I am often asked why my designs do not have a lot of hard edges. There was a time when all my designs had hard edges, it was a long time ago, before awareness came into my designing life, putting an edge under a rail makes it not only difficult to surf, it limits many performance aspects of surfing as the board itself becomes disfunctional, not capable of performing on many parts of the wave.
A surfboard rail needs to be a combination of soft and hard to obtain balance and control through the range of manoeuvres and wave shapes and sizes. I have proven over the years that this formula is by far the best. There are many myths or lack of knowledge experts that will disagree with this, they are simply wrong and need to study function a while longer. The realty of function is that soft holds water and hard releases it. So how does it work in practice.
I found by softening the entry and planing area, it allowed the board to run high on the wall of the wave, it also reduces catch and bogging of the forward rail area, all this because the rail is more open on the bottom allowing it to have greater holding abilities on the more critical parts of the wave (steeper, hollower) giving easier control to the surfer. Where I do use a hard edge on my designs, which is around the fin areas, it is to release the water flow quickly in an area of the surfboard which requires the water flow to be released quickly. This “release” occurs quickly simply because hard edge cannot hold water as they have no area that will hold water flow. It’s a hard edge. On my designs I vary the positioning of the hard edge depending on how many fins the board has.
All my multi fin designs, the hard edge starts level with the front edge of the side fins, because multi fin boards have more hold, it is necessary to release the water flow as quickly and efficiently as possible. The single fin design has a much softer rail with a hard edge release starting at the back of the base of the fin. By keeping the bottom rail more open it assists the single fin hold the board in the most critical parts of the wave and that is what my design are about giving the surfer greater control of their surfboard. These are some of the reasons why my designs are the way they are and function so well in the water.
