Ok, chippy has been prodding me to post my thoughts, so here they are!
First, even though I brought four boards to mexico with me, I rode my bonzer stubbie almost exclusively. It worked for me in everything from knee-high slop to overhead beach-break death-bombs. It was fast, snappy, got in early, stayed in late, ran out on the shoulder, pulled in deep, stalled for shackage, pumped for speed. Two thumbs way up. WAY up! The only problem I ran into was occasionally pearling on late drops. The good news is that the epoxy held up like a champ when I ran it into the sand. I have a short vid of a crappy wave in Ticla (that was as long as my photog-chick would focus), but it does show how it squirts out of a turn. I haven’t figured out where I can host it for free, so if anyone has a tip there…
Now, for the fat penguin…
I was actually pleasantly surprised. I only really took it out at Ticla, and it seemed to work pretty well in the time I was riding it. I also loaned it out to a couple of my much more experienced friends, and they also seemed to like it… With some interesting limitations. The main comment they all seemed to have was that as soon as it gets some speed moving down the wave, the tail seems to lift up out of the water and get really loose. When riding the open wave face, they all agreed that it was very loose, responsive and quick (in a quad-fin setup). It also got into waves very early, which is always nice. The only comlaint that was expressed (by 3 out of 4 riders) was that it didn’t want to get into a “real” bottom turn. If you took off and dropped in already moving down the face of the wave, it was fine. If you dropped straight in, and turned square off the bottom right back into the face, it was fine. If you dropped straight in and tried to lay it down into a deep, gouging, carving bottom turn, it would slide out pretty much every time. The fins were holding just fine, but the front foot was sliding out. This is probably due to my omission of the small (2x1.5") canard fins that were prescribed on the original design to be placed outside of the concave under the front foot. I do think it is worthy of more investigation, but I also ran into another problem… Major delam. Like really bad, really ugly, really extensive delaminations. Damn home depot foam!!! It probably had something to do with an early, inadequately dried out leak, but you can bet clark foam/epoxy wouldn’t have blown apart like that.
So… now I’m kind of up in the air as to wheather I should make another one… Waddaya think?
Stubbie:
my “best friend” dropping in on me:
My home break in jalisco:
