There is an old Hindu story where the pupil comes to the teacher and asks, Sir what is life”?

The teacher without hesitation replies, ”Life is a never ending chain of experiences”.

Satisfied with the answer the pupil turns to leave.

“Wait”, says the teacher. “Don’t you want to know what the purpose of life is”?

“Yes master”, says the pupil.

The teacher looks him in the eye and says, “The purpose of life is to profit one’s self from those experiences”!

The year was 1971 and Geoff McCoy made a Chisel Tail Twin Fin in an inspiration filled night after seeing a picture of one in an American surf mag.

Within weeks they were on the cover of Surfing world and hailed as the best thing since sliced bread..

A whole lot of shaping dust has been washed under the bridge since that inspired night and ideas of what worked re Surfboards and what didn’t had to stand the test of fashion and to that mark the Chisel Tail Twin Fin didn’t cut the mustard and fell away like yesterday’s headlines.

There were many reasons, valid and not so valid, as to why that happened, but back then the days were moving fast and changes were a plenty as ideas were thrown wildly at a slab of foam and we were all looking ahead for the next new thing…. the question is why? Why throw something away rather than develop it?

So let’s go back to our teacher and his pupil and that brilliant last line, “The purpose of life is to profit one’s self from those experience”….

Since 1971 Geoff McCoy has had a lot of shaping experience and my surfing life is currently profiting from that experience on a design which was discarded 40 years ago, the Chisel Tail Twin Fin; which has now been redesigned and rejuvenated.

Last Xmas I was struggling to enjoy my Surfing. After near 50 years of doing next to nothing else but going Surfing the routine of what I was doing on a wave was becoming at best boring, at worst fuckin’ boring till I went to visit the one and only Tim Martin at Lennox Head…. Tim had a Geoff McCoy latest redesigned Chisel Tail Twin Fin … one of only two that Geoff had made for Tim to ride as he missed out on the design all those years ago. The important thing for me and my Surfing was, Tim had them and that means I had access to one of them, a 6’4” 21 ¼ 3”…

My Surfing life changed from that moment on.

After surfing Tim’s Twinny for a couple of days I rocked up on Geoff’s door step charged like a grommet and saying to him that he had to make me two, a 6’4 and a gun chisel tail Twinny… the gun being a feat I’m not sure was even tried back in the day… and that brings me to the story of my two Chisel Tail’s.

I’ve just got back from a trip to Cactus and had the best time, the best Surfing I’ve had for many a year and the reason was my Twinnies.

Experience is everything in life. It adds tone. It adds reason. It adds appreciation. It becomes knowledge.

My new Twinnies, though owing their inspiration to the year 1971 have the benefit of Geoff McCoy’s forty plus years of Surfboard Designing and Shaping in them, and that offers a new dimension to their performance and more importantly to the way these two Boards react to water, to the wave and the energy that it is the wave.

Gone is the uncontrollable Twinny slide off a steep bottom turn. Gone is the inability to ride in a barrel. Gone is the pearling on take off. Gone is the drifting of the tail when the last thing you want the Board to do is drift. And gone are most any other bugs you think the Chisel Tail Twinny had or might have had . And why?
Because profiting from experience Geoff was able to introduce many of the Design Features that he has learned over his many years of Dedicated Research and Development in his ongoing quest of Design Knowledge. I now have a Board that is not built on flats, down rails, hard edges, and V’s; but is soft, round, curved, domed, subtle and therefore offering a New Dimension in Performance.

These new 2015 Chisel Tail Twin Fin’s don’t reject the water by pushing at it as governed by the physics of the hard and flat design theories of 1971…  they accept the water because their physics are soft and subtle and the result I found is Pure Fun, Great Surfing and a new way to draw lines on the wave face

The explanation as to why is simple really…  experience.

Design Through Development.