concave?

[RichQ]

Concave ....simple & cmplex at the same time...basically concave lifts you up & you push it down creating forward momentum....complex part...depth & plcement of concave relative to your weight & how & where you surf...too deep & in the wrong place makes board feel sticky off the top & sketchy off the bottom....get the depth & placement right & you've got anothr gear to shift to ....all part of a truly CUSTOM board....

[RichQ]

Also, Nic C. wrote good article on concave in "Surfing" mag acouple of years ago....Icould find it in my "Research & Archive Dept."...(the toilet) if you want to read.

[Surfin Turf]

^^^^

thanks, I thought it was going to be one those 'how long's a piece of string' questions ...

might call by and have a look at that article though ... but if you don't mind I'll read it out the front rather than in the archive room ... for some reason I'm all a bit interested in some of the technical stuff at the moment ...

end of the day I am going to leave it up to GH as usual ...

[RichQ]

Ironically, the "Research Dept." is the cleanest room in the factory! Looking for mag now...

[Nick Carroll]

might call by and have a look at that article though ...

A little late crissy gift for you snt

The Age of Concave

Is this the real reason why everyone’s ripping? Nick Carroll looks at the biggest surfboard design change since the Thruster, and wonders how come it’s sneaked under our gaze.


About six weeks ago, chasing a bar of wax and one of those little leash string things, I blundered into the Rip Curl surf shop in San Clemente. Without, like, advertising it or anything, I’ve got to admit, it’s a fricken large surf shop. To get the leash string thing, I had to walk around a cash register stand, past some serious clothing and accessory stands, up a flight of stairs, and through a mass of absolutely beautiful brand new surfboards.
Well, you can’t do that, just walk past rack after rack of new boards, so I got sidetracked, gazing at the curves of all those Merricks and Simon Andersons and SurfTech replicas and all the rest….
And suddenly flashed on something. Why hadn’t I noticed it before?
What happened to vee?
The racks in Rip Curl’s shop, like racks in shops everywhere from San Clemente to South Africa, represent the least explained, yet perhaps the single biggest change in board design of recent decades. If you’re under the age of, say, 22, it’s highly likely you’ve never owned a board without concave in it. But not so long ago, worldwide, you could count the number of boardmakers using concave on one hand. Instead, almost every surfboard made came equipped with vee -- a classic standard bottom shape that’s virtually a mirror image of modern thinking.
So….what happened? Why, in the space of roughly a year between mid-1992 and ’93, did almost every surfboard designer of note or otherwise throw away the supposedly accumulated wisdom of 20 years of boardmaking, and embrace its exact opposite?


I have to confess, I love concave surfaces on surfboards. As a grom, waaay the hell back in the late ‘70s, back when vee was everything, I used to gaze longingly at a particular surfboard in my local surf shop window. The board was made under the label Bare Nature; it was a single fin pintail with a full concave, nose to tail, the only one of its kind I'd ever seen. Those inverse curves just seemed to make practical sense -- you could almost feel the water being pressured against the inner rail in a turn.
But it wasn’t just that. The concave was beautiful. When you lifted that board out of the racks and gazed down its gorgeous leaflike undercurve, you received an almost erotic tingle. It stood out among the stubby double-wing flat vee bottoms like Helena Christensen at an Orange County prom night.
I never got to ride the thing -- the shop owner's girlfriend bought it for him as a Christmas present -- but through most of the following years, watched as a few, a very few concave designs flitted along the margins of SurfboardLand. There was Allan Byrne’s vicious forward concave six-channel, so clearly a kind of surfing artwork it scared off most surfers. There was Terry Fitzgerald’s nose concave and double sided “spiral” vee, an inheritance from his early-70s Hawaii sessions with Brewer, Owl Chapman, Sam Hawk and Reno Abellira. And in the background to it all lingered the poor, lost-valley-of-the-dinosaurs design, the Bonzer, the board almost nobody took seriously until they realized it’d pre-dated everything else by nearly 20 years….
But dominating it all was Vee – central, tail-based slabs of Vee, rising up hull-like toward the stringer, designed perfectly to allow a board to rock back and forth from rail to rail, and unwittingly, putting the brakes on surfing in the process.

-------------------

It wasn’t like concave wasn’t known. In fact, for some surfers, concave beat vee to the table by 50 years.
Duke Kahanamoku, for instance. A 1948 issue of the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper describes Duke’s design work on his famed demonstration board, made in Sydney, Australia back in 1915: “Having no board, he picked out some sugar pine from George Hudson's, and made one. This board -- which is now in the proud possession of Claude West -- was eight feet six inches long, and concave underneath. Veterans of the waves contend that Duke purposely made the surfboard concave instead of convex to give him greater stability in our rougher (as compared with Hawaiian) surf.” That wacky Duke! Always ahead of the curve.
The Vee’s dominance stemmed from the late-‘60s shortboard days – or the days right before shortboards, when shapers like Dick Brewer in Hawaii and Bob McTavish in Australia were already trying to get boards to fit new curves on the wave.
Brewer and McTavish had two separate, yet weirdly symmetrical ideas about how to get surfing to the Next Level. The Hawaii-based designer, inspired by speed, worked on getting as much of the board out of the way as possible. Everything about the mini-gun and its children was forward-foiled, narrowed, and subtle. Some versions featured slight concaves; others had nose vees bleeding into dead-flat bottoms – control surfaces, made to plane clean on the world’s fastest waves.
McTavish, on the other hand, riding the smaller, cleaner, peakier waves of east coast Australia, wanted his boards to turn, sharp. So he designed for the tail, drawing back the width and placing a deep vee shape in the bottom, peaking just under the fin.
Suddenly the surfing world had a board that’d turn in small surf, and in the following decade, Vees created an entire surfing style. They were all about turns: pivoting, short-arc turns. They made shortboard single fins stand up on their tails and swing, and they kept the nose clear of the water while it happened – not an easy task on those slabby, flat-rockered beasts. On Vees, surfers first began to work on vertical turns up the face and stalls off the bottom into the tube and that all-time iconic Vee-bottom move, the Snapback. The design was so stable and sensible, so seemingly logical, it survived the twin-fin revival, then the Thruster revolution, then years of crazy 1980s growth and the combined ripping talents of every pro Knight Errant from Curren to Carroll to Occy to Pottz and legions of followers. Underneath all those changes, it remained unchanged.



So what the HELL happened back in 1992? Why did the whole world suddenly shift to concave? Trying to get a handle on this radical shift in design thinking, I went to visit Greg Webber – the shaper generally credited with modern concave’s birth, and the man who baffled the world in that seminal year by equipping young team rider Shane Herring with a quiver of super concaved boards so rockered-out they were immediately dubbed “bananas”.
He’s a bloody intense bloke, Mr Webber. He comes from an artistically inclined family and has five brothers, all of whom are radical in their own way. He’s still got a gap in his teeth from a fistfight over a surf spot three years ago. Artistic AND competitive – it’s a deadly mix.
Webber brought into focus just why it was I’d fell so spastically in love with that Bare Nature board. He sees the aesthetic of concave as being vital to understanding how it’s come to dominate design. “We’re attracted to beauty,” he told me. “That’s part of being human. And there’s a hardwired link in the human mind between aesthetics and function. Surfboards prove it.” He uses ellipses to expand on the point: the way the human eye is fascinated more by extended curves – like the Nike swoosh or the Coca-Cola “dynamic curve” – than by a straight line or a simple, hard circle.
Prior to concave, Greg shaped normal boards for the time, the early 1980s: flat to tail vees, with the vee rolled slightly as it came into the board. He shaped for Greg Day, Richard Cram, and Shaun Tomson (“the most nervous I’ve ever been,” he recalls). By the mid-‘80s he was working under his own label, Insight, and had built a healthy reputation as a smart, reliable designer, partly through his top team rider Barton Lynch.
Then one day in mid-1985, while surfing at Angourie Point in northern NSW, Australia, he saw the great Floridian surfer Bill Hartley. Bill was in Oz trying to crack some of the pro trials events and stopped at Angas for a free-surf. He was riding a single concave thruster made by Greg Loehr, and in Webber’s words, “he went mental. He did surf better than anyone else in the world – at least in that one session. Bite off the bottom, release off the top, and the water coming off the outside rail in a sheet.” Greg got down low and demonstrated a Hartley turn from that day, a whippy drivey top turn, common these days but back then, in the days of the snap, rare as … as full concave. “It gives me goosebumps now,” he says.
After seeing this session, Webber promptly went back home and ignored it. “I couldn’t understand it, so I just put it into the back of my head… About 18 months later I was in my shaping bay about to make myself another board, and suddenly realized I was pissed off! Here I was about to cut another vee bottom and it was a complete dead end. So I tried to think about something that would be the opposite of what was bothering me.”
Into his mind popped the vision of a board seen from underwater – a board with concave from nose to tail, and an exaggerated continuous rocker. That’s the board he shaped, then and there: 5’8”, 17 and a half inches wide, two and a half thick, three eighths of a inch of concave at the center, and a relatively parallel template – the nose, at 11 and a half, was proportionally quite wide. “I had to cut away at the middle of the deck to get the rocker in.”
Hand shaping a concave the first time, says Greg, is an uncomfortable experience. “You feel like you’re making a reverse of the bottom rocker.” He begins to demonstrate on an imaginary blank, and immediately I can see what he means. With a vee, you’re shaping off an identifiable peak in the board, rolling off it down onto the rail, fanning off it into a flatter front half and down the other side to the tail. There’s a lot to consider, but there’s also a consistency in that peak point; it helps hold your line of sight. In a concave, you get bewildered; there’s nowhere to fan out from; instead there’s an endless vanishing point along the rail, and the sense of falling through the board’s center line.
This uncertainty invariably results in bumps through the rocker. “The first time, you can’t help it. 20 years of shaping doesn’t prepare you for what you’re seeing,” says Webber. “What’s hard is to relate that to rocker. You only need one eighth of an inch of concave to achieve a full inch of rocker change.”
It’s a way of saying that with concave, not much is a lot. It magnifies itself along the stringer line; on the rail and on the stringer of a concaved board, you’re looking at entirely different curves.
Webber made single concaves for several surfers – South Africa’s Mike Burness, Sydney’s Mike Newling and California’s Jamie Brisick among ‘em – but when Barton Lynch rode his once, then threw it away, Greg mothballed it again. “I had to concentrate on his boards. Barton was trying to win world titles and that’s what mattered at the time.”


Greg Loehr recalls the history of that Hartley board with ease. Loehr, like Webber, is a real original. Tall and lanky, with a piercing eye and a smooth goofyfoot style, he’s renowned for following his own path – not, as some designers do, through some sort of misplaced cross-grainedness, but out of his sheer grommety enthusiasm for boardbuilding. Greg’s always looking for something better.
Such was the state of affairs in 1980, when the surfing world was still tangled up in the great debate of the time: single versus twin. Loehr, like many Floridians, was a twin-fin fan: “The twins at the time were all deep vee,” he recalls.
Loehr himself, however, rarely surfed anything other than a concave. The reason, he says, was a winter spent on Oahu’s North Shore in 1971, when as a team grommet under Dick Brewer, he’d seen Brewer make a board with a single concave starting 18 inches from the tail and bleeding right out the back like an exhaust pipe. The idea stayed with him through the whole Vee Decade, and he kept making concaves along with everything else, including one variety of single-fin with an unusual tail concave he nicknamed the “uno-spoono”.
Along came the Thruster and solved that single-vs-twin debate – but according to Loehr, not in his home town. “The first thrusters in Florida were not met with the kind of success that they had elsewhere because of the slow wave speed at nearly every break, exceptions being Hatteras and Sebastian Inlet,” he says.
Bill Hartley, then a Loehr team rider, stuck with the singles, notably the uno-spoono model, but around 1984 he cracked. Bill took one of his uno-spoono single fin boards and put three fins on it. “Voila,” says Loehr, “a three fin with enough lift for Florida waves … it had so much more speed and drive that it was revolutionary.” Soon Loehr and Hartley were cutting the thing down toward modern measurements, shaving off width and thickness and adding rocker to help it through turns. By the time Webber saw Bill surfing in Australia he was miles ahead.


Yet as with all great design shifts, it was all about timing. Vee-style surfing reached a peak in the 1980s – the drop, the bottom turn, the snap – and no way was one hot surfer from one beach thousands of miles from the world pro tour gonna change that. Yet by 1990, those Vee lines were boring to the eyes of Herring, Slater and a whole generation of light-footed supergroms … at least one of whom, Kelly, had seen Hartley ruining the Inlet for years on his modified uno-spoono.
The appearance of Maurice Cole’s reverse vee in 1991 inspired Webber to return to concave. “I just went, ohhhh, I’ve gotta do something here…. I could see he was backing into a similar sort of thing, in a way. It changed the rail rocker and released water really fast. But it was still a vee.” Early in 1992, in the first great New School competitive showdown, young Herring beat Kelly Slater in the Coke Classic final riding a lower rocker full concave. Says Webber: “He looked faster than Slater and I don’t think it was just him.”
Concave’s reputation as an extreme design wasn’t helped by what happened next. Greg decided to charge all the way with his super-rockered vision. The result was Herring’s “banana-board” quiver, which the young Aussie carried through Europe to a series of calamitous results. The boards “locked up”, refusing to turn anywhere except in the steepest and most critical wave regions. Herring said to him later: “Make the board around the in-between turn. I want to be the one who decides when to do the extreme turn.”
Ironically – and typically of most new design ideas – concave only grew into itself once shapers like Cole, Merrick, Xanadu and numerous others began reducing its impact on the board. Maurice learned to drop his reverse vee just in front of the concave, letting it in easy, then running it out the back through a swallowtail. Xanadu pioneered the flip-nose rocker entry; Al cut the hard curves of Kelly’s early rippers with which he rearranged the deckchairs of the the ‘90s. And eventually, all else followed.
Like his best known design feature, Webber is nothing if not a paradox. Recently he tried to eliminate concave altogether from his high performance equipment, just to see if his riders could get the maximum out of nothing but a smooth rocker. “Kieren Perrow noticed it immediately. Taj (Burrow) did too. I gave up and put the concaves back in.”

---------------------

On concaves, modern surfing erupted. It was as if a style blockage had been removed. You can see its lift, its reflex speed, in everything these days, from A.I.’s incredible swift top turn carves to Taj’s pump-accelerated airs to Kelly’s astonishingly rounded-out carving cutbacks … all the way to your buddy’s sudden turn of speed on that little inside bowl section last weekend. And at the other end of the crazy spectrum, when Dick Brewer – now well into his 60s – cuts a towboard for Laird Hamilton, it’s concaved nose to tail.
Concave surfaces so proliferate throughout the surfboard, in fact, you just knew they had to show up on fins. And thus we have the Futures Vector series.
Stemming from aerodynamic theory, the Vector is almost certainly the most radical departure from conventional fin design since the Thruster itself. It uses a concave curve on the inside face of the side fins to help create a reverse image of the old-school convex base – what Vortex designer Mike Caldwell calls a “reflex” foil. “You can move more water across a curved surface than you can across a flat, it’s that simple, really,” he chuckles.
Mike was born and raised around Windansea in San Diego. He’s one of the increasing number of us with more than 40 years’ water time under his belt, and has built his own boards for a good chunk of that time. “I grew up around all those cool guys, Diffenderfer, Mike Doyle, Mike Hynson, those cool Californians … eventually I started drifting toward more radical designs, Bonzers and five fins. The fins were always the lagging element, that’s how it seemed to me. I wanted to think of the fins first and the boards second.”
In the 1980s he moved to Yallingup, West Australia, where he had an old surfing buddy – Vance Burrow, father of Taj. Here, in some of the planet’s muscliest waves, is where the Vector was developed. “It’s actually the opposite of an airplane wing,” he explains. “There’s more power at the tip than at the base. If you had a wing like this on a plane, with this much lift, it’d tear the airplane to pieces.”
Mike sees the future of surfboards in what he calls “resonance” – getting all the ingredients to work together, so they hum off each other. “Ironically people who are beginning to make surfboards deliberately for the Vectors, it’s RADICAL how much concave they’re putting in,” he says. “Five-eighths of an inch!
“The Vector eats water. And the concave is just a better user of the water.”

--------------------------
Mike thinks surfers’ minds are generally way more open to new design ideas than they were even three or four years ago…and looking at the way in which new technologies are being absorbed into SurfboardLand, you’ve gotta concede he might have a point. One wonders if our minds are quite open yet to his latest vision – a fin set that provides so much lift it imitates Laird’s hydrofoil plane. Mike has it in testing and says it lifts so hard “it actually hurts your feet”.
Cripes! Imagine…boards with hydrofoil lift off the fins…jumping out of the water like flying fish…sucking the juice out of even the smallest and most sluggish wave…can any of us really guess what’s next? One day we might look back and see the Age of Concave as just the start.
Let’s face it, this sport’s sooo far from done with us yet.





HOW CONCAVE WORKS
Concave changes two big things about the bottom of a surfboard. First: it changes the board along its length. As a concave bleeds in and out of a board, it effectively makes the board straighter (and shorter) along the stringer than it is along the rails -- there’s less rocker down the center than on the sides.
Second: it changes the board from rail to rail. As a concave cuts across a board, it curves the bottom on either side of the stringer in toward the center at a slowly increasing angle, reaching its max near the rails.
Both these changes work to increase the board’s LIFT and DRIVE, thanks to a basic piece of engineering theory: Whenever you change the direction of a moving flow of liquid across a solid surface, you achieve lift at 90 degrees to the flow. Under a concave surfboard, that means up, baby.
When the board is running flat, with gravity and wave energy pushing it along and your body weight pushing it down, the water is pushed toward the quickest path from nose to tail – right down the middle. When you put your body weight on one rail more than the other, the water is pressured against that inside rail curve and squeezed out through the tail, much as it’s pressured by the inside surface of the rail fin.
Boom! More lift, and thanks to the inside rail curve, more bite in turns. The setup “allows you to pump, giving more pressure when you weight, and more release when you unweight,” says Greg Webber. “In effect, everything you do is exaggerated.” It’s literally a form of turbocharging – turbo engines use a similar pressure effect to squeeze gasoline into the engine cylinders.
Even better: since the rails retain all a concave board’s original rocker, it tends to carve its cleanest turning line when set on a rail. That’s one big reason why top turns and cutbacks have grown rounder and smoother in recent years.



GREAT CONCAVES THROUGH HISTORY
Duke’s Australian starter-board, 1915. One of history’s most potent and dangerous pieces of surfing equipment, given what’s occurred in Australian surf in the following 90 years.

Dick Brewer’s concave guns, Hawaii 1968. Brewer shaped forward concaves into some of his Waimea guns, hoping to increase paddling speed; later he shaped tail concaves into a series of short miniguns for the likes of Owl Chapman, Sam Hawk and Reno Abellira.

Campbell brothers’ Bonzer, 1970. Famed at the time for being presented with some extraordinary semi-scientific explanations, such as the “Venturi effect”, this was the original three-fin concave bottom board, shoved to the margins because it was too much for the times.

Derek Hynd’s tail concave twin-fin, 1976. Shaped by vertical-surfing master Col Smith, this scary board featured a single concave between the fins, allowing Hynd to out-accelerate anyone; no other surfer could ride it.

Terry Fitzgerald’s concave “spiral” vees, 1977. Not for nothing was Fitzy known as the Sultan of Speed. Along with the epic spray jobs, his J-Bay, Honolua and Sunset semi guns were equipped with single concaves under the front foot and slight concaves in either vee panel.

Al Byrne’s concave to six channel, 1979. A lethal combination of deep single concave under the front foot with six deep “clinker” channels running out through the tail, softened by a slight vee in front of the fin. Later converted to three fins with shockingly fast results.

Al Merrick’s TriPlane Hull, 1983. A modulated triple concave, so subtle at times to be almost invisible, concealed around a basic vee-bottom and often used with wings (see the Flyer – it’s the classic modern version).

The Rawson/Rusty single to double, 1989. Pat Rawson’s take on the original Bonzer single to double concave setup was championed by Rusty, who melded it with his own subtle rocker lines; within a year, the design of choice for many top pros.

The Webber full concave, 1986/92. The freakshow of a design that stuck full concave back between the fins where it belonged and inspired the hi-per board of today.

[Surfin Turf]

haven't read it yet but a big thankyou ... I look forward broadening my knowledge base over a beer tonight ...

Rich ... I suppose you can put it back in the archive files of the R&D laboratory ...

[Natho]

Surfin Turf,

Heres my own personal take on SC versus SDC. It looks like my take is similar to yours.

A nice clean single gives you lift, speed and projection esp down the line.

A slight double shaped into the back end of a board allows for quicker directional changes. This is assisted by the raised stringer created in the middle of the double (which acts like a Vee) allowing you to get the board over on the rail a bit easier. The double also helps break the possibility of the single 'tracking' at speed. The double also seems to give more 'squirt' and drive when the board is on the rail (turns). This probably has something to do with one full concave (one half of the double) being in the water when the board is on the rail. Whereas once you put a single on the rail you only have half of the concave in the water. (sorry if you are confused ..speak to Greg webber for a better explanation).

I like both SC and SDC depending on the wave and board. I find a SC works a treat in nice clean down the line waves, however i find a slight double in the back can assist in smaller, short peaky waves where quick directional changes are needed to keep turning back into the wave. I have also noticed some singles tracking in bigger, clean down the line waves. Surfing bigger Nusa Dua a couple of years ago comes to mind when I felt my board sucking to the face making it harder to break into a turn. This may have more to do with the individual board.

Had a look at a few of Mick Fannings boards that he is currently riding in smaller waves and they had a fair bit of double in the back end. He has always liked SDC but it looks like Darren is putting a heap more double in his boards at the moment.

Double can slow the board a bit, however a well shaped double should not make too much difference.

Im about to head to OS with a few boards shaped by Simon that are both SC and SDC. So I will be interested to see if there is much difference noticed between the two. Right now i can't say that I like one more than the other in general.

[ric_vidal]

About six weeks ago, chasing a bar of wax and one of those little leash string things, I blundered into the Rip Curl surf shop in San Clemente. Without, like, advertising it or anything, I’ve got to admit, it’s a fricken large surf shop. To get the leash string thing...

Unbelievable you bought a leash string. What happened to the cord from ya budgie smugglers?

Not a bad write up on the concave either not that we expect any less.

[wanto]

good thread guys, great post nick.

[pridmore]

good stuff NC, enjoyable reading even better lookin back and seeing what happened when...even though I was surfing alot of the mentioned designs and shaping some of my own early and rough versions myself, great to see who did what when.....I remember the AB's and Rawsons that Kong would have and I would always chec his equipment out heavily and remember just frothing over the first Byrning Spear I saw , the deepest sickest channels and big single feeding them....looked so slick and more like a weapon than a surfboard.... I am inspired to go and do myself a clinker even though I just did 3 boards and sweated off about 4 kg's....You gotta love lookin back at the designs of the past.....

[Surfin Turf]

NC ... couldn't wait ... just read it (stuff it, it's Friday arvo ..) great read ... enjoyed the history as well as the technical, thanks ...

Natho ... thanks as well (I got what you are saying) , again it seems hard to pick one over the other but with a slight lean towards the SDC in the typical northern beaches conditions ... it's a bit like asking do you prefer blondes or brunettes in the dark ...

I'm looking forward to trying my little bro's new single concave (a GH, Rich & RV) ...

[Surfin Turf]

good thread guys, great post nick.

do you have a preference wanto ... I'd be interested in your experiences/opinions

[bohdidontsurf]

Single to doubles / bonzers/ Vee in tail all work well for quads. The raised stringer helps give a centre point feel to the board which helps with that ugly sk8ty feel that most quads have. The trick is to have the double or vee running right between the fins. Throw in a round tail or diamond tail to assist in a pivot point feel for your quad. Throw in a bat tail if ya wanna look cool.

I know this is a thread about concaves not quads, but........ I have just never felt that skatey feeling with quads? I have gone almost completely accross to quads now. My mal (f.ck I hate admitting that) is a truster and I have a step up thruster but all my others are quads. They have a little vee in the nose (can hardly see it even with a straight edge) , single concave into the start of the fins, and a tiny bit of vee in the tail. I also have shifted away from bat tail quads to round tails. I was super sceptical about a round tail quad, but I will never go back now. Heaps of speed and drive and turn on a dime. So I guess we all surf different and boards feel different for everyone.

[wanto]

do you have a preference wanto

yeah, all single doubles generally speaking but:

smaller wave boards are more single with slighter double starting between fins.

good wave boards have more double but overall less concave in the tail area if that makes sense.

infact, (shameless plug) simon a just does it right, i don't even bother discussing it with him any more.

[wanto]

not sure if that question was directed at me, but i never rode v's. i'm a bit young!

[moreorless]

Interesting read Nick.

Don't know how this fits in with the chronology of the concave, but I remember when I was a grommet learning to surf at Harbord in the very early 1970s there was a crew of older guys there riding very heavily concaved single-fins.

Haven't a clue who was shaping them, but these boards were very distinctive. They had a really deep concave running right the way through, deep enough anyway for a know-nothing grommet to notice. The guys riding them were the local rippers. They seemed to handle these boards pretty well.

[Gasherbrum4]

iggy

Hold onto those Banksy's mate. I really regret selling my 7'2" Banks about 15 years ago now, fantastic board, pretty much flat to rolled V through to the tail but beautiful to ride especially in heavy, hollow waves.

Whilst the V is slower compared to the concave, as it doesn't generate speed, it controls speed very well. Old blokes like control

[Hano]

Double can slow the board a bit, however a well shaped double should not make too much difference.

That’s the problem ive got with my latest experiment. I harassed for a deeper double through the fin entry in the hope it would generate a little more pivotal zap, but I think it has probably created a little more drag. i hope the new set of glass fins will help to bring back a little zing.


great read Mr Carroll, i like the sound of Mike Caldwell's fins