Down A Design Rabbit Hole.
By Dan Dobbin.
Do you have a type?
A silhouette or feature that you just can’t resist, something that makes your heart rate quicken, your pupils dilate, blood rush to…. Ya get the point….
For a long time, mine was slightly wider, volume in the back end, more rounded, Brazilian like.
No channels, bat tail.
Custom after custom I persisted with the design, despite my regular being one of the east coast’s premiere wedges.
Wedges don’t require the speed generation that the extra surface area in a bat tail generates.
Scooping into teepee peaks is undoubtably easier with some deep channels and a crescent tail squared away in the back end.
Straight railed, smaller, skinner like everyone else was riding.
But I couldn’t help it.
The Science E0 was the window into this fetish.
Traded in four old boards and scavenged money hard in the midst of being a twenty years old university student with a newborn baby girl to get my hands on one.
The looseness and glide of the flat bat felt like power steering after a grommet hood on standard crescents.
The fact that Mike was making and riding them lent the star power.
Riding them required different lines, get to the bottom and draw a longer bottom turn, rather than the scoop and shoot of a crescent.
The carving reverse out of the bowl, ala Spencer Skipp, and flip out of the bowl, ala every Brazillian ever became the move of choice.
I had what I rate as my personal best surf performance on that blue meany one afternoon at above mentioned wedge. Full roter air rev after air rev, a brief window into the superpowers that the pro’s must feel.
It wasn’t always a rosie relationship though. My mate Nath loves to remind me of the time I slid out badly at the bottom of a dredging mysto right. The shame, the shame…..
By the time I ordered an experimental gel coated, gold sprayed creation by Alister Taylor shipped from South Africa, I had to recognize that I had a problem that I was impacting me in a negative way.
So next custom, I went cold turkey. 42’ 21’ 12’ 18’ crescent with channels. Traditional.
I’ve had dalliances since. Lots of concave play, I like the noses on my boards thinned out, half board stringers seeking a flex feel. Currently tinkering with length.
Still, the old E0 sits in a boardbag in the back shed, too battered to ever be ridden again, but never to be thrown away.
Anyone else want to confess their design kink?
