Why we are living in the golden era of surfboard design

The twinny just showed up. It’s a sleek, swallow-tailed ride with rainbow-coloured rims and eye-catching flyers. An object of vintage-inspired beauty with a few modern tune-ups. Built for speed and guaranteed to fly over the next flat section, obliterating the burdens of middle age the moment I put it through a turn. Well, I like to think so anyway…  

Main photo: Torren Martyn with his twinnies.    

This one’s a hand-shaped custom job, but that doesn’t mean I’m averse to buying machine pop outs off the rack – how could you be? Wandering into a well-stocked surf shop these days is like being a kid in the candy store. Who doesn’t enjoy roaming the fibreglass aisles, contemplating the possibilities, mind-surfing every model – stroking rails. Rows of boards that all suggest a slightly different kind of feel. That’s before you even get into construction materials. Perhaps the real secret to enjoying the panoply of crafts available is letting go of the attachment to the idea of, “Does this one go better or worse?” and embracing the fact that they all offer something different – a unique sensation and a new way to experience a wave.   

What a modern quiver could look like

 

It’s also the one facet of surfing where you really have an advantage over the WSL pros. A narrow, judging criteria combined with the pressure to win means the top pros can’t afford to spend too much time experimenting with radically different designs. While you can contemplate adding a channel bottom single fin, a log and a double-flyer twinny to your act, their room for movement is more like, “Let’s take 1/16 off the width and move the wide point half an inch further forward. The beauty is that you can still do the micro-refinements with a custom shaper and get the twinny too if you want.

 

Can you spot the difference in Taj's quiver?

Did I mention I’ve got a 5’9” custom coming with a commissioned spray job of the silver surfer, my favourite cartoon character. Plenty of good artists and air-brushers out there who need little more than a poska to pimp your ride.  Just hope my tax return gets through on time…      

Artist, Louis Gervais can pimp your ride.

Sure, a certain cash-flow is required if you want to indulge in your foam fantasies but on a relative scale surfboards offer a pretty good return on investment. For between 600 and 1200 dollars, a stick can offer countless hours of fun. Once the investment is made, the surfer with a dream quiver craves little more than some time to ride his or her finned treasures. Next time you are about to make a major purchase do the arithmetic and ask what the expenditure will buy you in surfboards. It’s hard to justify spending money on a new sports car to cure the mid-life crisis when you consider the kind of board collection you can create with half the amount?

The surfboard has also probably become the closest thing in the world to a genuine time machine. You can tap into any era of the past you like with high quality recreations and interpretations of classic models and designs. Keep a few boards in the back of the car or share with mates and you can do the full history tour in a day. The truth is there has never really been a better time in history to be a board buyer.  It’s just a matter of opening the mind a little and remembering the real competition is trying to make today’s surf more fun than yesterday’s.