Ask Carroll

[Narra Kook]

Nick, have you ever seen an artificial reef created that changed a close out beachy into peeling walled perfection?

Also, I suffer the same right foot forward affliction as your brother. However, I'm right handed. Is TC left handed? Does being goofy have anything to do with being left handed? If so, is this the cause of my kookness?

Final question: who do I have to fuck, kill, or pay to get a set wave at the Peek?

[Skipper]

did you have to look up oleaginous and proprioception Nick?

his wife might have had too

no way dude, i reckon she'd have answered his enquiry off the cuff.

[Nick Carroll]

did you have to look up oleaginous and proprioception Nick?

No.

Proprioception is like grade three sport talk, and as far as oleaginous goes, well I have met my share of real estate agents.

[Skipper]

of course, me neither

[Nick Carroll]

Nick, have you ever seen an artificial reef created that changed a close out beachy into peeling walled perfection?

Also, I suffer the same right foot forward affliction as your brother. However, I'm right handed. Is TC left handed? Does being goofy have anything to do with being left handed? If so, is this the cause of my kookness?

Final question: who do I have to ****, kill, or pay to get a set wave at the Peek?

I have never seen such a thing done successfully with that goal, ie to create rideable surf

Plenty of examples of it having been done by accident as a side effect. Just drive up the NSW coast and check out all the river training walls. Places where the walls have created a settled beach environment with deep deposits of sand well offshore, which then break up swells and push them on to the beach in wedges and peaks, often assisted by refraction off the outside face of the wall.

Nah Tom is right handed and I don't think there's evidence to suggest that goofiness and handedness is connected in any way. The underlying cause might be related though.

Finally, it depends who's out there at the time. I dunno why you would want a set wave out the Peak anyway, it's a cnut of a wave unless you grew up surfing it.

[Natho]

Nick what is happening these days with Newport Plus? It appears several long standing members are now surfing for other clubs?.

[Nick Carroll]

Ah it's going along pretty well. It has some decent funding and seems really engaged with the kids. We had a super fun day a few weeks ago, a comp with NASA which everyone from both clubs really enjoyed. I'm not sure who you mean but there is a lot of back and forth between clubs these days and quite a few people cross over and surf in other clubs' contests.

[Little]

Nick,
Have you ever used a deck grip? I know they're usually terrible things but I've been working on inventing a good one for years and I think I'm close. Would you ever use one if it was at least as grippy but way more durable than wax or do you think it's just one of those things that is never going to happen?

[Nick Carroll]

I use deck grip all the time. Like tail pads, is that what you mean? Any board under 6'3", essential. Preference for Dakine. but some versions of FCS and O&E seem good to me. I use 'em because the feedback re foot positioning is super valuable.

[PeepeelaPew]

...

[rmb]

Nick how does a surfer bridge the skill gap between Intermediate and Advanced. Time in the water is a given but there must be other skills intermediate surfers can nurture to enhance their skill set. To further expand their surfing experience.

Wow what a fantastic question.

I can only draw on what I've seen for an answer.

Some surfers seem to make a very swift leap through these levels and layers of surfing skill. I think this is usually because they have some really surf-friendly stuff in their physical makeup. My friend Simon Buttonshaw would see some people do Yoga and say they had a "fortunate body", I think this is true of some people who surf; they have a fortunate body and it fits what is needed from the waves and the boards of the time.

For others it's a longer but perhaps a deeper transition; they are surfers who are willing to keep trying and beavering away but require some external factors to play a role. Like they may find a surf spot that fires their imagination or a series of surfboards that carry them to a deeper understanding of what they're doing. For sure, competitive surfing can play a big role here -- it has a way of forcing people to advance despite themselves. But it's not the only way.

The key word here is "understanding". To me the greatest difference between an "intermediate" and an "advanced" surfer is in the understanding of what they are doing. I have no suggestion for how to achieve this other than to keep following your nose in the sport. Not everybody is supposed to be fantastic at everything and maybe the trigger for your advancement will remain hidden to you for some time, or maybe it will come quite quickly and early. But it's not gonna be a result of magic, it'll always be a result of time spent in the water and time obsessing about what you're trying to do in there.

Thanks for answering I think the time spent in the water and obsessing are most important. As you mentioned in another post regarding the pro's that self analysis is important which leads me to my next set of questions. In improving ones ability is expert coaching/tuition valuable? My second question is regarding the biomechanics of surfing what improvements can someone make to improve their skill set.

[Nick Carroll]

rmb these are huge and very broad questions. I'm just gonna go real short on 'em.

expert coaching is most useful to experts.

everybody is built differently, everybody moves differently. That said, one extremely basic and simple thing any surfer can benefit from is learning to relax the upper body so he or she can move more easily through the hips, knees and ankles, where surfing actually happens.

[Davros]

Kneelos, George Greenough and Lis get a lot of credit for surfing designs and concepts that changed the face of surfing. Do you think the impact is as great as some pundits say and can kneelos really know what impact they have made or were making to "stand up" surfing. Kneelos are an interesting and almost, if not, modern historical sub culture. Really good kneelos are fascinating to watch, but I wonder if design concepts can consciously be translated to stand ups and hence maybe the contribution is overblown.

[steve shearer]

Of course they can be consciously translated, that's exactly what happened.
They saw Greenough riding short stubby equipment and going all over the wave and tried to copy it.

Coming from longboards that was a quantum shift.

[Hollowed out]

Adding to that Steve, is that George did indeed draw different lines but that was a direct result of his radically different equipment, personal skills/approach, low centre of gravity and low profile in the water. He famously rode 'spoon' kneels which meant he needed to surf in the pocket and could get deeper in the tube and when needed, could carve tighter arcs in the pocket.

Boards of that era were much more planing hulls and rode out on the face and were not good in the tube or capable of tight arc turns

I don't recall (but happy to stand corrected) George ever riding conventional full bodied kneelos.

So to that end George had a real influence on traditional surfing but the attempt to translate that type of craft he rode to stand up surfing never really worked , although is was seriously attempted on at the time. So there was a form of translation "of what was possible"

[steve shearer]

Translation, not direct copy. Of course they had to be adapted to higher centre of gravity of stand up surfing, although Ted Spencer and Chris Brock did some radical surfing on tiny hulls that weren't that far removed from what Greenough was riding.

All boards are planing hulls when on a wave Hollowed Out, the trad longboards of the time were far more displacement hulls than planing hulls, especially compared to a Greenough spoon.

[el rancho]

I shaped a small displacement hull a few years ago, 5'7" X 22 i think - super wide, flat deck. It's got a super domey displacement hull all the way through it, I stuffed the back end rails, there is no hard edge anywhere. The hull and rocker profile are really similar to some of Greenough's spoons.



george board


The first time I surfed it was at Ti Tree, Noosa the first wave was this sucky, head-high below sea level thing and the board just sat in the pocket and sort of melded into the wave itself. I thought I'd shaped some genius space vehicle. Turns out the board is very limited in the conditions it works in. Has to be 2-3 foot steep faced points otherwise it bogs down, pushes water or spins out.

I'm thinking of stripping glass off and reshaping it. Tone down the hull and put some hard edges in the back half.

[bomboraa]

Then possibly the second great kneelo contribution to stand up surfing after Greenough was the Steve Lis fish _ inspiration for the modern twin, then, later, through Hynd, the starting gun of the next incantation of shorter and wider stand up boards.
Interesting that in between these two events the modern non-slab multi-finned kneeboard used to such great effect by Novakov, Farrer etc didn't seem to get stand up creative design juices flowing, even though they did some inspired and different surfing right in front of everyone at Narrabeen.