Innholdsfortegnelse for #348 Boards i Surfing Life

(Cough.) Hello. Errr … HELLO. Sorry, bit loud. (Cough.) That’s better. Hi. Hi, there. (Perfect.) My name is Jed Smith and I am a journalist and radio presenter. I have been chosen as your captain—that is, editor—for the foreseeable future, so let me start by first saying that it is an honour and a privilege to have your attention, and to be handed the reigns of this here proud and storied publication, Australia’s Surfing Life. Why they’ve trusted it to a punchdrunk pikey from one of the most maligned beaches in the world, Bondi, will no doubt be as confounding to you as it to me. But, let me assure you, you will not be disappointed, there is a silver lining, especially where the reader is concerned. If there is…

The mind boggled. It just didn’t seem possible. Gabriel Medina’s 9.73 to take command of this year’s final at the Corona Open J-Bay was one of the most improbable waves ever surfed in a world tour event; up there with CJ Hobgood’s Tahitian tube ride to another dimension in 2015, and Filipe Toledo’s double alley-oop also at J-Bay. When understood in the context of the history of Medina’s backside surfing, it takes on another dimension. Bigger than anything that had come through all contest, the wave barely clung to the reef and had a bizarre triangular wedge running through it. Most world tour surfers would barely have managed a four on it. Consider, also, that Medina was already down a near perfect 9.1 to countrymen Italo Ferreira after he opened…

Even if you think pro surfing and everything that goes with it is the spawn of Satan, you’d have to have a peculiar form of blindness to not notice the boys from Brazil—the so-called Brazilian Storm—have almost completely dominated the sport in the last year, following on from a period of near domination only broken by the back-to-back world titles of John John Florence. Almost unremarked in that dominance are long lasting relationships with some of surfing’s saltiest shaping gurus who have been plying their trade under the radar for years, decades even. That has led to a sly, almost secret advantage in equipment which the front-runners of the storm—Gabriel Medina, Italo Ferreira and Filipe Toledo—are using to fuel their dominance. It deserves a closer look. For its own sake…

SHAPER: ALEX CREWS ARTIST: BRETT PALMER SANDER: THE GLASS LAB 5’6” x 19 ¼” x 2 7/16” 28.3 L TEST PILOT’S NOTES: This is a really fun board, it has a fair bit of foam up the front and then it kinda rides a little longer than it is. It’s 5’6” and I rode it in some pretty solid waves. It had a lot of drive off the bottom and drew really nice lines off the top. It never felt skittish at all and it also has a pretty flat entry rocker so it’s super fast. I was really impressed with how much drive and hold it has. It’s an all-round fun board, especially on the point breaks, and it would be perfect for summer, into any season. I highly…

SHAPER: PAUL GRAVELLE ARTIST/RESIN TINT: PAUL GRAVELLE SANDER: PAUL GRAVELLE 5’8” x 19 ¾” x 2 ⅜” 29 L TEST PILOT’S NOTES: This is the first Asym I have ever tried. It’s got two beautiful tails on it (laughs) and was a really fun board to ride, but not exactly the same on your toe side and heel side. As a twin-fin on the toe side with the channels and half a swallowtail, it had so much zip, it felt like it was trying to get you up to the lip as soon as possible. Once you got on to the quad and smooth round tail side, it had that smooth tight turn that quads are known for. It felt like you drew different shapes off the top and bottom,…

SHAPER: DAN MANN ARTIST: NONE SANDER: FIREWIRE 5’6” x 19 ⅜” x 2 ⅜” 28.7 L TEST PILOT’S NOTES: This is a very high-performance small wave board. They’ve done an amazing job of hiding the foam, and the amount of foam that’s in it. It feels like quite a small board but then it’s super buoyant. They’ve kept the rails low and hidden all the foam in the middle. It’s still got the tail that’s really refined and rails that are really refined, so it surfs like a high-performance board with the buoyancy of a little fish. Great small wave board. It’s running the tri-quad fin set-up so you can run it as a thruster or a quad, but I’m sure you could run it as a twin with a…

SHAPER: FEDERICO PONSA ARTIST: BRENT TURNER SANDER: FEDERICO PONSA 5’5” x 20 3/16” x 2 7/16” 28 L TEST PILOT’S NOTES: This board has my favourite spray. All the Aussie animals are so cool. I think the favourite thing about the board is, it’s like it’s got a couple of jetpacks fixed to the back. It’s got a super deep double concave that goes into a quad concave at the back of the last two fins. It has an off the bottom that feels normal, feels normal … and then it just goes whoosh and shoots you up to the lip with a crazy acceleration like I’d never felt before! The long points are where I believe it would excel the most, because you’d get to feel that turbo boost…

When it comes to turning a chunk of foam into something that gives you hours of fun and joy, it is a team effort. From the shapers through to the floor sweepers, everyone has an important role to play in the creation of a surfboard. So it seems a little unfair that it is just one person’s name that gets put on the final product when in reality there were so many people behind it. We thought we’d shine a light on perhaps one of the most under-appreciated jobs in the factory; the sanders. While the shaper might be seen as the rock stars who shape out the charming curves that we know and love, it is the sanders who have the final say on whether your board is going…

Nestled in an industrial nook just a stroll down the road from Currumbin point on the Gold Coast, sits Shapers Australia. A family-run company that has provided materials, resins, technology and tools for everyone from humble backyard shapers to international heavyweights for more than 30 years. Dan Holloway, who runs the business with his brother Jake, was more than happy to sit down with us and take a look into his crystal ball on where surfboard manufacturing is heading. What’s up ahead in board manufacturing? Where is it going? I think it’s going in the direction of more diversity and the acceptance of diversity. It is about getting to this point where we have boards that better suit the particular surfer and the waves they are surfing to increase their…

It was like a dream. As the sun set on a cosmic day of surfing, the vastly underrated NSW Far North Coast surfing purist, Chippa Wilson, struck a high-line soul arch, on a golden backlit Uluwatu grower, that might have elicited the loudest roar of the contest. It mightn’t have scored a single point, but the image of Chippa was seared into the consciousness of the hundreds packed along the cliff top at Ulus. Like much of the surfing witnessed during the second annual Uluwatu Single Fin Classic, it was an expression of pure joy and beauty—a reminder of surfing as it was first imagined. The fact it was happening at the very wave a 15-year-old Steve Cooney set the gold standard at in the immortal 1972 psychedelic surf epic,…

SHAPER: STEVE DEL ROSSO ARTIST/RESIN TINT: RICHARD McGARRY SANDER: AARON ABRAHAM 5’6” x 19 ⅞” x 2 ⅜” 29 L TEST PILOT’S NOTES: I really enjoyed this board. It has all the traditional things you look for in a twin-fin. It has the little bevelled rolled down nose, which is cool, and the tail still stays out wide. The fins are perfectly set to give you that squirty feel that you look for in a twinnie, but it’s also got enough drive to do some high-performance surfing. I guess you can ride it as the old school twinnie that you have fun on, but if you get a good section you want to rip in, it still has that drive so you can do some nice turns on it. Definitely…

SHAPER: BOYD PURDY ARTIST: BOYD PURDY SANDER: BOYD PURDY 5’7” x 20 ¾” x 2 9/16” 29 L TEST PILOT’S NOTES: The HB has a super traditional wide tail with some not quite traditional channels that run all the way up the front. It’s definitely a summer board. You’re not going to be doing big airs on it, but if you wanna trim down the line at the Pass or one of those point breaks it’s a lot of fun and it goes really fast. It has a little spot that you find in the wave that I think the channels and the straight edges get you going and you get a little turbo boost. Yeah, it’s a good fun board. SHAPER’S NOTES: For the Sled Review I’ve done one…

SHAPER: GORDON SMITH ARTIST: NONE SANDER: JAMISON 5’9” x 20” x 2 5/16” 29 L TEST PILOT’S NOTES: This board was a lot of fun. When you’re up and riding, it’s got a lot of foam up the front, under your chest and at the front foot. The foam up the front is well hidden and as the name says, it’s a wave snatcher and paddles into the waves really easily. With the tight pulled in tail, it could handle all the speed that it generated so it was a lot of fun. It’s kinda what I ride as my fun wave board. I always have foam up the front and I’ve never really liked super wide tails. This thing is nice and pulled in and perfect, and once you…

As all surfers know, every board needs fins, wax, tail pads (unless you’re left back in the ‘70s), legropes (because we firmly believe in the safety of others), and a board bag to throw them all in. Our Sled Review was no different, and we needed the good oil for our test pilot, Wilko, so we asked around and got the support of some incredible brands. SHAPERS MANUFACTURERS CO. Every year we ask an accessory company to provide the gear for our Board Bible – Sled Review. This year, Shapers Manufacturers Co. came to the party with grips, legropes, fins and board bags. It was challenging to put together all the different fins required for this test because we had such a wide variety of boards. Luckily, the Shapers’ range…

Surfing Life: First things first, talk us through the perfect ten in the quarter-finals. Owen Wright: Right, I can go back in my memory. I can do that now (laughter). It was the first heat of the morning and I was out there getting a feel for it before I started. Some of the guys were saying that there’s a few leftovers, a few huge sets. I didn’t really know what to expect so I went out and got a bit of a feel and it didn’t seem that big, but sure enough there was this set that came through and the first one Jaddy (Andre) swung on and I was like, “Awwww, I reckon there’s gonna be a way bigger one behind this”. It ended up being a pretty…

After winding through a maze of roads on a rainy NSW North Coast night, Luke Daniels’ rustic double-decker timber homestead reveals itself via a banged-up caravan in the front yard next to an active chicken coup. His van, which has plastic taped over a broken window to keep the rain out, is parked out front and I find him downstairs in the garage he’s converted into a shaping bay. I push open the makeshift door to find Eddy Current Suppression Ring blaring out of a Makita tradie radio and Daniels blowing the dust off a freshly hewn blank, soon to become board number 272. “I number every one of them”, he laughs. A carpenter by trade and former professional lifeguard, LD, as he’s known, grew up at Bronte Beach, in…

The objective was simple enough. Ride a 17 pound (7.7 kg) single fin with 10 000 cigarette butts glassed into it through an eight-foot Cloudbreak chamber. Thus making a monumental statement about humanity, the impact of capitalism, materialism, nihilism, disposable culture, and apathy, on the environment. The objective might have been simple but achieving it would be another thing. “I was a bit hesitant to see how it would handle, how it would come off the bottom”, says Tevita Gukilau, the man charged with the responsibility of riding what is ostensibly a conceptual art piece through the bowels of one of the heaviest waves on the planet. “Obviously, Cloudbreak is quite a powerful wave … having never caught a single wave on it, I knew I’d either stand up and…

TEST PILOT MATT WILKO Matthew “Wilko” Wilkinson is one of Australia’s favourite sons and the froth levels were through the roof when he agreed to be our test pilot for our Sled Review. Wilko has strutted his stuff on the world stage winning several world tour events. Matt is currently bending his will to return to the championship tour and with the level of talent he has, we know it’s only a matter of time. Before heading out with us he was involved with the Champions Trophy where you surf three different boards: single fin, twin fin, and thruster. So we knew he’d be ready to test a bunch of fun boards for us. Thanks again Wilko you were amazing. This time of the year is always a favourite with…

SHAPER: JYE GUDENSWAGER ARTIST: ADRIAN TURNER SANDER: GARRY HUBBARD 5’11” x 19” x 2 ⅜” 28 L TEST PILOT’S NOTES: This board was super nice, a high-performance, small wave board. In fact, it was a little bit more high performance than most of them in the bunch. It was great off the bottom, great off the top and great for airs. It’s a board you could ride in a contest and had everything you look for in a fun board. Not super fishy, but a really fast, drivey, light, good surfboard. It also has little channels on the swallows to kick out the tail. I’m not sure how much I felt them, but it definitely felt like a nice board. I surfed this board in pumping six- to eight-foot Love…

SHAPER: IAN BYRNE ARTIST: WILLY NICHOLLS SANDER: RYAN MacDONALD 5’10” x 20 ¾” x 2 9/16” 29 L TEST PILOT’S NOTES: I’ve never ridden a curve channel twinnie or a curve channel anything before. It was really impressive to see how well it held. I surfed it in waves that you wouldn’t normally take a twinnie out in. It was a little bigger and I expected it to be super sketchy off the bottom, but I was powering through bottom turns and drawing some really nice lines. This is probably the best good wave twinnie I’ve ever ridden. Usually you take your twinnie out in little waves to make it fun, but you could ride this thing in any pumping point break and you’d be drawing really nice lines and…

DESIGN: RYAN CAMPBELL - SHAPER: STUART CAMPBELL RESIN BLEED: STUART CAMPBELL SANDER: STUART CAMPBELL 5’8” x 19 ⅝” x 2 5/16” 28.4 L TEST PILOT’S NOTES: This is another super fun summer board with a fair bit of thickness in the tail which gives you the feeling that the board just wants to keep going. I think on some Aussie beaches it would be a perfect board for summer when you feel like your regular board is not going to do that. I liked how the rails have been kept a little lower than what I ride. For a board with meat in the tail, it held rail really well and went super fast. I rode this with a two-plus-one fin set-up on the first surf and it had all…

When we head off into the wild yonder like the very first explorers, we expect to do it in air-conditioned comfort like the first explorers use to … didn’t they? Oh well, for this trip we certainly did and thanks to AirAsia and World Surfaris for making it possible, because it’s hard work making a surf magazine … isn’t it? MAAVAHI SURF CHARTERS We were privileged enough to be on board the Maavahi, for this year’s Board Bible – Sled Review. When it comes to reviewing boards, you need a bunch of waves in the best locations and what better way than on a surf charter. The Maavahi was an exceptional boat with everything you needed for a classic surf charter. A brilliant crew and none better than the local…

Would you pay top dollar for a board made out of trash? What if it “went like a rocket” as the creator of Australia’s first ever up-cycled trash board, Adam Baldwin, says his does? As the global population begins to truly reckon with the vast amounts of waste our lifestyles are producing, Baldwin and a handful of other shapers and designers around the globe are trying to imagine a more sustainable future for the most environmentally unfriendly component of surfing culture—surfboards. “There are people out there that use these exotic, “environmentally friendly” EPS (Expanded Polystyrene foam) blanks, which have got anywhere from 30% to 70% recycled EPS in them. But they’ve still been produced through an industrial process. They’re still made from new so there’s still a crap load of…

Are you getting lost in this image of Laura Enever at Shipsterns? Does it boggle the mind? Did you ever think you’d see the day when women were riding waves considered too heavy for the world’s best men a couple of decades ago? Did you get lost in that image of Owen Wright standing in the guts of an eight-foot west-bowl at The End Of The Road? Were you enthralled by his description of what it feels like to watch the horizon go black, knowing he’s potentially one slip away from a lifetime of mash potato and meat purée, only to grit his teeth and absolutely send it for a perfect ten? Are the hairs already standing up on the back of your neck as you read that last sentence?…