I was surfing dredging pits(head high to a foot overhead hard offshores) on the east coast the other day. I was riding a 5 10 kinda wide nose, pulled tail, flat rockered thruster and was getting barrelled silly, my friend(who makes all my boards) and others were riding more standard looking boards and were getting hung up in the lip and passed by. The board I was on was great until I hit the open face and tried to turn(mega stiff). I was just wondering if anybody uses a specialty shape for super hollow beach break or if the standard thruster is the board of choice. My "normal" board is a 5 11 wide tailed quad which wouldn't have gone too good
Word man, you are in my realm. So I have ridden these conditions quite a bit and the board you are riding is definitely perfect for the tube, I really want to shape one myself but I run into the dilemma of what am I going to do once I get out of the pit. My current 6’2" step up it rides the barrel really well is and is anything but stiff. You could easily lop the top 4 inches and make it a 5’10" for the last second drops into the barrel. I didn’t shape it so I am not positive as to what makes it so much looser than any step up I have ever ridden but I can give you a guess. The rails are really thin and the tail though narrow pulls into a thumb tail. Bottom is concave nearly the whole length but but has the minorest of doubles between the fins. I have never measured the tail rocker but I think it is fairly high. In short my suggestion would be to add a little more tail rocker and possibly add a little more surface area in the last little bit of the board.