A few weeks back JZ took me to go look at a mid-length single fin pintail. I thought the $700 price tag was too high, even for a new board, but the visit stirred an interest in a style of board I hadn't given much thought to before. A long time ago I got washed around trying to ride an 8' egg at various surf spots. I couldn't duck dive it, I couldn't outrun the waves to the channel, and so I was a sitting duck getting repeatedly beat down by waves. I decided that mid-length boards were for suckers.
Since then I've ridden smaller mid-length egg like boards in more appropriate conditions. Down around 7'6" I can start duck diving a board but still can glide into waves early. At 6' most of that glide is gone but a certain maneuverability is available. A wide, hulled bottom gives more glide, flow, rail hold and smoother or easier turns. Hulls are better in non-barreling waves. Downturned rails and narrow tails allow control in steep sections and more abrupt direction changes but at the cost of difficulty controlling the board. Still, down rails and narrow tails are better in hollow waves. Single-finned boards don't handle late drops as easily as multi-finned boards, and so early entry is key.
All these facts/impressions I've recently gathered in my head and tried to figure out what board I would want next. Part of the problem is that I have so many boards that there isn't a gap to be filled, more like a nook or cranny. So do I want a hull that's a longer version of the GeeBee or do I want a beefier version of the Buttons? Looking at pictures of surfboards I'm drawn to the pointed spears that work well in perfect large hollow surf. The kind of conditions that are so rare that it would be unlikely that I'd find those conditions AND have the board close by. But I'm still going to surf OB, so I need to be able to handle difficult conditions if I ever expect to bring it to the beach. Where does that leave me?
Something in the 7'2" range, +/- 4". Something like a double-ender but less egg shaped and more drawn. Some examples:
7'2" Liddle Death
7'8" Christianson Flat Tracker
7'0" Andreini Vaquero
And I could go on for hours just based on the Mollusk website. Many shapers have some version of a basic beginner's egg and most also have some "tuned up" version as well. I know I want a tuned up version, but is that a knife railed hull or a narrow tailed hard railed? There's many examples on shapers websites, but there are very few on craigslist at the moment. And that's what I should be doing, looking for a cheap way to explore this range of shapes.
The fact is that even though I have some money in my surfboard account, I don't yet know how to spend it.
