” to plane while paddling in.

Tow-ins break the rules by having a power plant take you up to planing speeds to stay in the wave. Then as Lord says, “Everything changes.” Pointed sterns start to drag. On surfboards when the pressure is on the inside rail to the wave the dynamic trans-pan flow comes across the bottom of the lower part of the hull. It is directed there by the monohydrean shape we call the “rounded rail” that is making the top of the rail low pressure and the bottom dynamic high pressure. The result is lift by the kinetic energy (moving water) that is being deflected. The surfer is controlling the pressure by the amount of weight he exerts on the rail from his feet in the right position. Planing is described as skimming on water. Lord says planing hulls adjust themselves with speed, so much that they can fly dangerously out of control at higher speeds in conditions that can be too rough causing cross waves and chop. The camber nose or turn up really helped surfboards from pearling — an early problem with the old boards that no longer was a problem after Simmons.

Aspect ratio, put into use. Photo: Slavin

The old planks did not plane or turn well because of too much flotation, too much weight, and the wrong shape of rails. People were told to drag a foot to turn to angle the board. That ended with the Simmons’ boards. All boards thereafter copied the foiled rounded rail, but changed nose and tail shapes to their own liking. No one knew what they were copying or doing. Simmons did not talk to very many surfers, nor did some of those surfers listen to him.

The modern board has some type of rounded foiled rails. There is still a lot of confusion of what the outline should be. But there shouldn’t be if the surfboard makers knew how the electric strain gage works to identify shapes that have resistance. But aesthetics still win out in marketing. Today, so many people copy what works in surfing but are not quite sure how it works because there are a number of complex things working. One of the most important things that Simmons said and simply observed was that a surfboard really is going almost as fast sideways to the beach as it is going forward. He identified a surfboard’s trajectory and designed a board to do that. What he did was not the last word in planing hulls as he was constantly changing and improving on what he did. What he did was on solid ground. As Curren once told me, “It was too bad he died, he may have come up with something better.”

The summation of Lindsey Lord — the MIT naval architect who wrote the book on the Naval Architecture of Planing Hulls, who used the Bernoulli equation, and tested his study with the Simmons strain gage for exact data — said, ” There is nothing revolutionary in this because one thing leads back to another. In other words, there are links after links to other known principles.” And further more, “These things we did are from solid information and only the beginning.”

I must smile on the definition of “flex”. It is wide-open to some degree but there is a solid base and flex would fit into refining and improving the basic findings. There are restrictions but keep in mind that, “The sea is a hostile and ever-changing environment.”

The parameters as Simmons saw it as a scientist was, “We are really not going that fast; you just think your are.” He was right because waves only go so fast. He worked on reducing drag, with suitable size and flotation for the load of each rider, then attacked the enemy of planing hulls — resistance, mainly eddy flow drag, and excessive fin(s) — through Lord, hydrodynamic understanding, and his own observations and data with strain gages.

What he had and did for his time was remarkable. Proper aspect ratio was of course a key factor. To make it simple, there are important parts to the whole. Although as Lord said, “You change around a little but everything else is a compromise.” Which was apparent for better planing because it keeps the water under pressure and directing by the monohydrean rail for sudden and dynamic release, for lift making the hull lighter. Changing your weight deflects the board for turns and trim. The rail reduces pressure on top and increases pressure from the bottom, and it also tracks and holds the board in the wave unless it gets too steep. This application is unique to waves from standard planing.

We can follow the history of surfing. We look back and see small Hawaiian or Oceanic types of plates. They were used for different types of surfing. All these designs were done by “rule of thumb” — simply, what works is copied. They had no mathematics or language, and only the materials available. The variable is, of course, the rider’s skill. Some rider’s can ride anything. Dempsey Holder use to say, “A good surfboard rider can ride a door.” That is what it has been. Surfboards got screwed up from old Hawaiian shapes with “planks” and “paddle boards”. Flat decks and U-rails have too much weight. Paddleboards are surface shapes and have serious drag problems planing. This all had to be sorted out.

We started out in ‘47 riding borrowed paddleboards and planks. They were dangerous and impossible to ride well except for the gifted few. We asked our mentors and every one advised, “Get a board that floats.” Usually surfers picked a board with nice grains and a shiny finish. No one knew how a surfboard worked…until Simmons came along. Bob defined surfing as planing and surfboards were supposed to be planing hulls. Simmons snarled and gnashed his teeth, “Paddleboards are not.” He was more specific and despised pointed tails and tails under 10 inches, but favored wider tails for quicker lift. Soon, his adversaries, which were a few of the ignorant and jealous, started to generate vicious hearsay about wide tails, spin out, nose pushing and so forth.

Simmons would snarl, “Go someplace with better waves! We are really surfing on our rails.” He was right and it was too difficult to explain to the general population found at the beach. He was referring of course to Bernoulli and Lord’s research and basic hard knowledge of aero and hydrodynamics.

Others over the years without really understanding all that he did and meant have said, “Simmons was way ahead of the pack by light years.”

Stan Pleskunas is one of those quiet understated, highly-achieving, mad scientist surf dudes. His shaping machines were state of the art in the late ’80s — Channel Islands,
Linden, Nectar, and Rusty all used them. He designed a line of shaping hand tools, which are still used by many shapers today. Stan also worked with Lis, Greenough, and countless other visionaries on boards, sailboards, machines, and fins. His Fumunda Marine Products are globally distributed.

He goes further into Aspect Ratio for us:

The “whole” surfboard plan form is distinct from “wetted area” plan form. That said, it stands to reason that overall plan form relates in a general sense, to wetted plan form if the shapes considered are more or less conventional surfboard shapes. Another thing that seems to be overlooked is the rule (which is set in stone) that it takes a given amount of area to plane, a given weight at a given speed. Gravity and weight are the constants where speed and area are the variables in this rule. This is sort of the bedrock or foundation that all other factors are based on. To be more concise, the slower you go the more area you need to plane a given weight.

The next thing to consider is the power available. If you look at a modern jet, the wing plan form is decidedly inefficient or low aspect ratio. This is because of the fact that there is essentially unlimited power to push the jet forward.

Digging deep with a Simmons-inspired hull design. Photo: Slavin

On the other hand if you look at a sailplane the wings are long and narrow which have extremely high aspect ratios. The reason for this is there is nothing but gravity powering a sailplane so it has to be very efficient. To recap: low aspect ratios are less efficient. Higher aspect ratios are more efficient. In aeronautics, efficiency is measured in the ratio of lift to drag.

Throughout this rant we are assuming that the areas for both high and low aspect bodies are the same and the weight is the same. So low aspect ratio wings will have a much steeper natural glide path than a high aspect wing. A jet might have an unpowered glide path described as 2-to-1. That is, it goes forward two-feet for every foot it falls. A sailplane might have a glide path of 20-to-1 or it goes forward 20-feet for every foot it drops. The reason is the differences between the drag that low aspect and high aspect wings have. Remember, in this case gravity force/weight and area is the same for both bodies.

This might seem a bit complicated but it is not. Lower aspect ratio wings are more swept back. Higher aspect ratio wings are more perpendicular to the flow. What that means is at any point along a low aspect ratio wing, the flow is in contact with the wing for a longer distance than on a high aspect ratio body. This offers more opportunity for the flow to develop turbulence and increase drag, so it has more drag for the lift it generates. On a high aspect body the flow is in contact with the surface for a shorter distance so it has less opportunity to develop turbulence hence less drag for the lift it generates.

So if we have two wings of exactly the same area carrying exactly the same weight, the low aspect ratio body will require more power to go exactly the same speed as the higher aspect body. And if we try to relate all this to surfboards, let’s start with the assumption that the wetted area will more or less reflect what the overall plan form aspect ratio is. Keep in mind that the rule of speed, weight and wetted area still applies.

Let’s take a 6′2″ x 19″ board. Steve Coletta’s outline (which is what I have to work with) has 1060 square inches. The span is measured as the width of the shape or perpendicular to the flow, parallel to the stringer. In this case the span is 19″, the square of 19″ is 361. The span squared 361, divided by the area of 1060 is .3405. .3405 is the aspect ratio of the outline shape.

That same board scaled to be 9′8″ X 20.5″ has an aspect ratio of .2349. This is a substantially lower aspect ratio than the 6′2″. The gun has an aspect ratio, which is only 69% of the 6′2″ board.

So the question begs to be asked: why does a gun go so much faster than a shortboard if higher aspect ratios are more efficient? First, it has to do with amount of power available to push the board forward. Just like the jet that might fly at mach 2 the gun has a heap more power available. The gun on a big wave has more power to tap than a shortboard on a small wave. It is certainly arguable that a shortboard will go faster than a gun on a smaller wave more suited to the shortboard. All things equal, especially the available power, efficiency wins over all. Otherwise, we would all be riding 10-foot guns on three-foot waves. A 9′6″ longboard designed for smaller waves will be much wider which will push the aspect ratio up considerably perhaps even equal to the shortboard’s aspect ratio. Or put it this way, the 9′6″ board would have to be much wider and have much more area to have the same aspect ratio as the 6′2″, which would end up looking like a longboard not a gun.

The next obvious question is why not ride a shorter, higher aspect ratio board in big waves where we have all that power available to go that much faster? Again, for the same reason a jet has low aspect wings — it is all about control. The flow laying on the wing for a longer distance makes the jet more pitch stable than the sailplane. It has more drag but the advantage of lower aspect ratios is it does not pitch up and down or pearl and stall as easily as the high aspect wings of a sailplane. With all that power, the jet, just as the gun, must be controllable especially in the “pitch” plane. So you are dropping into 15-foot Sunset with three-foot bumps coming up the face, the lack of relative efficiency of the gun to the shortboard is of minor concern compared to plowing into bumps or getting launched off one. Besides there is so much power to tap who cares if the shortboard is a touch more efficient? Control is the key to riding bigger, bumpier waves.

This is really simplified but the basic premise of this argument is correct, in my opinion. This is more or less proven by the fact that smaller waves require more efficiency and they are generally ridden on higher aspect ratio boards. The same is true for big waves where longer lower aspect ratio boards are ridden in big waves. Today’s shapers have it sorted out — just look at what they prescribe for different wave conditions, it all pans out. One thing that is very hard to get a handle on is the power that a competent surfer can add to the equation. When a guy starts pumping and the board begins to flex a bit and he un-weights, the energy he is imparting is substantial. This profoundly affects the efficiency and ultimate speed of the board. This is where today’s shapers have made most of the improvements in design. This is especially true for specific riders who can accurately communicate their feeling/desires in a design to the shaper.

This treatment does not take into account rocker, thickness, rail shape and a myriad of other design features that make a complete board. However, using aspect ratio as a common denominator for board measurement/design might be a very useful (if overlooked) tool to tune surfboard shapes with. Using aspect ratio as a measurement will be an empirical process but may really help those who have had a family of boards designed with CAD software. Area measurements, which are critical to calculating aspect ratio, are easily known from CAD drawings.

Where is the next frontier in board design? I think it will be in the quantification and control of flex. This has not been done and cannot now be easily designed for. Given the variability in shapes, materials and construction techniques it will be a long row to hoe to get flex sorted out. When a guy gets that “magic” board, that “magic” is flex, in my opinion. I could go on and on about flex but that is entirely another chapter.

It’s no secret that surfboard design requires a certain bit of hydrodynamics. And while some of you were snoozing in physics class, early board-builders were figuring things out so today’s modern shapers didn’t really have to. Leading that early charge was Bob Simmons — an eccentric dude, who didn’t care much what people thought of his off-the-wall concepts. However, Simmons single-handedly looked at the board’s planing surface and made it the forefront of shaping.

Richard Kenvin on a Simmons-inspired model. Photo: Scott Sullivan

San Diego surfer Richard Kenvin is making a film about Simmons called ‘Hydrodynamica’ and offers the following:

After the longboard era ended in the late sixties, surfers pursued a performance ideal focused on deep tuberiding, tight-radius carves, controlled slides, and finally, vertical turns in and above the lip. This performance criterion has dictated the evolution of the shortboard over the past 40 years. The desire to perform precise vertical turns and make controlled micro-adjustments on the face and in the barrel brought about a narrow, stiletto-like board with continuous outline curve, lots of rocker, and a canted fin cluster designed for holding power and instant release up the face. All of these design innovations make today’s incredible shortboard performance surfing possible. The dreams of the late sixties have come true, and there is no argument that the modern shortboard is a functional waveriding machine that allows for spectacular surfing.

That being said, this shortboard performance ideal comes with a price, and the currency that pays that price is drag. Quick lift, paddling power, glide, planing speed, and trim have all been sacrificed on the altar of maneuverability. For the strong and agile or for those lucky enough to ride clean, powerful surf on a regular basis such drag-inducing design elements as ample rocker and narrow curvy outlines have more benefits than drawbacks. Even so, surfers are always looking for new sensations, and in recent years many of us have been exploring designs from the past that originated long before the contemporary shortboard. Wide, low rocker, high aspect-ratio designs like the fish don’t allow quite the same performance levels as shortboards, but they do set us free, more or less, from paying the debt of drag associated with ultra-rockered, narrow designs.

This growing movement towards experiencing “alternative” boards like the fish is evidence of a widespread desire to be freed, at least occasionally, from the shackles of over-specialized contemporary design. In fact, these “retro” boards are now influencing shortboard design as rockers mellow, outlines get straighter, and boards get wider and shorter. As the design pendulum swings back in favor of wider and flatter, it seems we are in for interesting times. With minds opening along these lines, shortboard performance is about to take a leap forward in a new direction. Relaxed trim and planing speed will be possible on very short and maneuverable boards, and the dreaded “Huntington Hop” will be eliminated from our repertoires. All along the surf history timeline the prophets of width and planing speed have appeared and blown our minds: the Paipo riders of Hawaii, Bob Simmons, George Greenough, Steve Lis, and though we try to deny it, bodyboarders like Mike Stewart and Danny Kim have all brought us a message we too often fail to heed. With evidence of the virtues of flat and wide (and finless flex!) displayed right before our eyes our tendency to stubbornly deny those virtues in favor of convention is quite remarkable.

When considering wider, high aspect ratio board design it becomes impossible to ignore the work of Bob Simmons in the late 1940s and early ’50s. By the time of his death in 1954, Simmons had brought his dual-finned hydrodynamic planing hull design to a state of fulfilled refinement. But planing hull surfboard history really begins with the traditional finless boards of pre-contact Hawaii, particularly the short, wide Paipo board and the longer and slightly narrower Alaia. These ancient surfboards are extremely fast due to a hydrodynamic design that allows for subtle flex, very efficient trim and planing and hardly any drag.

In the mid 1940s, scale models resembling Paipo and Alaia type planing craft were tested in Hawaii as part of an effort to improve military powerboat performance. And in 1946, naval architect Lindsay Lord published the results of these tests in a study titled The Naval Architecture of Planing Hulls. Lord proclaimed the performance benefits of wide hull designs and also acknowledged the challenge of incorporating them into a seaworthy vessel. Modifications and compromises were necessary to achieve this, and the same holds true for surfboard design. Before long, Simmons obtained a copy of Lord’s report and referred to it when designing his first planing hull surfboard in 1948. He also studied the work of the Daniel Bernoulli, a mathematician from the 18th century who had articulated the basic principles of hydrodynamic lift in a study published in 1738 under the title Hydrodynamica. Simmons then began effectively combining ancient planing principles with modern hydrodynamic theory to arrive at an entirely new type of surfboard.

Simmons was able to harness the planing powers of the traditional finless boards by designing a Bernoulli-inspired elliptical rail that, when guided by a shallow keel fin, allowed his boards to accelerate out of turns and carve on a rail with unprecedented control. The Simmons rail generated dynamic lift and required a fin to function properly. He kept his tails very wide for planing speed, and he placed a keel on each outboard rail near the tail. He used minimal rocker to reduce drag, and minimal curve in his outlines to maximize trim speed. He broke the outline slightly in the back third with a “bump” for release, and he rounded the noses of his boards and tilted them upwards in order to create lift through displacement when paddling into waves and negotiating steep drops and chop. This innovation became known as a “spoon”. The lifted angle of the spoon is sometimes mistaken for rocker, but the actual riding surface of the board is quite flat.

Simmons’ boards are perhaps more relevant today than at any other time in surfing history. With the advanced CAD design programs now available it is possible to reference the original planing hull concept and blend it with contemporary designs to make better boards. Fin placement and bottom curve can be tweaked and adjusted until a happy medium is achieved, with the goal being a very short board that paddles well, skates, glides, and trims, all without sacrificing maneuverability or control in the tube. Riding a Simmons-inspired planing hull and discovering its place in surfing’s past and its relevance in the present is a rewarding experience for surfers of all ability levels.

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John Elwell was friends with Bob Simmons the last five or six years of his life. He was in the water with him at Windansea the day he died. Elwell has a book called “Surfing in San Diego,” which is a great historical overview. Elwell elaborates on ‘The Coming of Simmons’:

First, we heard rumors of new boards that were the rage of Malibu in 1948 and early ‘49 and of Simmons. He showed up here at IB in ‘49 when I met him. This guy had power of “presence”. You could feel it when he walked in the lifeguard station. I once felt like a wind passing and he went behind me unseen. The guy wore a glitter of fiberglass dust and clothes of resin. His plaid wool shirts were faded and well worn, and he wore deck shoes — never any socks or underwear. He was poorly groomed and shaved and spoke in short, hard one-liners, snarling or cackling laughs. He was no nonsense, almost unfriendly at first. He was all business and a busy person about to die young. When something was bad…it was a disaster!

Chris DelMoro, using his hull. Photo: Peterson

We wanted some of his boards but he was not ready to make boards for everyone. We had to get the wood and he would shape for $15 and we would sand to his directions and supervision in glassing. It would take a while — like almost a year. The good times were watching him shape and carefully asking him questions. He would like to tell special stories of surf experiences. He would blurt out stuff that we would have to think about.

After his death, Morgan and I would talk about this. He said we wouldn’t ever know what he was talking about and what all those calculations were on his hydrographic charts. He talked about a sea break off SF called the Great Break. Then, at times, talked about 100-foot waves off Chile that he would need special rubber suits that were not yet developed and small bail out bottles of oxygen.

At 16, it was like talking to someone like Buck Rogers. ‘Is this guy for real?’ Then there were boomerangs — that he called deadly weapons — and ping-pong championships. All connected again, we would find out later through Bernoulli. My relation to Simmons is that we became good friends surfing together and watching and listening to him shape in the station. I admired him, not knowing he was a brilliant math student, engineer at Douglas, a machinist, master boomerang-maker and thrower, ping-pong champion, and power bicyclist. He was an accomplished athlete of special skills and endurance sports. He had a badly injured arm from a bicycle accident that almost killed him. He almost went down at Hermosa from a blow from his board. But he was not a cripple, or a “surfer who could hardly swim,” as Quig described him. His arm was wired together without being able to rotate it and it slashed the water. He made mile swims off the Sloughs and no one worried about him.

I was surfing with Simmons the day he was killed and was the only one with him when he took off late on a big wave and slipped on a new, poorly-waxed board. He was surfing brilliantly that day after returning from the North Shore in the winter of ‘53. He made a new board in ‘54, the same configuration but improved the attack angle so he could take one-stroke and no-stroke take-offs. His boards were just about perfectly balanced and he would check them on a sawhorse and note the center of gravity. I think this is very important! When Morgan told me that we might never know what he meant, I started to turn over stones with his family and friends to put the puzzle together. Simmons was indeed way out there. Even back then, he talked about predicting surf from sun spot storms that heat the equator which causes the El Nino.

Check back next week for part two of this subject — Aspect Ratio.

What about guns? They’re narrow. They go fast.

A gun, doing its job at Waimea Bay. Photo: Jeremiah Klein

They are narrow on the ends but in the middle they are wider. In building quivers for riders and customers, usually the “performance shortboard” is the narrowest one in the bunch. Sometimes I’ll make the next one or two up a little narrower but not by much. Maybe an 1/8″ or so.

As I work my way up from 6′2″, for example, center widths will hold for a couple of steps up the ladder and the ends will pull in. But at some point, the center width, or widest part of the board needs to start increasing.

So for a 175 lb rider his quiver might look something like:

6′2″ = 18.55″
6′4″ = 18.45″
6′6″ = 18.45″
6′8″ = 18.55″
6′10″ = 18.6″
7′2″ = 18.65″
7′6″ = 18.8″
8′0″ = 19″
8′6″ = 19.5″
9′0″ = 20″
9′8″ = 20.5″

The longer boards need to be wider to maintain adequate outline curve. The ends are reduced in area for control in larger, more powerful surf.

It’s a common misconception that wide boards are slow. In most cases, inch for inch, they are actually faster. Shorter, wider boards, once planning, are far more efficient and ultimately capable of achieving higher speeds than longer, sleeker looking foils.

Short, wide, low rocker, thin, and finless is probably the fastest ride in terms of inherent speed — Paipo, Alaia, and bodyboards. Control is another issue, especially if you are going to stand up on the craft.

Derek Hynd spinning out, just for fun. Photo: Sean Rowland

Narrow boards are quick. Reaction time from rail-to-rail is directly related to width. Light, quick surfers are capable of generating a tremendous amount of speed by loading one rail, flexing the board, which tightens the arc, unweighting, the rebound or return from the flex launches the rider out of the turn, setting the rider up for the next turn. Narrowness reduces transition time from one rail to the other. By linking a series of tight arcs at a higher frequency, a more advanced rider is going faster by generating speed.

There are many different lines to be drawn on a given wave. One craft will find its way on a pure speed line, another, given the ability level of the rider, will cover more distance between the same two points in the same amount of time.

There is a lot of research about how things go through water and air, either self-propelled or by some external power like wind or engines. With surfboards, however, we are looking at planing hulls. We’re looking at ways to maximize performance of something planing on top of the water propelled by the waves energy and how the rider utilizes it.

Once up and planing, wetted surface becomes a big variable influencing the speed of a board. The more board that is in contact with the water, proportionately more drag is incurred. The entire surface area of a board isn’t so much an issue as the rail length and tail width. Narrow shapes, especially with narrow ends, cause drag and suction, and are inherently unstable and interfere with complete planing process. So a wider board, even though it may have relatively more area, allows the rider to go shorter. Usually one rail is committed at a time. A shorter rail line will have less drag, less wetted area, and accelerate more quickly.

Tow boards are short, narrow in the middle, and thin. Stating the obvious, lack of planing area and volume isn’t an issue because the craft is artificially brought up to planing speed. The primary reason tow boards are so fast is that they have such short rail lines and low exit rocker. They have low overall area but they have proportionately wide tails. The overall narrowness helps facilitate control. Narrowness also allows for shorter, lower area (lower drag) fins, which work more efficiently at higher speeds.

Raimana, hoping his tow board goes as fast as this Teahupoo mutant.
Photo: Sean Collins

Experimentation with extremely narrow boards in the late ’60s and early ’70s produced some memorable surfing. Reno Abellira was the quickest surfer in the World Championships in Puerto Rico in 1968. (*See footnote at bottom of page.) His sub-seven-foot, very narrow, Brewer mini-gun was the most advanced surfboard in the comp. Reno’s board was 6′ 7″ x 18.75″ x 2 5/8″ single glassed round-pin, weighing 8 lbs (inc. fin) — a real mini-gun. He also had with him (but did not ride) a 5′ 4″ x 17″ x 2″ (!!!!!!). Keep in mind, most of the other competitors were riding boards in the eight- to nine-foot range, 21 inches wide, give or take.

The winner, albeit controversial, Fred Hemmings, was on a short (8′6″) longboard and satisfied the judges ‘biggest wave, longest ride, most critical part of the wave’ criteria. His large planing hull had its advantages. Reno was lightning-quick, not just down the line but also from rail-to-rail. While his rides may not have been as long, the actual amount of distance he covered per wave was far greater than the other competitors. A comparison could be made to Kelly Slater early in his professional career, competing on boards around 17 5/8″ wide. A few short years later, in the mid-’70s, Reno and Brewer were instrumental in transitioning the fish into the MR twin-fin.

In the early 70’s, Barry Kanaiaupuni rode boards that even Kelly Slater would call ridiculously narrow. He’s remembered for late drops at big Sunset, his trademark rocking from rail-to-rail, and setting up for his definitive single-fin bottom turn. The narrowness translated into control and quickness while the majority of the surfers out at Sunset on any given day were struggling to control their speed because their boards had too much overall area. Paddle power was critical to get in, but what to do with all the excess planing area and resultant speed after the wave is caught?

BK laying into one of his trademark bottom turns. Photo: Leroy Grannis

So, depending on conditions, appropriate width comes down to a balancing act of catching and control.

Some of the early ’70s surf movies took a generation of surfers on a fantasy ride that may as well been called “Romancing the Rock” (Hawaii). The surfing on early modern guns (post-longboard) on the North Shore was nothing short of amazing. The imagery in the magazines and movies was so powerful; it seduced a large percentage of the general surfing population into trying to ride completely impractical equipment. But the boards sure looked cool.

As they always do, corrections happen. In the mid and late ’70s, MR helped popularize twin-fins, which were a much more practical ride for the majority of surfers and their hometown conditions.

Tom Curren, coming off a competitive hiatus in the early ’90s, turned heads by competing on a vintage early ’70s twin-fin and having good success in small gutless surf. Everyday surf. I don’t mean to dwell on the twin-fin thing, but it’s the width, length, thickness, and relaxed rocker of the 5′5″ Rick Twin-fin retro board that gave him the planing speed to liven up his surfing in the mediocre waves for that particular contest.

A little Internet searching plays out a pretty consistent timeline on the Fish fascination and reintroduction into mainstream consciousness. On the topic of Searching, Curren riding the short, wide, Fireball Fish at huge Bawa is seared into the memories of anyone who watched the video in 1996.

Throughout the early 90’s Kelly Slater was redefining performance surfing on ultra narrow, heavily rockered 6′1″s. While about 1% of the general surfing population could actually ride these types of boards, the other 99% struggled. …Lost’s video, 5′5″ x 19 1/4″ (1997) helped to shift the momentum the other way.

Ironically, in the last year or so, Kelly is helping to spearhead another correction.

Left: Kelly on his Glass Slipper in the ’90s; and Right: at the 2009 Snapper Rocks event on a wider, fatter board. Photos: Divine, Rowland

On the Base Surfboards website, Darren Handley discusses what’s different about Mick Fanning’s 2009 title board. He calls it “The Cut Down” — a 6′1″ cut down on the ends. A little wider. A little thicker. Fascinating.

So what’s up with the retro thing? Simple: shorter, wider, thicker, flatter. More efficient planing hulls.

In the last few years it seems, more and more so, the general surfing population is on to the shorter, wider direction. Most shapers with a little experience have a decent 6′2″ x 18 ½ x 2 ¼ in their bag. In a machine age, little is left to the imagination on this type of board. It’s sort of senseless for surf shops to go deep into this type of inventory because it’s such a commodity item. What’s fun is exploring all the different ways to go shorter and wider. It doesn’t get judged or need to be validated with a rating or ranking.

In earlier blogs I have touched on fins and how multiple fins have enabled designers to go shorter and wider.

To my knowledge, Bob Simmons was the seminal influence on modern surfboard design. His scientific approach to building surfboards was groundbreaking and a lot of the principles he applied still have strong merit 60-plus years later.

In the next blog I’ll explore some of his theories and have a look at how his incredible influence is manifested in some new-old designs…hydrodynamic planing hulls.

It’s all about putting the glide back in the ride. Less work, more fun.

Happy Surfing.

[Special thanks to: Dick Brewer, John Elwell, Richard Kenvin, Stan Pleskunas. And: George Orbelian and Paul Holmes for research details on the Reno Abellira and Mark Richards boards from their upcoming book "Shaper of Surfing: Dick Brewer."]

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*Competitors and media alike went to Puerto Rico expecting it to be a showcase for the new, progressive shortboard style. Vee bottoms, mini-guns and still-experimental surf craft were the order of the day. Fueled in part by psychoactively-induced imagination, there was a collective desire for something radical to take place. It did, but not in the way that was generally expected. Hemmings read the rules, studied the conditions, figured out his game plan, rode a board he describes as “a short longboard” — an 8′6″ wide-back, thick, heavy squaretail shaped by Ben Aipa — and surfed to victory in the finals by riding the five biggest waves the longest possible distance. To many of those who considered themselves on the cutting edge at the time, it was a downright travesty of justice.

Just after Hemmings and Margo won men’s and women’s divisions in the ‘68 World Champs. Photo: Leroy Grannis

“They were looking for rock ‘n’ roll and I was a waltzer, and I think what a lot of the other competitors missed was that the judges were all from the waltzing school of surfing, too,” says Hemmings. But he also adds, citing his already considerable contest record, “Winning the World Contest was not a fluke. I went there to win. I trained hard. I didn’t smoke or drink. I went out with a strategy and I beat those guys fair and square. So it hurt when some pundits in the surf media denied me the recognition that was my due.”
–Paul Holmes/Fred Hemmings, interview from Longboard magazine

When I’m designing a board I always contemplate the fins — the number of fins, the shape of the fins, the size of the fins, the relationship of the fins, where they are positioned with respect to each other, the rail, the nose vector. They are not always the same size or template. In fact, I’ve always been a firm believer in mixing sizes, foils and flex to get a desired effect.

World Champ Mick Fanning, tuning up with his trusty thruster.
Photo: Jeremiah Klein

FLEX

Flex is so crucial. Not just the amount of flex, but the quality of the flex. Where is the fin bending? Base-to-tip flex? Torsional flex? How quick does it rebound?

Small mushy day: Try fins with softer flex. Try front fins with some base and extra area. A more pivoty, triangular outline, a heavily cambered foil, and a back fin with a little less area and depth, and move it up if your system allows.

The surf is cranking: Run smaller fins up front, preferably with a little more rake, and stiffer flex. It would be good if they had a slight radius to the leading edge. Place a larger, more dominant fin farther back on the tail for control and holding power.

Lighter surfers in smaller weaker surf will usually benefit from a fin with softer flex. Softer fins will help the board feel looser. It will help to initiate turns but isn’t necessarily a dynamic solution. Soft, as in “bendy” plastic, helps start a turn but there isn’t a lot of return. You may find yourself double-pumping to try and keep your rail set or struggling to project where you want to go.

Another symptom of a fin that is too soft is that it will wash out on turns, especially on a cutback or coming off the top. Coming off the top you should be able to accelerate. A soft fin will slip a little and throw your timing off. A quality glass or composite fin may have a firm base but a “softer tip” and what you should be looking for is a crisp rebound on that flex. A fin that is soft, generally speaking, spills a lot of the power you put into a turn and slows reaction time out of the turn.

Dave Wassel is no small dude. Bigger guys tend to favor a more rigid fin.
Photo: Jeremiah Klein.

Conversely, larger surfers in more powerful surf will be happier with a more rigid fin. Too rigid is no good. A turn is a complex thing that takes everything working in harmony to maximize the return on effort. A good hull will have certain flex attributes and it should be married to a fin with complementary qualities. As you load the board in a turn, so too should the fins be storing energy. As you follow through on your arc and start to unweight, the power of the wave and your energy being returned should flow together. You should feel a launch out of the board and the fins should contribute to that launch.

A lot of companies offered up carbon fins over the last few years. In some cases this was primarily to overcome the shortcomings of the method of attachment or inadequate plastic. There are some composite fins that combine a lightweight, cor-mat filler, fiberglass cloth and carbon to create a light, strong fin, with a variety of flex patterns.
Carbon has “Tech Appeal” but needs to be used carefully and sparingly so as not to overcorrect the flex shortcomings of other materials involved in the construction.

Fins in the past were cut out of panels of fiberglass laid up in many layers. A finished fin is in the range of .22 to .35 of an inch thick. Personally, I lean towards a thinner fin, as I believe they go through the water faster. As long as flex and foil are not compromised by going thinner, it is usually a good thing.

Panels are laid up usually with six-to eight-ounce cloth, and possibly some glass mat as filler. Think of the finished panel as something similar to plywood. The more layers, the finer the cloth, the more control you have over foiling detail, less resin (resin is rigid), more strength, and more control over the flex, and to a certain extent, a lighter fin. This is why in most cases I like four-ounce panels.

GLASS-ONS VS FIN SYSTEMS

How a glass-on fin is attached can have a lot of bearing on its performance. The amount of cloth used and where it is applied has an impact on the final product along with how the sander finishes it off. The sander as well as the overall foil and taper of the fin impact the leading and trailing edges.

Standard glass-on fins. Photo: Jeremiah Klein

I think when a fin is glassed on it creates a very subtle “vector” contour on the inside of the fin. Technique varies from glass shop to glass shop but usually a few cloth ovals are run up both sides of the fins when they are glassed on. If you were to run a straight edge across the inside of the finished fins, you would probably see a slight convex to concave change on the inner part of the fin.

Fin system box failure can be devastating and difficult to repair, especially on the road. Glass-ons, on the other hand, are usually not that difficult to reinforce or re-attach. A lot of pros simply feel that glass-ons add something, however difficult to articulate, to the board’s performance.

There is an on-going dialogue about the effect of having rovings or a filet at the base of the fins. Many competitive surfers feel that the radius at the base of a glass on fin adds some intangible element of flow, or that the fins being glassed on creates a “oneness” in terms of how the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.

Personally, I think a lot is lost in the inability to fine-tune performance by changing out fins. Years ago, a visiting pro who was in town for a major tour event got a new board and could tell he really liked the hull but the fins weren’t quite right. We cut those fins off and glassed them back on four different times in four days before he finally declared they were right…he did end up getting a good result in the contest.

If you really think the transition at the base makes a difference, run a bit of silicone or something similar along the base of the fin if you are worried about the feel of a transition curve. But the ability to change out fins based on conditions is invaluable.

WHAT WORKS FOR YOU

Fins for most people have always been an afterthought. Even a lot of experienced surfers trust their shapers to guide them. There are a lot of shapers that simply don’t have the experience to give their customers a good overview. We do demo days from time-to-time and some of the fin companies will participate. These events are real eye openers for most of the people who show up but it’s very difficult to reach many surfers this way.

Freddy P, putting his fins to the ultimate test. Photo: Jeremiah Klein

A surfboard may cost you $500 to $700. You may get fins included with the board. In most cases these will be molded plastic fins. They may be OK but chances are you can do better. A good set of glass or composite fins will be an extra $70 to $100 more.

Don’t be afraid to try something new. Take a few sets of fins to the beach and switch out during a session. You can get many different feels running different fins on one hull. There is no better basis than actual experience.

Parts of the above blog are excepted from the Surfer’s Journal vol. 15#6

Thanks to our friends at Surfline.com!

Part one of Quadrophenia was focused mainly on what makes a good quad. In part two, Rusty interviews notable shapers, surfers and designers on the history of quads. Enjoy. –Ed

Pipe Master and former World Champ Tom Carroll on a serious quad in the eighties.

Simon Anderson on quads:
I’m looking to make a quad that performs like a thruster — in other words: predictable and connecting smoothly through turns. My 2009 quad has a twin-type plan shape with flat nose entry but a lot of tail rocker with deep vee through the back half of the board and at the swallowtail, deep single concave cuts through the front half of the bottom with a double cutting thru the vee to the tail.

The fins are more clustered than last year’s model. I use normal thruster side fins and 1/8″ smaller double-sided foiled-back fins both at five degrees — the forward fins point to the nose tip and the rear fins point straighter up the board.

This style of board for me works great in waves that lack a little bit of power and I find that I can do power turns off the top thru a section with a flatter or weaker face that actually feel like thruster turns on a more powerful wave.

My quads are designed for the most part for small waves, from one to four feet. Average surfers can surf these boards in bigger waves up to six feet and have a lot fun because of the extra speed and looseness off the top. But in the end, the quad is essentially a well-behaved twin fin and the trick is to harness the wild element — as much as possible — associated with this type of design.

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There’s a lot of speculation on who made the first quad. I imagine quite a few designers were searching for ways to build more drive into twin fins and expand their range. Glen Winton is one the first surfer/shapers that I know of who made a four fin. Certainly there were others.

Greg Mungall talked to me recently about the impact of Simon’s visit. Greg had a hot-selling twin-fin model with Nectar. Nectar’s focus quickly shifted to the Thruster. With Simon’s back-to-back wins at Bells and the Coke, the design was more than validated and in heavy demand. Greg asked Gary McNabb if he could do a double-wing swallow three-fin. Gary declined but offered up, “Why don’t you put four fins on a board?”

Greg did and took it to his next pro event in Japan.

Late in 1981, Australian shaper Bruce McKee made his first quad and hasn’t looked back. His Mission Quattro is a nearly three-decade long commitment to refining and evolving the four-fin surfboard.

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Bruce McKee on quads:

I found it interesting the way in 1981, the Thruster was first created, then packaged and heavily promoted by the mags and pro surfer community. It was definitely a major advancement, a great mix of needs finding a solution. A new concept with an iconic statesman to represent it. To me, though, it was just one solution; before the end of 1981, I had commenced what I called: “Mission Quattro.”

I saw the first four-fins and quads as twin-fins with baby stabilizers on the back and nothing more. Just as I saw twin fins with baby stabilizers on the back for what they were. Were they also Thrusters? No. You could add a number to the fin combo but that’s just a label.

I found that Thrusters had flaws — not that anyone wanted to agree with me. To say otherwise was heresy, a sacrilege. Maybe it was just my shapes, but I tried other’s boards too. Maybe you can have a full quiver of shapes, make a narrow-tailed board to aid the tail fin’s penetration and hold, larger fins, etc. But that meant that board shapes and tail widths needed to be customized to certain size waves, as a golf bag has a range of clubs for each part of the course. But I wanted an all-around club, or at least greater versatility out of one. Nursing turns on a Thruster or double setting bottom-turns wasn’t attractive to me, so the logic appeared to me to be that having four fins of similar size on the rail, should hold in better than a thruster. To combat the twin-fin image quads had, I placed larger rear fins than the fronts on the board, plus it had a four-channel bottom, which was popular at the time. (I had never ridden a traditional quad, which I knew would ride like it looked — like a Twinnie with baby back fins.)

When the legendary Tom Curren tore into legendary J-Bay for the Search movies, it was a little known fact that he was riding a quad shaped by Bruce McKee. Photo: Lance Slabbert.

My first-ever bottom turn on that first Quattro board had me feeling that “Eureka!” moment — like an explorer finding the Fountain of Youth, my own Holy Grail. Acceleration, speed, hold, foam-climbing ability, fluidity…it was all there. Problem was, the world was starting to pulse with Thrusters, and my quad or what I called a Quattro, named after the car, was promptly classified as a lost cause, and sympathetically smirked and snarled upon by surfing’s new “Thought and Design Police.”

Although my first Quattro had the fin cluster too far forward, it still hung in and I could thump the bottom turns. If I got my foot right back I could go past vertical. I knew then that the system would be amazing for guns. I could have the fins forward and it would be loose with no fear of spinning out. I stuck a baby back fin on the tail for a quick fix but knew that I just had to move the cluster back a bit to get the feeling right.

My first boards from 1981 to 1988 had 10% larger rear fins than front, but on my migration to Europe via Hawaii, I took with me a board with all fins the same size. It was way too small for the conditions I found (a 6′5″), but I got enough waves and big turns in to have complete faith in the direction I was following.

I ended up on the north coast of Spain in the Basque Country. Soon I linked up with the Pukas and factory Olatu where I was resident shaper for 12 years. I managed to make a bunch of Quads, but, as is true in many industries, there are companies that push for innovation and others that want conformity that brings safety. Many of the surfing industry’s shaping gurus had me pegged as a heretic — a poor fool who had lost his way; obsessed (not dedicated) with trying to make others swallow the medicine. According to them, Quads were caustic medicine.

Aussie expat quad-o-phile Bruce McKee and his eighties and nineties quad guns.

During a surf session at a lefthand point break, a friend visiting from Oz asked, “Why don’t you put the back fins closer together more like a thruster’s center fin?” I remember saying, “But there’s more drive when they’re on the rail.” With longboards, the fins are way forward, so if you move the rear fins forward you tend to follow the rail so the back fins have a big spread between them. This means that you have to do big body gyrations just to get the board to come down off the lip after running across the wave face. The problem was that the lower side fins engaged too late and the board felt like it was stuck on one tack still wanting to go up the face. What a center fin does is it re-centers the board between turns and enables it to easily be redirected back down the face.

So the words of my friend stuck in my head and, later, I couldn’t believe how stupid I had been for not analyzing his words more carefully. His idea was totally logical in that, by bringing the rear fins closer together, they reacted faster in re-centering the board while still maintaining drive. I found that too close loses drive — so there was a happy medium there that combined the best factors of both.

The early Tom Curren quads had the rear fins close together because they were squashed in narrow tails. They worked due to correct combined fin size, flex toe-in, etc., but needed a back foot overpowering the back fins to get a good pivot off the top when at speed. I had veered off the good track while trying to cluster the fins, not realizing the relevance of the distance between the rear fins to each other.

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Nearly three decades later, Bruce McKee is still a staunch advocate of the four-fin. His M5 is a design with five boxes. It is what he calls “The System of Truth” and adds, “The ball is your court.”

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Back to the early quads.

News drifted back to us in Southern California of Simon’s victories at the Coke Surfabout and big Bells. Time to have another look at Simon’s three-fin board, the Thruster. Most designers and shapers on the planet began working, in earnest, to understand and evolve the design.

MR had dominated professional surfing for four years riding a twin-fin, winning consecutive world titles from 1979 to 1982. 1982 was a year of transition. Some surfers still rode twins in small surf and would switch to singles in bigger surf. Many had changed over to three fins. Cheyne was still riding singles in all conditions. Glen Winton was starting to have competitive success on a four fin.

[1982 final rankings: 1. MR (two fins); 2. Cheyne Horan (one fin); 3. Tom Carroll (three fins); 21. Glen Winton (four fins)]

By 1983, most competitive surfers had moved to three fins, with the exception of Horan and Winton. Tom Carroll took home the first three-fin world title. For the next quarter century the three-fin dominated the competitive landscape. Simon’s design has been further refined by shapers the world over and has become, arguably, the single most important, enduring surfboard design of all time.

Several generations of surfers have known only Trifins.

Who remembers this magazine cover?

Larry Bertlemann. Quad. Aerial. 25 years ago.

He shaped it with George Downing. Larry had been working on twins and added rears to add more drive. The previous winter he told his friends that he was going to “fly.” This shot is at V-land on a 5′10″ and LB claims he was 230lbs. at the time. He also mentioned that the fins were 747s. (Originally called 747s now called 757s.)

This is from 1983.

Why do evolutionary branches of design get choked off, atrophy, only to be “rediscovered” and nurtured into a new life?

As a relatively new sport, the majority of the surfing audience looks to its competitive heroes and icons to validate what is good. A one-design mentality keeps the equipment very homogenous. It’s rare to find a top competitive surfer that will cross the line for fear of prejudice — at least in the line of duty.

Concurrently, there is another side to the surfing culture that participates in, not a sport, but this kinetic art form; the quest for newness empowers these artists to walk down a different road, indifferent to the opinion of the masses. Herein lie the eclectic seeds of change and variety, freshness.

Why didn’t Bob Simmons’ twin-finned board take a linear path to Mark Richards’ four world titles?

I asked Carl Ekstrom recently what was the first three-finned surfboard he could recall. His answer: “In the late ’50s I built a board with a tail that was too wide, it kept spinning out. I couldn’t afford to make another one so I stuck two small fins on the rail outside the main fin. It fixed the problem.”

In October 1980, Simon crossed paths with Frank Williams. Frank, a journeyman shaper, had worked with Geoff McCoy, Barry Bennett and other notable Sydney boardmakers. Simon ran into Frank as he was coming out of the water at Narrabeen with a board that was essentially a twin fin with a strange little “half-moon” shaped fin on the tail.

Simon asked him what the third fin was for, and Frank told him, “It helps make it more stable.”

Simon’s instant response was, “I’m going to make it real stable!” In that moment the Thruster was conceived in Simon’s mind.

Glen Winton, in all probability, may not be the first person to have put four fins on a surfboard but is credited with the design. In a recent Nick Carroll/ASL interview, Glen actually claims to have started with six fins with the intention of knocking two off after getting a feel for the board.

“I put six on with the aim of picking one set to knock off. I actually won a contest on the six. That’s how four fins were invented — by knocking two off ‘em.”

Shayne McIntyre, four-fins and fancy-free in Liberia. Photo: Sean Brody

Nick Carroll weighs in on quads:

Pros pooh-pooh them for a few reasons. One is that their favorite boardmakers by and large haven’t yet “conquered” the design, they’ve just sorta dummied one up as a semi-Fish or whatever, which just doesn’t cut it at a high-performance level. Another is that they have very little trouble with their current equipment — a refined single concave thruster is a pretty damn good board and it’ll go wherever they want, so why fool around? I think that is changing at the moment, a benefit of Kelly taking a few risks — although the conventional wisdom is that KS was blowing it, riding 5′4″s etc. in heats, a lot of the pros saw him riding those little things in freesurf sessions and were pretty much blown away by what he could do. It’s opened up the doors for shorter boards and increasingly quads I suspect.

Me, I got fascinated by the four-fin thing about four years ago after being tormented by TC for a coupla years on it, he is an Early Adopter! They’d irritated me in the past because I’d always felt there was a real loss of center-line feeling in the board — that it’s good to know where the center of the board is when finishing turns, especially because it allows you to flow swiftly into the next turn, and without a center fin, there was just a sort of void, which caused the board to respond slowly at the end of turns. Like whatever speed you were gaining out of losing the back fin, it was negated by that weird clumsiness at the end of a turn.

The old twinnies used to make up for it with that mega-vee through the fins — nothing like vee for giving you a sense of a board’s center-line! So I got one made that was a bit radical at the time, 5′7″ with a straight-ish rocker, double concave with a little spine through the fins to give it a sense of the center, template pulled in to conventional hi-performance width at the tail, and back fin set in a bit closer to the stringer. Surfed it a couple of times but then along came those carbon rail epoxy boards and I kinda forgot about it … dug it out again six months ago and I couldn’t believe how quick and sorta savage it was. Have got a few since then and I’m beginning to wonder if in time the quad’s advantages might push the thruster aside a bit. It’s just taking time because the fin set is so riddled with potential fuckups. People tend to use too much fin overall for one thing.

Why the heck are they faster, well I don’t know if all of ‘em are faster, but they FEEL like they are, because there’s no center fin dragging on entry into a low angled turn like what most normal-level surfers do as a matter of course while running along a wave. That back end freedom is pretty seductive.

Three fins, they’re less complex, they surf in arcs and snaps along with longer carves and they recover better in airs and slides, they love single concaves which still feel like the best bottom going, they’re easy to tune using a fin system. But they can feel draggy next to a quad, especially for a surfer of average ability, and there’s not much left to explore about the design, it’s there and it ain’t changing the sport any more.

Four fins, they run fast and free, their ability to run longer turns mean they can be shaped short (i.e. a 5′8″ quad can ride similar sized surf to a 5′11″ three-fin) which makes for some very different lines, they’re excellent tuberiding boards, done right they give you heaps of feedback while you’re surfing them (you can feel a lot more underfoot than on most conventional three-fins). They can feel awkward on quick direction changes and they don’t all like to surf in arcs off the top, but there’s still quite a few questions in the design and that makes it exciting I think. The quad could still change the sport a bit.

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Pat Maus, a teamrider, came to me five or six years ago and wanted to build four fins. I hadn’t really made any since the early ’80s.

Pat Maus on quads:

Yeah, the first time I got on a quad the waves were waist-to-chest-high, and all I had with me was my tri-fin squash tail. Nathan [Fletcher] took one look at my board, and in typical Nathan tone gives me the, “Psssssss! Yer still riding three-finners? You should try that quad right there.”

Nathan was kind of curious to see how someone other than himself could make the board work. But the last time I saw a four fin — I think Glen Winton was carrying it! Anyway, I loved the board after the first wave, and since Nathan had a new one, he gave me that board. It was a 5′7″ bat-wing quad, shaped by Cole.

The how and the why they work so well? Well, ask any person that’s tried a quad and nine times outta 10 the first thing they mention is how fast they go. Then come the people who love how easily they can do turns and control the board. You see, with a quad, the moment you set your rail and go front side or backside, you already have two fins grabbing the face. That allows you to make later, more critical drops as well as being much more stable during tuberides.

Pat Maus puts his quad to the ultimate test.

Also, we can’t forget about the youth of today. Most of them just ask: “Does it do good airs?” Across the board, surfers will all agree that the quad can punt some good-ass airs! One of the reasons being is the fin placement on the trailer fins. If you look at a regular tri-fin setup, you’ll notice that rake from the trailer of the tri-fin more often than not ends up right at the end of the tail. That means when doing an air the last thing to leave the lip is that trailer fin, giving it a feeling of tracking off, if you don’t nail it just right. Now, with the quad, that last thing to leave the water is tail, not a fin, so you can kind of imagine in your head: “Sliding of the tail brings nose underneath me and oh-my-god, I just pulled the best air ever!”

Why do most pros stick to tri fins? I think it has a lot to do with them just being so familiar with tri fins. I’m sure some guys on tour figure, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” It could also be that most pro surfers are under a tremendous amount of pressure from their sponsors to win or get good results, no matter what. That could tend to mess with a man’s willingness to wanna try new equipment. However, I’m sure the most loyal professional tri-fin surfer has at least one quad in mix.

Is there anything missing from the quad ride? No, I think they are the most well-rounded surfboard out now. One thing I would really like to let people know is that the brand of quad has just as much to do with your perception of a quad. What I mean is, just because you have a shorter, wider surfboard with four fins on the bottom doesn’t always mean you will get the performance that so many people talk about. My only advice to anyone looking to progress their surfing ability by riding a quad would be to do a little homework and go with the guy who has the most experience.

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Jeff Clark on quads:

Started focusing on quads for big waves around 1990. With guns, it’s an easier formula — you’re drawing longer, swoopier lines. Tri-fins stay centered; they want to go straight. Tri-fins pivot. Quads have inherent speed and hold, but there’s an information gap — a void — going from one rail to the other. (Lots of vee on quad gives a centering feeling.)

The goal was to build a board with the best qualities of both designs; to make a quad feel more like a tri-fin than a twin-fin. At first, the fins were too close to the rail. I moved them closer together - 1 3/4 to 2 inches off rail. I experimented with wider tails at first, around 11.5″ on guns in the 9′6″ range. They were too wide; so I brought them back to 9.5″ to 10.5″.

First instinct on late drops is to set a rail; tri-fins want to straighten out. It’s that centering thing — trying to set a rail and battling with the back fin. Quads want to find one rail. Unlike a three-fin board, there is no conflict between front and rear fins. They are all pointed towards the nose on either side of the board.

A tri-fin with flat-sided fins will cavitate, and with the back fin not connected, you find yourself sliding down the face — you have to go straight or flatten out to reconnect.

Big wave quads: nine inches of base (two fins) in the face on your inside rail; 80/20 foils hold better. You never have to adjust your line back towards flat or perpendicular to the wave’s energy to reconnect.

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Pat Rawson’s take on quads:

When the energy is running down the line, more surfers are receptive to the qualities of a quad. When the energy is coming in towards the shore, the preference is generally three fins.

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Personally, after working with Pat Maus a few years back, I made myself one and have been riding them almost exclusively for the last five years. The only time I might switch back to a tri would be in a short, hollow, backhand wave. After riding them for a few years, I made a convertible for laughs. At one of my favorite testing grounds, a fairly long hollow left (frontside for me), I took it out first as a tri. I thought to myself, yeah… I remember this feeling. Solid bottom turn, up the face, snap off the top — feels pretty good. Surfed for a couple of hours. Took a break. Went back out with it switched to a quad; pretty much the same conditions. The board was so much faster and quicker on turns…it was night and day. I haven’t look back since.

Like a Wikipedia entry, this thing will grow and change. Any constructive input is welcome. Thank you for your help on this:

Bruce McKee
Nick Carroll
Pat Maus
Larry Bertlemann
Jeff Clark
Glen Winton
Simon Anderson
Pat Rawson
Greg Mungall

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Thanks to our friends over at Surfline.com

Four fins are faster than tri fins.
Four Fins are looser than tri fins.
Four fins ride the barrel higher and tighter than a tri fin.
They drop in easier.
They come out of the gate quicker.
Accelerate on cutbacks.
Do better airs.
Can be ridden shorter.
Draw new and different lines.

Josh Kerr is one of the half-dozen or so of the ASP World Tour who regularly experiment with quads.

So why isn’t every surfer on the planet riding one?

It’s all Hype?
Different strokes?
Media?
The pros don’t so I won’t?

Maybe shapers don’t have it right…yet?

Perhaps if there were a ubiquitous effort, a Manhattan Quad Project, the design would evolve at a faster rate and all would enjoy the benefits.

Sorry, somebody has to win a major friggin contest on one first. (Biggest win? CJ won the Body Glove Surfbout on a quad in ‘07.)

So at this point, who seems to like them and who doesn’t? And why?

Typical first impression of a quad is this: fast and loose, but not confident without something directly under the back foot. It takes a few sessions to trust the setup — and run with the positive attributes.

The lack of an auto-centering sensation seems to be a common complaint from most detractors. Without a center fin, a lot of surfers miss the instant feedback from the back foot and the ability to do quick adjustments. With quads there is an information gap in rail change that varies widely depending on fin (rear especially) position.

Backhand performance is also a concern of 3-fin loyalists. Going heelside, the rider delivers more power through the rear foot and specifically the heel. Visualize foot angle and where the energy is going…for most surfers pretty much in line with the rear fin, three inches and change from the back end.

Early days of the 3-fin, I’d put rear fins way back on some rider’s tail blocks. It was necessary to do this to keep more powerful, rear-foot surfers from blowing their tails out on acute direction changes. Occy’s were set at 2 3/4″ and some of Tom Carroll’s trailers were as far back as 2″ from the end of the board. As rockers and outlines evolved, the rears crept up to 3 1/4″ to 3 1/2″ on an average shortboard.

If a rear fin on a tri is moved up an inch or two from the placement most people are used to, the board loses drive, hold, and moves the pivot point further forward. A surfer would have to completely readjust his rear foot placement. Same holds true with a quad.

Which leads to probably one of, if not the single most important detail in designing a 4-fin surfboard: fin positioning. Not weird-ass tails. Not crazy bottom contours. Fins. How big they are, outlines, and foils. Where they are, their relative positioning with respect to each other, cant and nose vector.

Jamie Sterling is a fan of quads in the barrel at Teahupoo ’cause they go fast and hold at speed. Photo: Tyler Cuddy

Early on I took a fairly simplistic approach to it.

Early quads were an attempt to add drive and control to twins. In 1980/81, Twins were de rigueur. Since 1982/83, tri-fins were most surfers’ experiential basis. In my mind, I’m starting with a tri-fin. So I took the rear fin on a tri, and was theoretically splitting it in half. The more the rider wants the feel of a tri, the further back and closer together I’d keep the fins. If a rider was after more of a twin-fin feel, I’d move the rears towards the rail and the front fins.

My common middle ground: for argument’s sake, a 6′2″ tri-fin has fronts at 11″ and rears at 3 1/4″. A lot of designers go half the distance on a quad, so that would put the rears at 5 1/2″ and the same distance from the rail, about 1 1/8″. In my humble opinion, I feel this is a little on the neutral side. I split the difference on distance from the tail (tri vs. quad: 2 1/4″), which would be 3 1/4″ plus 1 1/8″…or 4 3/8″. Easier math: 7′ board. Fins at 12″ and 4″ on a tri. Half the distance is 6″. Split the difference, 5″ for a quad. On average, I try to keep my rears about 2″ in from the rail. That’s a generalization. It becomes a more complicated depending on tail width and board length.

Fin size: Fronts are similar to tri-fins, perhaps slightly smaller. Rears: profiles similar to fronts reduced approximately 10% in overall area. You can adjust drive by swapping out rears with different aspect ratios. More upright fins for tighter arcs. More rake to add length and draw to turns.

Foils: Your preference on fronts…your favorite tri fin fronts are a good starting point. If you are a fan of cambered fins — stay with them. If you prefer flat-sided fronts, you will probably like them in the trailers as well. Smaller, weaker surf; flats are probably the go as they react a little quicker and provide instant feedback. Bigger, more powerful surf — most prefer cambered or dual (full) foil trailers. Less prone to cavitate and let go. Some prefer full-foil trailers in everyday surf, citing more “feel”…smoother, cleaner, etc. Not as fast.

Cant on rears: Typically, I halve the angle of the fronts. It can vary according to intended use. Smaller softer surf; a little more cant will add some lift and looseness. Conversely, less tilt will increase speed, hold, and drive.

Nose vector (line towards nose): I typically point all four fins to approximately the same place, which depends on board length and type of surf the board is intended for.

Another shaper’s insight into quads and fin positioning: Bruce McKee has done nearly 30 years of homework for all of us and he’s quite happy to share it here.

Why not chuck a quad in the back with the rest of your quiver? Photo: Tyler Cuddy

So back to…why aren’t more surfers embracing this design?

I suspect that there were probably a lot of takers that might have had a go early on before a lot of work had been done. They may have had a less-than-satisfactory experience and shared it with others that may have at one point been interested.

Some of it may be due to negative stigma. The print media. In an incredibly myopic and disappointing “Surfboard Issue” last year the polyurethane/polyester tri-fin was declared the winner and still champ in a fizzling technology push.

Thankfully, we have the Internet.

Search and you will find. There are quite a few board builders offering quads. Even Simon Anderson himself rides and enjoys quads and has several models in his product line.

My suggestion is that if you are interested, search out a builder who embraces the design and has a solid history with the setup. It’s not as easy as just sticking four fins on a board.

More often than not when I let someone demo a quad they are pleasantly surprised.

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Check back later this month for “Part Two: A History of Quads,” with words from Simon Anderson, Jeff Clark and more.

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BONUS ANSWER TO A COMMENT FROM LAST MONTH:

Last month’s blog on tails, we received a question in response to the Simon Anderson story:

So Rusty - did you build a thruster later that same night? –Munga

Rusty answers:

I tripped on the experience for a couple of days, wrestling with the thought, was it the board or the surfer? My mind said it was 90% Simon.

After a few days, wtf, I stuck a trailing fin on my favorite twin. My first surf on the jury-rigged tri-fin was in decent surf but it was not nearly as good as Blacks on that day I watched Simon. First impression: board was noticeably slower but had a tentative short burst of speed out of turns on the better waves. It felt like the parking brake was on but when I drove off my back foot hard enough the board would come back up to the speed it had as a twin…just briefly, and as soon as I let off, it would slow down again.

I shelved it.

The next board I made myself after the twin to tri-conversion was a 4 fin round-tail. It was a super fun board. It had the speed of a twin but with more drive and a bigger sweet spot. I vividly remember it doing swooping cutbacks at full speed, almost effortlessly. I rode it for a few months.

Thanks to Surfline.com .

From Surfline.com

After last month’s blog entry on tails sparked a lively debate and discussion in the comments area, we decided to pull a couple of the better ones out and have Rusty respond.

Here’s one:
What? No Greenough? Kneeriders are responsible for the Shortboard Revolution. Cool article though.
–halfman

And based on the number of Campbell Brothers’ fans commenting on Taylor Knox’s blog, we knew this was coming:

Very nice history lesson. I know some things have to be left out — can we say the word ‘Bonzer’? Overall, a very nice treatment of the backend of our toys.
–Chuck Allison

Finally:

How come no mention of Simon Anderson? He was the pioneer of how a thruster could be the biggest revelation of all surfing.
–Kenny B

Turns out, the answers to these questions/comments become a little history lesson of their own. Read on….

More History:

In 1965, George Greenough builds a short, stubby kneeboard called the ‘Velo.’ He explains: “My first flexible spoon kneeboard started taking shape in 1965. I’d ridden the solid balsa spoon for three years, and I’d been using flexible fins for longer than that so I decided to make an entire board that flexed like my fin. Fish moved when they swam so why not make a whole board that moved when it rode waves?”

Kneeboarder/visionary George Greenough was one of the catalysts of the Shortboard Revolution. Photo: John Witzig

Greenough uses his Balsa Spoon as a mold to lay a fiberglass shell over it. Then he laminates some leftover foam cutoffs onto that shell and shapes a “spoon”-shaped nose. This was the first of his fiberglass Spoons.

Later, Greenough, Nat Young, and Bob McTavish collaborate in Australia to make ‘Magic Sam’. Nat Young takes the board and wins the World Championship in 1966 in San Diego. So Greenough’s kneeboards do actually spark the Shortboard Revolution — but it takes several years for the impact to fully set in. (More info on this crazy time here.)

Nat Young winning the ‘66 World Champs on so-called “Magic Sam.” Photo: Tom Keck

The next world contest in 1968 in Puerto Rico sees probably the most eclectic mix of design ever seen in a major comp: it’s a wide and varied mix of longboards (getting shorter), mini-guns, and sub-9-foot wide-tail vee bottoms.

The next World Contest is in Johanna, Australia, 1970. Aussies are full on into sub-six-foot stubbies that closely resemble Greenough’s wide, arc-tail, spoons in outline, length, and fin-shape. The boards worked fine in the clean groomed pointbreaks of Northern NSW and Queensland. But then again, just about anything does.

In the fairly sizeable, powerful beach/reef surf of Johanna, they struggle to keep their short, wide slabs in the water. Thing is, wider tails require deeper fins. The deeper the fin, the more frontal drag is incurred. Greenough’s kneeboards are thin, penetrate the water easily, and everything loads and flexes as a unit — he literally springs out of each turn, and he obviously has a leverage advantage being on his knees. A standup board requires more volume. Being thicker, they’re harder to keep in the water. Also, flex is inversely proportional to thickness: energy and drive is compromised.

American Rolf Aurness wins convincingly on a more conventional 6′10″.

What does all this have to do with tail shapes?

Fins, mainly. With the Shortboard Revolution, singlefins (and straighter tail rockers) arguably impacted tail widths and shapes. With shorter rail-lines, designers were searching for ways to build speed and drive back into the boards and still keep them from spinning out. Tail widths and shapes in the late ’60s and up until the inception of the modern 3-fin were somewhat constrained by the limitations of a single fin.

With the Mirandons and Lis resurrecting interest in twin-fin boards, tail widths expanded. Also, in 1970 Hobie and Bing both marketed wide squaretail twin fins. These incorporated totally different approach with fins.

In 1970, the Campbell Bros build their first Bonzers. Their outlines and tails closely resemble the Australian stubbies. And they also were similar to the wide, squaretail, twins that Hobie and Bing were marketing at the time. Their unique, 3-fin setup keeps the board in the water and helps generate speed. This design more closely resembles Simon’s modern tri-fin than the two-plus-one version that saw a brief window of popularity the following year, 1971.

In 1974, Australian Jim Pollard is credited with shaping the first deep-channel boards. Col Smith, Allan Byrne, Bill Caster, and many others embrace the design. The design evolves over the next few years. Popular for Indo-type guns, hollow, lined-up waves with clean faces, they also gained traction (no pun intended) in the shortboard venue. The extra hold and drive from the channels enables designers to pull out tail widths. Double wings provide natural exits for the channels as well as stepping down width. My favorite single-fins in the late ’70s were all double-wing, deep channel bottoms. The bottom design segued into the 3-fin era with surfers like Tom Carroll and Gary Elkerton, and continues today in a small-but-passionate subset of surfers, mainly for powerful waves.

In 1981, the modern 3-fin changes everything. For hot-dog boards, wide squashtails take over. Simon’s guns are swallowtails. He wins the ‘81 Pipe Masters on a 7′6″ swallowtail. But squashtails maintain dominance for most small/med wave designs.

A lot of the early ’80s guns were swallowtail 3-fins. By the mid-’80s, more roundtail 3-fin boards work their way into the mix, which offer an intoxicating blend of smoothness and drive. Elliptical or thumbtails maintain some volume in the last few inches (as opposed to a rounded pin) without creating excess curve (lack of drive) through the front-fin zone: a very smooth feeling tail shape with almost seamless continuity on rail transitions.

Big Simon Anderson is more than just the inventor of the thruster; he surfed damn well at Sunset, too. Photo: Dan Merkel

Side Story/Digression:

A little story about twins, tri fins and tails;

January 1981, I had just finished an epic mid day session at Blacks.

Low tide, hollow, 6- to 8-foot, lined-up but almost every wave makeable. Conditions were A+: high pressure, hot, no wind, textbook winter perfection. I’m starting the walk back to the road from North Peak, and I see Greg Mungall walking up the beach with Simon Anderson. I knew Greg. He was one of top competitive surfers of the day and was sponsored by Gary McNabb and Nectar Surfboards. Greg introduced me to Simon. Greg was on the twin-fin bus and usually rode a double wing roundpin on his twinnies. Most of the surfing world at this time — including me — rode what MR rode, a swallow-wing twin.

I knew Simon was a good surfer and was aware of some of his earlier tour victories (’77 Bells and Coke). He had the weirdest looking board I’d ever seen under his arm. Super-short for how big he was, probably an inch or two shorter than he was tall. Very narrow nose and a very wide squash tail. And three fins. I was tripping. We exchanged pleasantries and they both paddled out.

I took a seat in the sand. Greg got a wave first, dropped in, laid into what looked like a solid bottom turn and proceeded to spin out. Greg was a great surfer but his board was not the right tool for big Blacks. Simon dropped in on his first wave. It was a solid one. Depending on the swell angle and tide, rideable Blacks has many moods and ranges from peaky at times to a wave that is so fast, if you don’t set your line as early as possible you get left behind in a heartbeat. This day is fairly lined-up and very hollow.

Simon dropped straight down the face and squared off, came straight back up the face of this hollow beast, almost past vertical and threw a mind bending gaff, drove down the face, squared off again, pulled in, came out and threw a few more big hooks to finish off. My jaw hit the sand. I sat there for two hours and watched some of the best surfing I’d ever seen. I’d been judging pro contests for a few years, including several Pipe Masters. I had seen good single-fin surfing. And I had seen good surfing on twin-fins. But this was something on an entirely different level. And it of course went on to change everything.

I call the back third of a board the business end. Rocker, fins, foil, and outline curve all work in harmony, ideally, to provide the rider with a desired feel.

Questions about tail shape seem to get asked most frequently. Understandably so, because in the last decade or so there has been a proliferation of “new” tail shapes. Tails are easy to separate and the visual differences are easy to identify.

To understand how tail shapes have evolved, I’ll offer a little history. I don’t profess to be a historian, but here is a little overview. At some point in time, thousands of years ago fishermen started standing up on their small hulls on the way in through the surf. Canoe? Kayak? Reed hull?

It’s almost like speculating if there is life on other planets but it’s safe to say that there were quite a few early fishing communities around the globe that were comfortable going out through surf and coming back in. Whimsical thought, children would play in the surf with small flat pieces of wood and some would stand on them.

A few hundred years ago, prone craft got supersized so adults could participate in the fun. Someone flew at a higher altitude and realized that the outline of a boat made sense but they didn’t need all the volume. Once propelled by a wave’s energy, volume becomes less relevant and early board shapers became intrigued with outline shape.

Eventually, the penny dropped and the importance of the planning aspect of a craft built specifically for wave riding clicked in and surface area became more important than volume — a craft in motion.

How does a slab of indigenous wood (or flotsam from shipwreck for that matter) become a wave riding craft? If you look at the most primitive of shapes from early wave riding cultures you’ll see that the shaper of the period has taken a rectangular plank and rounded the nose off a bit. As boards evolved, the rectangles became trapezoids of sorts: rounded nose, wide point was quite far forward. The board gradually tapered, on some designs almost imperceptible, to the tail section. Tails were wide and square with slightly rounded corners.

A designer’s inner dialogue boils down to striking a balance between planning surface (area, lift) and control. Sometime in the early 1930s designers began cutting away area between the corners. Possibly to make it easier for the prone paddler to kick while still maintaining rail length for lift and control. These inverted arc tails may have been the precursor to a “fish” tail.

Tom Blake is credited with putting the first fin on a surfboard in 1935 to facilitate steering and is said to have built a two fin board in 1943. Simmons, quite possibly unaware of Blake’s two fin board, built some two fin boards in 1948. Simmons built bigger, wide back, rounded square twins and a few shorter ones in the 50’s. Tom Blake reshaped a Simmons square tail into a split tail, “The Makaha Wedge” around 1954.

An early Tom Blake design. Photo: Tom Blake\Surfing Heritage Foundation

This was most likely the inspiration for the Mirandons to build a single fin with a fairly wide split in 1967 called the Super Board and followed it with the Twin Pin: a double pin tail twin fin, in 1968. Arguably, the Twin Pin was the inspiration for Steve Lis to incorporate the fish tail and two fins into his very short kneeboards. Richard Kenvin has been working on a project, Hydrodynamica, that weaves all this rich history together.

Traditional fish have roughly a 10 to 12 inch split. Area and volume is removed between the corners. Maximizing rail length, enhances drive, adds traction, and releases quick. The further apart the corners, the less continuity there is in rail transition. The notion was to have a long, straight rail on a very short, wide board. Typically, the wider the gap, the deeper the cut. A round pin template can be used for the inside part of the curve so a deep cut doesn’t lose too much area and the inverted pintails don’t get too pointy. The deeper cut also allows the individual tail, the one in the water on a turn, to flex more readily.

Rewind just a bit: in the 1950s, with materials changing, boards becoming lighter, fins accepted and evolving, outline shapes and tails shapes were experimented with as well.

In 1954, Dale Velzy, bored with the same old outlines, used his nose template for the tail. This pulled the wide point well behind center and, while it may not have been the first round tail, “The Pig” popularized hips pulled back, and very curvy tails; rounded squash, round tails, and round pins. More curve equals tighter arcs and surfers found themselves accelerating out of turns. The era of angled takeoffs and straight line trimming was transitioning into the early days of modern, maneuver-based, performance surfing.

Velzy’s “Bump” (1956/1957) featured an exaggerated hip which was arguably the precursor to the wing, or sting. In 1960, Velzy had a go with some ski inspired outlines, inverted parabolic midsections, and a version with an inverted midsection, with the wide point 2/3rds back, pulling into an almost nippled pin tail which he dubbed “The Stinger”. Then in 1963, Velzy designed the Banjo/422 that featured possibly the first modern version of a step down type wing about 2/3rds back.

So this gets us into a period where experimentation with outline curves, hips, and tails is accelerating. With the short board revolution, single fins (and straighter tail rockers) arguably impacted tail widths and shapes. With shorter rail-lines, designers were searching for ways to build speed and drive back into the boards and still keep them from spinning out.

Tail widths and shapes in the late 1960s and up until the inception of the modern three fin were somewhat constrained by the limitations of a single fin.

With the Mirandons and Lis resurrecting interest in two fin boards, tail widths expanded. Also, in 1970 Hobie and Bing both marketed wide square tail twin fins. These incorporated totally different approach with fins.

In 1971, Brewer, Reno, McTavish and others start experimenting with three fins. These early versions were primarily two plus one setups: a single fin with small side-bites glassed on the rails, roughly about mid-base to the main fin. This allowed for a shorter main fin and wider tail blocks and experimentation with wider, “closed tail” designs, ie. squash tails and diamond tails. That same year Gary Goodrum won the US Surfing Championship at Huntington Beach riding a three fin.

The mid-1970s saw a lot of split tail design incorporated for small wave designs. While pin tails, and diamonds were left for larger surf. The fish, swallow, dove tail, allowed for wider tails on singles fin boards. Width, with the area removed between the corners, provided drive and hold with a quick release on tails. A more modern, split tail twin fin moved into dominance in the late-1970s.

In 1981, the modern three fin changed everything. Hot dog boards with wide squash tails took over. Squash tails maintain dominance for most small/medium wave designs. By mid-1980s more roundtail three fin boards were working their way into the mix.

Today, what I find fascinating is, most of the short, “performance” boards that I build, and other designers boards that I look at, have remarkably consistent width numbers the last 18″ of the board. Width at 6″, 12″ and 18″ up from the tail are very similar between shapers and designs for boards that are ridden in everyday conditions.

A few years ago someone came to me with a concept board that would allow the owner to change out the tail of the board. The width at approximately 18″ up from the tail is around 16 ½” so the designer had interchangeable tail sections that joined the board at the 16 ½” width mark, wherever it fell, and allowed the owner to put in slightly shorter or longer and different tail shapes. He had some working prototypes and the thinking was sound. Depending on conditions or mood of the rider, the board could be modified to perform accordingly.

All things being equal here’s kind of a basic breakdown on tail differences:

Square: Probably the grandfather of all tails, maximizes rail length and area in the last foot or so of the board. It adds stability, drive, more angular turns, quicker release, and less continuity in rail-to-rail transitions. They are used by some shapers as a small wave design and were used by some shapers in early big wave designs — gun pioneers like Pat Curren used small square tails on guns.

Fish Tail, Swallow Tail, Dove Tail, Split Tail: A square tail with area removed between the corners, fish is a catchall name. Split tail is a name that doesn’t initiate semantics debates. Fish used to be a wide (10″ to 12″) split with a fairly deep cut about half the width number. Quite often, shapers will use a round pin template to create the inner curve. Swallow was a used on more of a standard hotdog type board with a 5″ to 7″ split. The depth was an inch, give or take and the inside cut had curve. A Dove tail was similar width and a little shallower depth with a straight inner line. Width, depth of cut, and area (fullness of curve) of the inverted pins can be used to achieve different riding qualities.

An interesting sidebar on splits with deeper cuts is they promote flex. Plenty of shapers over the last few decades have experimented with thinning out the pins to the point where they are virtually just fiberglass.

Baby swallows or baby fish tail refers to a narrower tail on a gun with a split that maybe as small as 3″ or 4″.

Squash or Rounded Square: Here’s where we start getting into semantics and hair splitting on the names. Maybe a squash tail is a round pin someone dropped and a rounded square is a square that had its corners sanded off. Basically, they are both shaped by rounding off the corners of a squaretail. In addition to the usual checkpoints, I track numbers 1″ up from the tail and 6″ up from the end of the board. An average squash tail is about 10 ½ wide 6″ up. The 1″ number reflects how much curve there is because it’s difficult to measure the end of the board unless it has distinct corners, like a fish tail or a square. An average squash is somewhere in the 5 ½” to 6 ½” wide at 1″ up.

This is probably the most common small/medium wave tail shape. It offers a nice blend of area and curve. It became the go-to tail shape when three fins took over the world in the early 1980s. There were wide squash tails built early in the shortboard era. The problem with wide tails on single fins was that the wider the tail (block) the deeper the fin needed to be. The deeper the fin, the more the frontal drag. With three fins, it really enabled designers to go wider and shorter, moving area aft because of the hold and drive three fins brought to the game. The tail shape provides lift, support, and drive.
The balance of release and smoothness or continuity depends on how rounded the corners are.

Diamond Tails: A blend of round pin and squash with the corners moved forward a bit maintaining area, shortening the rail, finishing with a subtle point, and a very clean exit for a board with some tail vee. Diamonds were used quite a bit in the early 1970s on a wide range of boards all the way up the ladder. A nice blend of aesthetically pleasing yet, still very functional.

Bat Tails: Take a squash or a diamond and invert the last inch of the tail. I did ‘em in the early 1980s. They are all the rage for quads now. The area removed and little corners add some bite and help give the boards without a rear fin in the middle a little extra drive.

Round Tails: Uber-smooth turns. Make a clay model of a hollow wave, use a wire to slice it along the speed line in the barrel, and the cross section will probably look something like this. Or Google conic sections. This tail is a clean, natural curve that fits the pocket. It’s a great tail for a performance shortboard, good in head-high to double-overhead waves. Also, a good option for next one-up type shapes.

Thumb Tails: Look like the tip of your thumb — a blunted round tail with little less curve between front and back fins. Area in last few inches can vary compared to a roundtail; a little less than a squash tail. It’s an excellent all around tail shape with the smooth transitional qualities of a round tail and a little bit of release that you might feel in a squash. Combined with a slight hip or subtle bump, it makes an excellent tail for everyday conditions and into the good stuff. Probably the second most popular tail, behind the squash, for performance shortboards.

Round Pins: Are typically used on longer boards for bigger waves. As the board gets longer, the curves get stretched out, it becomes a bit of a juggling act for the designer to maintain a balance of curve and area.

A tail that is too narrow sits too deep in the water, compromising the board by creating unnecessary drag. A tail too wide creates the opposite problem.

Once again, remember that rocker, fins and foil all come into play as well.

With 1970s style single fins, the wide points up, long rail lines in the back, and pinny pintails (low area) were necessary to keep the tail in the water in bigger surf. Tri-fins allowed designers to go a little wider and use more rocker because of the hold and drive created by the three fin setup.

With quads, it opens more doors.

Arc, Half Moon: I seem to do a lot of tow boards with this tail as well as some guns. Back to maximizing rail length, maintaining some width, and removing some area behind the fins.

Toad Tail: This is when the line starts to blur on “is it a wing or a tail?”

I worked with Will Jobson on Twinzers in the early 1990s. The Twinzer was a not really a four fin but a twin fin with little fins in front of the main fins that help feed the water onto the main fins to help them work more efficiently. Martin Potter charged to his world title riding a lot of these (Will’s and Glenn Minami) designs. Will had a tail that looked similar to this but with the corners pushed even closer to the end of the board. He also had concaves running out through the corners. All these design elements he combined to make his visionary fin setup fly. The wings, or corners, step down the width, create release and hold. They’re good for four fin boards. I’ve made three fin boards with this tail that have had great reviews.

Asymmetrical: Who says tails have to be symmetrical? My first board was an Ekstrom asymmetrical. I’ve built a few over the years and had a couple good riders swear by them. I made myself one last year and had a blast on it. Swallow wing on the frontside, roundtail on the backhand. Drive and release toe side, shorter, power arcs heelside.

In the mid-1970s, I shaped myself two swallow tails, identical in every way (as best I could do handshaping). When they were both finished, I sanded some of the curve out of the tail between the corner and the 12″ mark. Some area removed, but more noticeable, a subtle hip or break in the curve. Any difference in the ride? Night and day. The one with the break in the curve won, hands down.

There were days back then when I was surfing solid winter Blacks on guns with the cleanest, smoothest curves I could make, and sometimes found myself wondering if an outline could be too clean. Beautiful, but vanilla.

Some things to remember:

Corners and aberrations break the line.

Smooth curves beget smooth turns.

Area affects lift and resistance.

Once again, it’s the whole package; rocker, fins, foil, and entire outline curve that dictate the overall feel of the board. Tails are embellishments.

No right or wrong. Whatever flavor you are after, there’s more choices than ever.

Happy Surfing.
R.

Photos: Brody

“I’m 195 lbs and 5′10″ and in good shape with most of my weight on top. I ride a 6′6″ to 6′10″ for my normal shortboard and got a 5′10″ fish this year. I love the ability to get into waves, the speed and maneuverability in under head-high surf, but have problems with the outside nose rail digging at times. I also have problems with steep takeoffs because of the lack of nose rocker. What aspects of the fish should I keep and what should I change?”
–John

Rusty, who’s been shaping since before the original fish was invented, fillets the question:

Ironically, the traditional/old school fish was designed for and excelled in fast hollow waves like Old Break, Big Rock, and Blacks, but it was primarily ridden as a kneeboard and ridden much shorter than your board at 4′8″ to 5′2″. In fact, 5′6″ was considered big. Eventually more and more people actually started standing up on the bigger ones and discovered that they were fast and maneuverable (sort of) in small, mushy, running waves. If you are interested in more background, hit up Eric Huffman at: BirdSurfBlog.com

Rocker, or lack of, can be the culprit when a nose pokes on takeoff: the board isn’t fitting the curve of the wave. Either the board needs to be shorter or have more curve. On your next fish, try a little more rocker in the nose and possibly the tail. A little more curve in the back half is just as important — if the tail curve isn’t fitting in the steepest part of the wave, it will lift the back end and drive the nose in.

It is important to have some balance in the curve. By that I mean the rail arc needs to flow from one end to the other. Having excessive curve at either end won’t correct the whole package and abrupt changes in curve will cause drag.

Your outside rail digging is partly related to rocker and is also probably a result of the nose being too wide for certain conditions. Once again, the back half of the board may be coming into play. If the tail is very wide and the outline curve is straight (factor in low rocker), the back end of the board won’t fit and/or release in a controllable manner.

Again, I am assuming your board is a traditional/old school fish. My numbers on this type of board are something like this: 5′10″, 2.3″ thick, width: 15.5″ (nose), 20.5″ (center), 16.5″ (tail) and 12+” corner-to-corner on the pins. Rocker: 4.25″ (nose), 1.3″ (12″ down from nose), 0.52″ (12″ up from tail) and 1.4″ (tail).

My suggestion would be to pull in the nose and tail about an inch or so, leaving the middle width about the same. Pull the corners of the tail in at least an inch, maybe more. As the fish evolved, it sprouted wings. This helped to step down the width on the back end of the board and reduce the pin-to-pin distance to something on the order of 10″.

Rocker: A little goes a long way. The front end could come up to approx 4.5″. The back end on the older fish was low — something on the order of two inches in the tail. Once again, an even curve would probably be a lot more user friendly in a broader range of conditions.

Thickness: The old fishes were flat, but relatively thin compared to other boards of the day. Adding thickness to a flat-rockered board becomes a little problematic, in that the deck line starts to develop a hump, or an “S-deck”, and transitioning out to a clean rail line becomes more challenging. To compensate for some of the volume you have given up by pulling in the template, you can add a little thickness to the center. With a little more bottom curve, you can probably add back in some thickness in the midsection.

Fins: A lot of the old school boards have the glassed on wood keel fins. These were designed to build more drive into very short boards. As you go longer, you have more rail and can probably get away with a shorter-based fin. If you don’t have removable fins, try a fin system so you can experiment with different feels for different conditions.

Hayes Domler Asks:
“I’ve been surfing for over 30 years and have gone from shortboards to longboards and back to shorter boards. I’m 6′0, 200lbs. I’d love to get a big thruster that would work in quality surf and would probably work in average surf, too. Can you help me?”

Rusty, being a big guy himself, tackles the question head on:

What’s considered big for the non-surfing man? Let’s say 200 pounds and up. So what’s average for a surfer? Well, for argument’s sake, let’s say 150 to 170 pounds. But 180 is starting to tip the scale. Any pro surfer 190lbs is considered big — Jordy Smith, Jay Davies, Pancho Sullivan, Sunny Garcia, Luke Egan — while 200lbs is considered really big. Simon Anderson, a.k.a. The Gentle Giant, surfed in competitions at 6′3″ and 210 pounds. There are a lot of very fit surfers who are, simply put, bigger than average.

Thruster-inventor and former World #3 Simon Anderson was a big dude, which never slowed him down, especially at Sunset. Photo: Dan Merkel/A-Frame

At 200 pounds, a young, fit guy surfing in good waves can probably make 6′2″x18.5″x2.3″ work for him. Yet, 6′3″x18.75″x2.4″ is probably a little more practical.

Here are some other examples. A retired pro surfer in his mid 30s, standing at 6′3″ and 230 pounds would probably ride a 6′5″x19.5″x 2.5″. But when he was in competitive form, he probably would’ve weighed 200 pounds and rode a 6′3″x18.65″x 2.3″.

Or take a 6′5″, 230-pound, professional athlete in his early 20s who is an experienced surfer. His board would be 6′6″ 19.75 by 2.6. Meanwhile, a 6′7″ 230-pound retired NBA player in his early 40s would need a 6′10″ 21 by 2.8-inch board as an experienced surfer.

Then factor in age, fitness level and venue, and the numbers change.

A lot of guys fall into the “vanity versus reality” funk — if you’re working too hard and not enjoying yourself on the same board or dimensions that served you well a few years ago, go a little bigger. If fun becomes work, you’re only hindering yourself. Go a little longer, wider, thicker and you will increase your wave count and stoke. You’ll probably surf more often and the fun and fitness will be restored.

People often ask whether there’s a formula for volume. Here’s an astute observation from one of the readers of our previous blog:

Tom G. 05/19/2009 04:25 PM
“Could you help bring back the volume measurements of surfboards? Maybe even weigh the boards too…(~5-10% difference). It could improve consumer confidence (for the average guy) in avoiding the worst purchase for most surfers — a sinker that floats you at your neck! For example, some people think you should surf something no less than 35% of your volume. So if I weigh 77 kilos (170 lbs) I should surf a board that displaces 27 kilos of water (27 liters). Would this help the movement?”

Jamie O’Brien weighs in at about 180 pounds and typically his go-to board is 6′2″x18.5″x2.27″ inches and displaces a volume of approximately 27.5 liters (or about 77 beers, as one CAD program conveniently calculates.) I’ve made him shorter, wider boards and I do use the volume tool on the software as a cross check.

Jamie O’Brien putting his edge to the test at Teahupoo. Photo: Sean Collins

Nate Yeomans weighs about 170 pounds, though he rides similar dimensions with slightly leaner rails. So I would say you are on the right track, Tom.

Ability level and venue also must be taken into consideration, and in no way is it meant to be disrespectful, but these are realistic factors when finding the right board for you.

Alex from Sweden 05/20/2009 02:43 AM
“I’m 6′3″ and about 220 pounds with wintersuit and all. Even worse is that I surf mostly in the Baltic Sea that is cold and has much less salt, meaning less buoyancy. I don’t fancy longboards or funshapes because I want a stable board that can carve and snap but still handle less buoyant water. My question — what kind of board, and especially size, do you think would suit me?”

Venue is always a factor. Again, another spot-on comment, this one about salinity and buoyancy. The best way to add volume is to add width. This will increase stability but the trade-off is a reduction in reaction time. Wide boards aren’t necessarily any slower than narrower boards in terms of how fast they are capable of traveling down the line but width directly affects the quickness of a board with regards to rail-to-rail transition.

Simply put, for bigger surfers: width is your friend. You don’t have the same quick twitch muscle speed as your smaller brethren. You have more power. Design you board accordingly. Head high is all relative. Adding thickness will add buoyancy — the trade off is a decrease in flex and sensitivity. And while adding length may allow you to catch the wave a little earlier, the trade off is possibly compromising how the board fits in the curve of the wave and increased arc length on turns.

A big part of a shaper’s job is finding a good balance between all these variables.

Your board should somewhat reflect your build. Shorter, stockier surfers should probably consider adding the extra volume they need with a little extra thickness. Taller, leaner surfers may be better served by going a little longer, and wider. The extra width is important to maintain outline curve. For every two inches of change in length (+/-) approximately an eighth of an inch (+/-) will keep the curve somewhat similar.

Foot size also comes into play. Sasquatch doesn’t want his toes hanging over the rails and he can probably handle more width because of the leverage he can deliver with his big feet.

Pancho Sullivan - big guy board, big-guy carve. Photo: Jeremiah Klein

It’s difficult to generalize and that’s why I think it’s so important for anyone who wants to maximize his or her surfing to work with an experienced shaper on customized equipment. Once again, this isn’t so much about old-guy or fat-guy boards, but really trying to throw out some practical solutions for the surfer who’s bigger than average and frustrated with trying to find a happy middle ground between challenge and reward.Average sized surfers are generally happy with fins that have a base and height of around 4.5 inches and a flex pattern that incorporates a somewhat softer tip. Bigger surfers should be looking at fins in the 4.65 to 4.75 range, base and height. Also, avoid softer fins. Plastics are a no-no. Some RTM fins are good. Carbon tends to be too rigid. Nothing beats a well-foiled, all-fiberglass fin. In smaller surf you can sub in a set of five-inch (give or take 1/8″) front fins for more lift and drive and drop in a smaller rear fin to free up your tail.

Quads? I’m a big advocate, especially for larger surfers in everyday conditions.

As far as materials and construction go, bigger guys have more to gain from EPS/Epoxy. With lighter, quicker surfers, I usually adjust the volume down to compensate for the increased buoyancy. While bigger or more “experienced” (a.k.a. older) surfers usually choose to enjoy the additional paddle power.

There are so many variables to factor in, but here’s a stab at a super basic spreadsheet:

#1: A board with typical shortboard proportions. (From a distance, under a bigger surfer’s arm or on a wave, it would be difficult to tell how long the board really is.)

A 3-inch difference between nose and tail
Nose 11 to 12 inches
Tail 14 to 15 inches
Wide-point an inch or two back
More of a “back foot” design

Assuming average ability, average surf condition and that the surfer is reasonably fit, surfing three-plus times a week.

20 to 30 years old:
200lbs 6′6″ 19.5 by 2.5
225lbs 6′9″ 20.0 by 2.65
250lbs 7′0″ 20.5 by 2.85

30 to 40:
200lbs 6′9″ 20.25 by 2.7
225lbs 7′0″ 20.75 by 2.85
250lbs 7′3″ 21.25 by 3.0

40 to 50:
200lbs 7′0″ 20.5 by 2.75
225lbs 7′3″ 21.0 by 2.9
250lbs 7′6″ 21.5 by 3.0+

50 to 60:
200lbs 7′3″ 21.25 by 2.9
225lbs 7′6″ 21.75 by 3.0
250lbs 7′9″ 22.0 by 3.15+

#2: A little more balanced, user-friendly shape

A 1.5-inch difference between nose and tail
Nose 13 to 14 inches
Tail 14.5 to 15.5 inches
Wide point moves closer to center

Assuming average ability, average surf and a reasonably fit guy, surfing one to two times a week.

20 to 30 years old:
200lbs 6′6″ 20.5 by 2.65
225lbs 6′9″ 21.0 by 2.8
250lbs 7′0″ 21.5 by 3.0

30 to 40:
200lbs 6′9″ 21.25 by 2.75
225lbs 7′0″ 21.75 by 3.0
250lbs 7′3″ 22.25 by 3.1

40 to 50:
200lbs 7′0″ 21.5 by 2.85
225lbs 7′3″ 22.0 by 3.0
250lbs 7′6″ 22.5 by 3.15+

50 to 60:
200lbs 7′3″ 22.25 by 3.0
225lbs 7′6″ 22.75 by 3.125
250lbs 7′9″ 23.0 by 3.25+

There are many other options in design that will allow you to go shorter if you choose. Boards that are wider in the nose and tail with more relaxed rockers work for certain types of waves. Or go longer for that matter. It’s all about the waves you surf and the lines you want to draw.

Form follows fun.

Check out Rusty’s Blog on Surfline.com and Keep Those Questions Coming!