I must say I am humbled by the amount of interest being shown in one of my very old designs, the wide tailed single fin I called the “Lazor Zap”.
The original template which was mutilated into the “modern short board”, designed by ignorance at the highest level, manipulated into existence by B grade surf journalists and clothing company executives promoting self interest just for the sake of making money.
No knowledge, no skill, no soul, just selfish greed and ego.
It is for these reasons surfboard design in a practical sense has been held back for the past 30 plus years, these low grade self serving flea bags have controlled it all.
With the weakening of the world economy, these controllers of surfing are loosing their hold as they become more affected by the financial situation that will inevitably take them out of the market and with them their non productive power.
This is already paving the way for a much broader thinking in recreational surfing.
Although most retro designs are not great performers, they brought back volume and area which is a great advantage to the less skilful surfers as it now allows them to paddle and catch waves and go left or right, which they could not do on their previous equipment, the modern short board with its slender low volume hard to surf approach.
It is with these awareness’s that surfers on all levels are seeing and understanding the true value of the well designed high volume surfboards that I have been designing and shaping for many years. Now with the internet they are once again enjoying unpolluted exposure which allows people to at least look and ask and realise that it is all only common sense.
There is no holding them back, it is extremely important with the single fin design especially to get the right concepts and contours flowing together to obtain maximum control and performance.
To reach the point where I am now at I have worked my way through a diverse range of contours before realising that the simpler and smoother, I blended the features the higher the performance and control levels were obtained from the object.
I have proven the less reaction from the object the smoother the ride and control for the single fin design.
Once you put reaction into the design, it then has to be controlled as well as being utilised, this makes it harder to surf overall.
It is quite simple, the more features you add the more reaction you introduce until there is a need to add more fins to counteract the reactions which you have introduced.
Another important aspect is that there is a cut off point in terms of tail width as the fins become further apart they start to work independently to each other causing delayed response to the surfer’s commands.
The single fin design improves its all round performance by widening and thickening the tail area as it gives the object resistance as it provides more buoyancy and support and a whole range of advantages such as instant acceleration , quick easy turning, more stability and easy wave catching and much faster overall, in fact the single fins wide thick tail will out perform all other fin configurations and designs in an extremely wide range of wave sizes and conditions with the correct contours and balance.
I can confidently say it is absolutely critical that the right amount of each design feature be right for its purpose as the slightest changes can have a major effect on performance.
Single fin design is more pure with only one stabiliser (fin) it allows the natural flow of water to have less interference on the bottom contours giving a smoother cleaner more flowing performance that multi fin designs cannot achieve because of the design features used.
What shapers at large have to realise is my designs have been extremely refined over years of understanding the thick wide tail designs performance; that is why they are so subtle to look at. The performance, consistent with the design which is soft and absorbing to the energy, it receives through the design, it is not a hard opposing energy design that repels water that other shaper’s persist in using regardless of how hard they are to surf properly.
I have to laugh to myself when I read how someone is using one of my design concepts and how in complete ignorance to true performance they state how they have added their completely foreign design qualities and improved on something they do not even understand and how by adding these features, they improve its performance without ever riding a real one, the poor deluded fools!
I say just because you can see it, does not mean you know what you are looking at and this certainly applies to my designs which are simple to look at, but in reality extremely complex.
Once you understand how energy operates and how pure it is, unaffected by man, then designing the object to ride on it becomes clearer and how best to make them function passively and easier to control without compromising, actually adding over all performance has to be a great advantage to the surfer.
Yes it defiantly brings a smile to my dial knowing, I alone now have some answers, the way I see it the people that disagree with my practical common sense functional approach to design simply expose their true ignorance, it is true the louder the voice the greater the ignorance !!
Shapers have to realise that you cannot just copy the plan shape and “rip off” my model names such as Lazor Zap, Nugget, Astron Zot and think they know all about what my designs are all about; when the realty is they have no clue that is why they take a design concept and destroy the purity of the design that makes it function, so well this leaves me to say if you want the real deal, then get a REAL MCCOY as I can guarantee they will always out perform an imitation.
