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.

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

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!