Funboards

This weekend I surfed a spot I've never surfed before, and never seen anyone surf. The wave isn't all that great, and it's only a little more effort than normal to get to, but for whatever reason it seems to get neglected. Perhaps I surfed it "as good as it gets" this weekend and have a skewed view of it's quality. Anyway...

It breaks in front of a rock shelf that sticks out from the cliff and blocks beach walkers from going any further. I had convinced a friend to join me for small waves and lefts at a reef near dawn on Sunday morning. Saturday night I got word that the waves were bigger than expected and confirmed with a double check of the buoys. Yup. Not a big swell, just also not small like I expected.

We looked around a little bit in the area of the coast I've been taking a closer look at recently. Scott's reef looked surprisingly bad. Surfable, but nothing even as good as the not so good I've been getting. We looked around a little bit and decided to try the other reef I surfed last week. It didn't look good, but I thought maybe it would get better as the tide dropped. We were walking our way over to it and JB kept stopping to look at waves along the walk. I told him I couldn't join him in sand barrels because I can't duck dive the Tree Hugger well enough. He opted to stick with me wherever I went and we walked on until we came to the rock. There were waves at this rock that could be surfed, especially with the mid-length boards we had. We decided to surf here and then continue on as the tide dropped and the other spot got better. As it turned out, we were having so much fun we spent three hours there. The wave was steep at the take off but mellowed a bit after making the drop. Some lined up but most had short shoulders. Most went left by we managed a handful of rights to mix things up. As long as I didn't try to ride too far to the beach, the paddle back out was pretty easy and getting caught by a wave usually wasn't a problem, just stay out of the pit. We didn't have a name for the spot, and I thought "Funboards" was a good name. We were on funboards (see more below) and the wave wasn't great for shortboards because it was rather soft. Also, I think fewer people will be curious about how to find a spot named "funboards" than if we named it something like "Supertubes" or "The Ranch" or "Secret Spot."

Okay, I'm going to riff on funboards. In the last few years the surf industry has been marketing the "mid-length" board. First, in the Transition Era of surfing in the very late 1960's and 1970's surfers were riding shorter and shorter boards. As a group these boards that were shorter than everything that came before were named "Transition boards." Aspects of longboard shapes were being removed/replaced by new designs. The change over saw significant design overlap making for some funky shapes when conflicting design aspects were combined. But it also led to the shapes we all ride today.

I learned to surf at the beginning of the Longboard Revolution of the 1990s and to me the mid-length was always the range between what I could duck-dive and what had good paddling speed, the 7'6" to 8'6" range. I hate than range because, without a wide open channel, I would just get washed around by waves all day. At that time there was also a style of surfboards which were oversized shortboards and were called "funboards" or "hybrids." Pedantic people (like me) would tell you the funboards had design elements that made them easy to ride for beginners while hybrids were high volume shortboards made for aging surfers with skill. There's also the style called the semi-gun which is for steep large waves in the 10-15 foot range where more paddle speed is needed, but narrow outline is also needed.

These last few years (the 20-teens) what the industry marketers are calling mid-length is somewhere in the range the Transition era boards with wide outlines and flat rockers mixed with harder rails and shorter lengths. One obvious difference with the modern mid-length is the use of multiple fin boxes. Now the boards can be ridden single-fin style or multi-fin style, with up to 5 boxes like the TreeHugger.

But this weekend I rode JBs Lost Smooth Operator. Its multi-boxes and 6'10" like the TH, but much thinner and closer to a shortboard in design. It had less paddle speed, but I caught waves just fine on it. Steep drops felt better because the board fell away from me like a shortboard instead of hanging up like a longboard. I even did a  hard cutback on it into a mild version of a roundhouse (without hitting any whitewater). I surprised myself because I didn't think I had it in me. In contrast the TH lags on such a turn and I've gotten caught-up on the lip and pitched, or the turn was slower and couldn't be wrapped around so more speed was lost. JBs board was setup as a thruster with a 4.5" center fin while mine had a 6.5" center fin. This alone could be the difference in the way the boards feel. So the TH rides more like an egg or a funboard while the Smooth rides more like a hybrid, or just a big-boy shortboard. Their website says the board has flatter rocker, so I'll call it a hybrid.

That's not to say I have any interest in giving up the TH. I bought it for what it is: a great fit between longboard and shortboard with the benefit of the center fin box. I have only dabbled into the myriad fins I have on hand to try on the TH. Maybe I should even bring a bag of fins down to the sand and swap them mid-session. So much playing around to be done!