ouch!

This rad looking little board is a prototype Gulfstream 4'10 asymmetric Seapea with a keel fin on the toe edge (longer rail) and a quad set up on the backhand side. It's pretty mental looking but its pretty much all Jools has been riding in junk surf over the last 6 months.

I've been meaning to borrow it for ages and had lined up a loan ahead of a sunday AM with a perfect 3 foot and clean forecast a couple of months ago. All great until I offered to show BGA and his visiting mate a little rainproof mountain bike route. To cut a long story short, I went over the bars into some rocks at pretty high speed and broke two ribs!

It's not an experience id recommend and (amazingly considering the stuff ive done) the first time ive ever broken a bone! Pain wise i think I got away lighter than some friends experience but the worst thing was being sidelined from any kind of fun stuff for a few weeks! Most frustrating of all the board went back to Jools unridden so you'll have to wait for a full ride report.

hey kook!

I had a couple of evenings home alone the other week so i indulged myself with a couple of glasses of a nice red and rewatching some old surf dvds. Notably two of my perennial faves, Thomas Campbells "Seedling" and Michael Halsbands "Surf Movie Reels 1-14". Both feature pretty heavy doses of Joel Tudor in the peak of his "ride everything" influence.

I came to a few conclusions as the bottle slowly drained. One, Tudor is a ridiculously talented surfer on pretty much anything you put under his feet. He is the master of making the difficult look easy and he is SO smooth. He's a pretty impressive skater too!

Two, lots of Tudor's single fin eggs actually have the wide point slightly back of centre instead of forward which is the more widely seen case with eggs. Tudor is quoted as saying he prefers the widepoint back for turning and doesn't like it forward unless he's getting barrelled!

Three, I haven't owned or ridden a single fin egg for ages!

Luckily, a couple of friends do have Tudor eggs and Thos very sportingly agreed to lend me his 6'6 Kookbox Archie's left (in the pics) in exchange for a few days on my Mandala.

Ideally i'd have had Saunton at head high doing its best pointbreak impression as a test track since I suspect that the board would truly light up under those conditions. That's what Thos says anyway. As it was I had to make do with a pretty mushy, onshore, chest high P-land and a clean but a bit too small dawn patrol at saunton.

I did get a good feel for how fun a board it is though! There's lots of foam in there at 21.65 wide and 2.75 thick, a little bit of nose rocker but otherwise flat as.  Widepoint I think just back of centre, flexy kookbox 8 inch fin. Small roll in the nose but quickly into a single concave that moves to a fairly deep double in the back third. Rails are soft for the first foot but then tucked under becoming a hard edge just in front of the fin. In short, it's definitely designed to turn and feel lively rather than cruisy.

It's got far less Hull influence than I expected from what I thought I knew of this model. As a result it's way less quirky to ride than a v bowls, which is ostensibly a wide point back egg too. It went backside well and in both directions had that snappy, pivoty turn that you would expect from a single fin.

I really like a flex fin in a single and you could definitely feel a nice spring from the fin as you exited a deep railed bottom turn.

What really impressed was its glide over the flat spots despite its shortish length. I think the lack of rocker and the plentiful concave in the bottom keeps it high and planing where others bog. In short its a cool little board, really easy to surf like eggs generally are, with a wide range of suitability for waves and the ability to be pushed if you want to.

Thos calls it his "guilty pleasure" and I can see why. 

Hopefully I'll manage to wangle BGA's Tudor Karma off him soon to compare.

sunny side up

Gulfstream's production skills just go from strength to strength and this little beauty is no exception!

7'10 of speed egg goodness. Flat, foiled, pulled in tail and nice performance rails. Your girlfriends mini-mal this aint!! 

I'm yet to get an A plus day in on it yet but early signs are really fun. There's a fair amount of rail line in there so it likes a bigger face to draw on. Its surprisingly loose off the tail for its length and trims super fast if you step up to the middle.

Roll on some nice head high lined up saunton summer swells!

oldschool

I spent a lot of the pre and post Christmas period driving our old VW around after the cambelt blew in my T4 (boo!) Never fails to put a smile on my face even if it doesn't have heating and has questionable brakes for muddy roads.

in an instant

The perfect small wave quiver?

I reckon a Single fin log and a small Mini simmons (9'4 and 5'2 respectively in this case) covers everything up to head high. Logging when its smaller and cleaner, mini sim for junk or dumpy wave fun and section racing on head high lined up days. Handcrafted by North Devons finest- Gulfstream surfboards

surf car no.2

Absolutely Baltic dawn patrol polaroid of Toms Volvo. Really fun session with plenty of the local logging crew out as I recall. Rad car too!

surf car number 1

Really enjoying the polaroid experience at the moment. This is Em and Andy's surf car at saunton between sessions

instant fun

Quiver summer 2016

impossible instants

 

Loving the vintage polaroid experience so far!

ceeperchunk

 

It's taken a while but i have finally managed enough sessions on the new mandala to form an opinion! I've never heard a bad review of one of Many's boards and im just going to add to the general hype about his shapes here.

Ive ridden quite a few different mini simmons over the last few years and prior to that i'd put quite a lot of time into various iterations of fish, both the classic twin keel and the double bump quad speedialler style. About a year ago i kind of rediscovered my little 5'6 Gulfstream keel fish. I think if i'm honest that it was maybe just a tiny bit too small for my shortboard abilities when i first had it and i never rode it all that much. Fast forward to last year and my general small board ability had definately ramped up a few notches. Getting back on the fish (which is very much from the performance christenson school rather than a cruisy "retro" place) suddenly opened up much more vertcal surfing and bigger roundhouse cutbacks than the seapea and other mini simmons allowed. However this new found "radicalness" (tongue firmly in cheek) came at the expense of the flat out mush/speed generation of the seapea or the TW bar of soap.

Bottom line was to start looking for something that sat between the two with more of the fish's urning ability but still the speed generation the mini simmons excel at. 

Manny would be the first to say that very little is new in board design but he does seem to have a talent for adding his own tweak to things that work very well and his family of ASQ (arc swallowtail quad) boards are no exception. Broadly speaking they are a version of the mini simmons platform with a rolled entry and flat rocker but they are narrower than the classic outline with a little more curve. They are quads and the bottom goes from belly into spiral vee instead of a single concave through the fins. The rails are more foiled than a classic simmons also.

All of this adds up to a really fun board that hits the middle ground i was looking at. It generates tonnes of speed in mush - the simmons style belly and the big concaves guaruntee that but the thinner rails and the quad set up along with a narrower curvier template yield a much more responsive board that will go more vertical and wrap through cutbacks much harder/easier than a traditional simmons shape. I think the vee and the quad fins help here too.

It was a long wait but oh so worth it!