Appreciate all the photos and comments - it’s a good subject for the curious like myself. Never really followed the media version or any version of surf history, and only truly became interested in surfboard design in any depth once I started making my own.
barry - when you say hull-ish, what specific design features are you talking about?
I have a couple boards I really like riding, and I feel that they owe something to the “hull” shape, although they are not really hulls at all.
One is a square tail longboard with pinched rails, not pinched a lot, not knifey, but pinched to thin them out, the rails roll up starting about 3" from the edge. The rails on this board are soft all the way around, even in the tail.
The other is a kind of a mini-glider, 8’4" rounded pintail, with much more pinched rails, not knifey, but like the small end of an egg, and a real belly or roll in the bottom of the nose, not unlike Huie’s picture of the yellow hull, just not that extreme. The rails in the tail of this one are hard down, like most boards today. Both boards are single fins, and have V out the tail.
The mini glider with the pinched rails, really holds in the wave face when it speeds up, I attribute that to the convex created by rolling the rails up - not exactly a round belly, but definitely a convex bottom. Not sure how the belly in the nose affects the ride, but the board is a surprisingly good noserider in trim, kinda the opposite of what I expected, since a lot of noseriders use a concave up front.
So, while the true “hull” still seems like an acquired taste, it seems there are useful design features that come from the hull.
