testing testing 1,2,3......

I've just stolen Gordon from Wavedreamer's pictures of the aforementioned Will from Gulfstream testing the first stock SeaPea. This is Will's take on it:


As you know I have been given the responsibility of testing our new board, the Sea Pea. Mainly im testing this one to see if it surfs how we want it to, and most importantly like its Father, Chris Preston's aka CP, Sea Pea.

I knew of a few subtle differences before surfing it. There was slightly less rocker, and i felt it had a slightly straighter rail line. It looks fantastic and was praying that it surfed as well as the original one.

The first session was in horrendous 2ft woolacombe. Strong NW winds had been blowing all day saturday and it wasn't til 5 oclock that i mustered up the stoke to get in. Gordon from Wavedreamer came along with his camera to document the event.

To give you an idea of how bad the surf was, there was only 2 other people actually attempting to surf, both of which were on shortboards and were having no luck at all. To say this board made me smile is an understatement. It didn't even have many good long faces to open up its turbos but good golly did it surf well. There is few boards that accelerate and trim quite like this board did in conditions like this. The whole experience of surfing this type of board is rad.

I also surfed it early Sunday morning in super clean 1-2ft. It was really weak and gutless but the Sea Pea served its purpose yet again. While a few keen loggers where in trim and getting nice nose rides, the Sea Pea was flying across little walls and making me wonder why i haven't owned a board like this for the last 5 years. Dam you CP.

Testing boards in good waves is no real test, most board will go well in 3 ft glass, but very few will go well in 2 foot absolute wind blown rubbish. This board is one of those few. It finds speed from the flattest wall, and drives through forever searching for the next section. You can beat sections that wouldn't dream of making on your standard thruster. It caught waves very well too, being flat and floaty gives you plenty of paddle speed. Once up, a few moments after, a subtle pump and I was going mach 10.

I will say a few constructive criticisms of it though;

- friends wont want to surf with you anymore as you get too many waves

- your hair will end up long

- you'll grow a moustache

- words like 'rad' will and 'stoke' become normal day to day words

If you can deal with the above then come and get one! See below for a few little snaps of it in action. More updates to come when i have had a few more surfs on it...

There are more of Will's thoughts and pictures of the orange SeaPea here.

Whatever your choice of trousers, corduroy lines never go out of fashion!!

So the other day, i lent my new little mini simmons, the SeaPea to my friend Will. To set the scene, Will is a shortboarder, he's actually a very very good shortboarder in a conventional pointy white thruster sense. He finds logs boring, doesn't like fish and thinks eggs are best confined to breakfast!

I think he wanted to try a sim partly becasue he's seen mine take shape and partly out of curiosity. I'm pretty sure he really just wanted to confirm that they were odd dysfunctional hipster shapes ridden by me and my beardy pals!

He rode it a couple of times, in onshore lumpy 3 foot croyde and in clean lined up 1-2 feet croyde. I'm just going to paste some of his texts to me here

"Oh my god, just surfed it at croyde, that was SO fun!!!!!!"
"It's by no means a shortboard but it went amazingly well in average waves and created speed from nothing!! I need one in my board rack!"

Whats pretty cool about this and the reason i've posted it, is that Will could see the fun in this shape despite coming at it from an entirely different direction and surfing reference points. It blew his preconceptions out of the water and in his words "made a very average day a lot of fun!"

 It's nice to know that someone with much greater small board ability than me, see's the validity in the design for our waves.

More about my board here Jools will make you one here

it lives......

 

The Sea Pea is finally finished and in my grubby mitts! Massive thanks to Jools, Matt, Ellis and Will at Gulfstream for your time and patience! 

I know you are all dying to know how it surfs. 

It's great! Really 'effin great!!

 I can honestly say that if i had bought it off  the rack i would have been really happy so to know that i designed and made it pushes the stoke-o-meter off the scale!

First session was mid to high p-land, 3 footish sets, really just windswell cleaned up by the southerly blowing cross offshore. I've ridden quite a few different iterations of the mini simmons and this one is definately a good one!

 It paddles great, despite being 5'2. There's quite a lot of foam in there and i think we struck a good balance between float and duck divability. There's a hair more rocker than some versions of this shape, something we borrowed from the bing version and that really seems to work when you're up and surfing and yet isn't enough to affect wave catching or "mush busting"

It's fast, really fast and skatey and responsvie, section racing and feeling lively under foot like it will react to every little pressure change from your feet. The bottom has a pretty subtle roll up front and that transitions quickly a single concave that deepens through the fins.

 There's not much of a hull feel here, more jet powered fishy. That translates into whippy cutbacks and a board that is really happy to go backside with no real nursing required, something that can be the downfall of mini-sim style boards.

Personal bias aside, i honestly think we've come up with a great shape. Like i've said before, these style of boards go great in the UK but up til now getting hold of one was difficult. Well now you can get one that you know will work great and you know it will be lovingly shaped and beautifully hand finished by Jools and co at one of the best factories in this country.

 The 5'2 x 21 5/8 x 2.5 Gulfstream sea pea in full flow, available now...... disco fingers not included!

Big thanks to Tom for the company and the picture!!

shelf life

The gulfstream factory's store of sanding disks and rather randomly, odd wetsuit boots!
 If you've never spent any time in a surfboard factory, it's difficult to explain just how dusty they are. Even ten minutes inside and the fine white powder finds it's way everywhere. There's something magic about the smell of resin and possibilities, the thousands of wave based adventures lying as potential within the stack of blanks, waiting to be unlocked by skilled shapers eye and hands and skilled surfers feet.

hanging in Matts man cave....

Big thanks this week to Matt, the gulfstream glasser for patiently helping me glass my mini simmons. Once again, it's not as easy as it looks, especially when there are multiple tints involved. I don't think i messed it up too badly and it is starting to actually look like a proper board! ( " Literally" eh matt?!)

 Fin wise i think we are going with 7 1/2 inch base glass on keels. More of a keel fish shape than a half moon so similar to those on the bar of soap and the bing mini sim but not as long in the base as the TW soap ones.

Hopefully it's going to be finished for my trip to France in a couple of weeks time!!

Small glassy logging is the order of the day today, the only question is which spot to haul my heavy single fin to!

planing

Jools hard at work in his shaping cave.

It's hard to explain just how difficult it is to cut a decent shape with a planer (for a newbie like me anyway) The foam is so fragile and the planer so aggressive that the tiniest change in angle or speed is reflected by creating a bumo or worse still a gouge....

The best comparison i can make would be trying to carve sonmething out of florists oasis with a dremel tool! Steady hands and a good eye are the bare minimum.

Hope everyone got some fun fathers day waves over the weekend. There certainly were a lot of people in the water. In the end a bit of patience was rewarded with a slightly smaller but quieter session. I rode my pointy squire log which hasn't been in the water for a while. It's pretty different to a proper log and a nice alternative to a three fin longboard in bigger waves. Despite having the wide point back of center, the roll in the bottom and the flexy fin give it an almost hully feel to the bottom turn. Especially if you get low and crank it over. There's a nice pivoty drive to it's cutbacks and the 17 nose really makes you work for your tip time. It's an unusual but satisfying board to surf.

Monday was a beautifully fun logging wave, small glassy and perfect for the if6was9 log i've been favoring recently. Boots off too!

The rain may be back today but it's my birthday and i'm going surfing!!!!

the sea pea

 

So i finally managed to get over to Gulfstream to finish shaping my first board under Jools watchful eye. It's come out really well and i am super stoked. It's not a straight copy of the Bing i borrowed although it does use that as a reference point. It also takes some influence from the TW bar of soap i own. Theres not much rocker, with a subtle bellied entry into a single concave from about a third back that deepens as it goes off through the fins. The rails are very soft 50/50, almost an up rail in the nose, quickly blending into a shortboard style rail with a nice edge to the back third. It looks "right" and hopefully will surf right too! Next up is glassing!

 

I want to say a massive thank you to Jools at Gulfstream for his patience in teaching me and correcting my cock ups before they got too bad. There's no way it would look like such a nice shape if i had been left to my own devices! 

I'd like to think that he enjoyed it  as much as i did, it's the first time he's shaped anything like this so there was a certain amount of head scratching and designing to get it to blend together well. Hopefully this is going to be the first prototype for a proper Gulfstream Mini simmons model! You heard it here first!

Obligatory cheesy shot..........hand shaping (well) is hard and my appreciation of it as a skill is even greater than it was!!

dust busting....

 

So i already had a pretty large amount of respect for skilled shapers but my level of admiration for people like Jools has increased yet again after my morning "shaping"

 

Notice i'm using inverted comma's since if i had been left to my own devices i'm not sure things would have turned out quite so well as they are going to and that is mostly due to Jools patience in walking me through in baby steps and stepping in to smooth out the bumps before my hamfistedness did too much damage!

 

Something that i hadn't fully grasped is how fragile the foam is when you are wielding the planer. It's incredibly easy to slip or lose concentration and cause a dent or bump. It's also difficult to keep an eye on the overall shape as you concentrate on each area in turn. So far it's been fascinating, fun and seeing the blank take shape is really exciting.

 

It's a 5'2 mini simmons. We took some measurements from the Bing mini sim i borrowed but thats now gone back so this isn't an exact copy. We measured out the points on the blank and then templated it using curves from Jools archive of shapes. What is really interesting is the combination of curves. It's got the nose from a log, the tail of a 6'8 squash tail shortboard and the curve that joins them comes from the template of a 7'6 mini mal. Bottom shape is belly to flat to a decent single concave and we are going to keep the rails pretty foiled as per the bing and the bar of soap i have.

 

Only half way so far and i'm going back to finish it off soon.......

 

 

freshly mown..

A freshly shaped 10 foot Gulfstream saunton foil model, waiting on the racks while the foam dust settles.

I only make it over there every so often but it's always a pleasure to hang out with Jools at the gulfstream factory for an hour or so. He's always stoked on the latest batch of boards coming through and really cares about offering a proper handmade custom manufacturing service.

capsule quiver

I, like many people in recent times, am lucky enough to have a reasonable quiver of boards racked up in the shed, covering long, short and several different schools of design thought. Some are bigger favorties than others and there is a gentle cycling through of boards over the years as my tastes, thought processes and surfing evolve. I dont get to travel far to surf and riding different boards at the same few places keeps things fresh but still local in a way exploring new places does for those lucky enough to be time rich and responsibility light.

So i've usually got a couple of boards in the van and i chop and change them bsed on the forecast and my mood. When i do get to travel is when the difficult choices arise. With the usual luxury of a shape for every eventuality, picking one or two boards for a trip can be a difficult process, fraught with insecurities about making the wrong selection. A fortunate dilemma to have obviously!

Over the years i've come to the conclusion that the photo shows my perfect "capsule quiver". I reckon i can have fun in pretty much anything i'm prepared to paddle out in with a skinnyish fish and a single fin log in the bag. Much as i love the mini simmons i've been riding over the last yearor two, their super flat and foamy nature don't give me as much confidence holding in (or squeezing under) bigger faster waves elsewhere. The GS twinnie above (which is heavily influenced by the christenson school of fish shaping) is slight enough to cope with decent size (for me anyway) bowly waves and still flat and fast enough to be fun in punchy small surf.

As for having a log with you, sure they are a pain to travel by air with but if there are small reeling point breaks (or even small clean beach break) on the agenda then a single fin is a must. My current personal taste being for something a little less bulky and more foiled / narrower than i'd ride at saunton.

do as i say....

One of my favorite ever tees, now back in stock at gulfstream

swell times

Stolen from the guardian website (which i never frequent you understand!) a nice little piece that gives a flavour of surfing around here with little cheese and genuine respect for the subject. Worth wasting five minutes on.

hobie split

There are a lot of beautifully maintained hot rods and busses around california, a lot of occasions when i wasn't quick enough with a camera as they drove past. This beautiful splitty resides outside the main hobie store in Dana Point most of the time though so it's an easy target.

This weeks essential reading is "uncle Skello's what's hot and what's not" published every thursday on the Gulfstream blog. Everything you need to know to chart your way through the sartorial and cultural minefield that is staying cool,

Remember, support your local otter..... shaper, sorry!

a fishy business

quiet peaks.......

far from the madding crowd.


Braving the wind and dodging flying surfboards i put my new fish through it's paces. At 5'6 x 20.5 x 2.5 ish it has less foam than anything i've had before, little enough to have given a few worries that i'd gone too small. My fears were unfounded though. It still paddles well and is so responsive and loose it feels like an extension of my feet, coming really square off the bottom and whipping through cutbacks with ease.

It's also the best fish i've ridden on my backhand. The decreased length really lets you feel like your weight is fully engaged on the rail on your bottom turn and it sticks less off the top too. Safe to say i'm looking forward to putting her through her paces in depth over the summer.

oh yeah, it's a gulfstream!

on the racks...

Perhaps i'm biased but i don't think anyone is making surfboards in the UK that are any better shaped or finished than Gulfstream. Maybe there are a couple of people that are comparable, but sadly i don't think there ar man people even trying to match the care and craftsmanship that most US logging labels strive for.

That said, i  have an order in with Squire, the label run by John Isaac and made by Seabase. Given John's eye for detail i'm sure it will live up to expectation.

catch of the day

 

The polish on this so shiny and so flat, there's no distortion to the reflection on it at all. Jools nails another class bit of kit. Jonesing to take it for a test drive now!

tools of the trade

the man responsible......

 

Jool's Matthews, owner and shaper at Gulfstream surfboards in  North Devon, the man who was voted best fish shaper in the UK last year.

Jool's just shaped me a frankly lush looking 5'6 x 20 1/2 x 2 3/8 keel fish, it's not quite done yet but pictures and ride report to follow when it's actually in my grubby mitts! Gulfstream is a small operation in the true sense of surfboard manufacture as a cottage industry, but their shapes, finishing and attention to detail is excellent. Each board is a labour of love and craftsmanship and Jools really cares about delivering something he can be proud of. They're a great example of how ordering a custom spec handmade board can be a fantastic experience.

you know it makes sense