Hello Roy
It feels good to have finally run into an aristocrat of surfing, a welcome relief from nothing but blind, deaf and dum herding around such egregious activity. I appreciate your courage to question and distill the spirit of surfing and understand it as the source of your work. "What is essential to surfing?" is a question you, no doubt, ask yourself constantly. Flight, maximum speed, an aspiration to perfect efficiency and unity with the energy of the wave is what your work tells me you're after, and that, to resucitate from defilement an important word so ruthlessly raped and rendered meaningless by the surfing world, is radical--that is: pertaining to the root.
Your boards are beautiful because they are true organic works. And organic here means, as you well know, that an object's purpose, apearance, structure, material, method of construction, performance and even symbollic potential are tightly woven into a cohesive but infinitely flexible whole, conceived after great analytical and synthetic effort of the imagination in an attemp to create, however modestly a man is able to, as nature does.
I've learned a great deal from your blog and the interesting links you've included in it (the Hummingbird one is fantastic) and enjoyed its clarity and conceptual cohesion. It was long overdue, for example, to hear someone talk about rocker for the first time in the concrete, systematic way you do, dealing with rates of curvature and defining it as circular, elliptical, or conforming to a segment of a foil section, making its apex always coincide with the template's widest point. I think the approach of your boards is, as far as I'm able to understand it, very elegant. The use of foil sections for templates, having considerable area with significant rocker forward, creating an optimum configuration to get up and planing as soon as possible, and a narrow tail for maximum control and rail to rail ease that works mostly in displacement, and whose limited displacement lift is suplemented by the much more efficiently generated lift from your fins is a brilliant balance of the best of many worlds: the tunnel as slave foil, at the same angle of attack as the bottom, lifting smoothly as needed without resisting roll and thus not affecting rail to rail movement; the deep elliptical fins generating upward lift as soon as they're not perpendicular to the horizon--which is most of the time the board is in the wave... It's so nourishing to see your true dynamic, three dimensional understanding of the elements involved in wave riding, as oposed to the usual resorting to convenient abstractions a la "wider tail/less rocker is always faster" that ring so much like fundamentalist praying and show no understanding of wave dynamics. I thought, for example, that your analysis of the so called "Maverick's suction zone" was absolutely surgical; it baffles me how hard it is for surfers to understand things as basic as the fact that a canted fin has "horizontal fin area" which will generate upward lift, the fact that one can never go straight in a wave (except, as you have recently pointed out in one of your entries, if one travels in a direction perpendicular to the wall of the wave), or that the faster rockers and templates will be the ones that conform more closely to the wave's curve.
I think your construction method definitely approaches, as you say, haiku depth, once you've assumed constant rail section--this is a point I still haven't adecuately grasped, but I'm working on it--and opens up amazing flexibility and resonance potential. I really enjoyed the video where one can see the different waves go through one of your boards after you hit it, and can only imagen how much life that introduces into surfing--I thought the analysis where one of your readers compared the performance of your boards to the loading and unloading through turns of giant slalom skies was rigth on target (weighting and unweighting, with arms shoulder width appart, swinging forward is, by the way, an exact description of my movement when pumping the airborne hydrofoil), and found the footage you made with an onboard camera showing the constant dance of subtle pressure and position adjustments of you feet during the ride very interesting, as well as the forward facing position. It's so superior, isn't it?, if you're interested in flight and being one with the wave. I've quickly been drawn to it by the hydrofoil. There are many things in your work that intrigue me and I don't understand well, like that incredible "Bullet" tow board with a totally parallel outline and tunnel fin for Garrett McNamara, but I'm looking forward to learning more. I find "The Baron", with its tunnel/flex fin combination, fascinating, as well as "The Squidfish"--it's hard to decide, but this could very well be my personal favorite--with its subtly channeled tunnel, an object that is, in its own right, absolutely out of this world.
Regards etc
Team olosurfer past present and future !
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