Surfboard weight: the eternal question, and Beware the Force of Gravity !

There's a time worn process taking place on Swaylocks regarding the question of weight  



 http://www.grainsurf.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=3170&p=22420#p22420



http://www2.swaylocks.com/forums/hws-deck-bracing-question-and-compsand-update?page=1

So, what's the truth of the matter ?



The truth is that surfboards have a lot in common with BOMBS.. . . the kind which fall from on high.



Lightweight bombs just don't do the job as well as heavy ones !

Ultralight is better for the extreme trick surfing which is the flagship for the entire mainstream surfing industry so there's a lot invested in the idea that lighter is always better. This investment has been made over a period of half a century so the attitudes are ingrained. 



 Materials cost money so ultimately the industry has little to gain by promoting heavier boards. The official line is that lighter boards are better except for big wave guns, but the truth of the matter is that greater weight used sensibly  has many advantages which apply to waves of all sizes.



 I regularly roast the tail feathers of  legions of shortboard and malibu heroes on boards  two to ten times the weight which they use, and the added mass is definitely a factor in that success. . .  of course I don't do scoreable moves and prefer to make my turns as smooth and invisible as possible for hydrodynamic efficiency and the flow of both the surfboard and the rider's concentration, but at the end of the day that's what usually wins in the real world.



 Beware of the Swaylocks BS, it's roughly equivalent to the propaganda put out by our governments, and has about the same truth content  !



 Rip tear and lacerate or slide dream and meditate ?  The former likes lightweight, the latter heavyweight, the heavy weight  is often underestimated .





 By the way beware also of the  line that weight is a handicap but heavier boards are ok for less skilled surfers in slow waves. Nothing could be further from the truth, heavier boards are faster or at least as fast down the line as light boards in both theory  and practice, and require as much skill to handle correctly as do light boards.



To really wind 'them' up, take the word 'GRAVITY' light the fuse, and toss it into the pit at swayp*x . . . they'll froth at the mouth and you'll hear more BS in one week than one usually hears in a year. . . it's great fun !

Surfing speed in big and small waves

I have often been asked how it is that we have recorded speeds of over 35 mph and up to 37mph on relativey small ( e.g.. head high) low period beachbreak , when tow in surfers on waves up to ten times bigger only achieve speeds in the mid 40'sIt seems strange at first as a 60 foot wave has ( all else being equal ) about 100 times the power of a 6 foot wave. Surely a surfer on a 60 foot wave should be able to go 3700mph if a surfer on a 6 foot wave can do 37mph?The answer of course is that they can't. A surfer on a 60 foot wave only travels about 1.5 times a s fast as a surferat peak speed on a 6 foot wave ( approximately that is ) .Why is this ?One reason is that drag increases by the square as speed increases ( approximately anyway ) so increses in power do not get a proportionally high increase in speed. This only partially explains the small increase in speed with large increases in powerA second reason is that waves of low power allow a more efficient energy transfer into horizontal motion than high powered waves. With high powered waves the glide path has to be more vertical in order to overcome the lifting power of the wave, thus a lot of the lifting power of the wave is wasted. The reason for this is that the rider only has a fixed amount of acceleration due to gravity available . . . the acceleration and force due to gravity do not increase proportionally as the power of the wave does. . . if it did the rider would go a lot faster on bigger waves than they do.