I usually watch and listen and hopefully learn here, but am jumping in because I’ve boogied for over 20 years. If you want to attain anything approaching speed on a 43 inch piece of foam you can’t drag your feet. I have also surfed finless on boogies on many occasions in shorebreak and hollow waves without loss of control. Positioning on the board is critical - all your weight is on about five inches of rail - check the pic dale posted above.
Most boogie boarders are about arial maneuvers - this in my opinion has stunted the designs - to go fast and carve and get barrelled, more than doing tricks and airs, might have pushed designs in a different direction - hard paipos and kneeboards, and mats, can attain more speed. Who knows what the ultimate prone craft should be, but I suspect it is not a 43 inch long piece of laminated polypro and suryln - but I have yet to tire of mine!
“I would also bet you’d be digging the rail if you tried to crank a hard turn. Would the rails be like this the length of the board? Or would they soften to the nose?”
A surfboard drives from fins, is bigger and has vastly different flex characteristics - to see some designs that bridge the gap, look at the custom blackball beaters fro turbo surf hawai
As Dale said, manufacturing processes dictate how mass-produced boogie board rails are designed. I have custom boards with concave 50/50 rail at the rear, combined with a channel, changing to 50/50 in the middle and then on to rounded in the front portion - much more effective rail design than the industry standard, but a lot harder to produce, it requires a craftsman designing and building a board for an individual, and that is surely something all swaylockians can relate to…
Your argument if refuted easily by the fact that when you ride without fins, you are draggin your thighs, calves, and feet thru the water to give you directional control.
Proven by the fact that if you go for a 360, you consciously lift your legs OUT of the water, so you can initiate a rail dig, and the tail just spins around.
The pics don’t prove anything, too much water turbulence, then the other pics were of mats, which is NOT applicable to body boards.
Look in your bodyboard magazines! Everyone drags or skims the water with their legs and fins.
EVERY drop knee guy has his inside fin draggin behind the board.
Just going off my own experience, not thoughts. You are correct, to an extent, and incorrect, to an extent. To spin you shift your weight forward, take the weight off the rail to disengage it and spin, lifting your legs higher helps with the spin - of course your legs/fins DO contact the water, and are used to rudder or to stall, but to maximise trim speed they are out, or barely touching, - otherwise you would bog and stall. I’ve also seen footage of people standing up on them, carving using only the rail, dragging nothing, and also disengaging the rail and doing stand-up spinners, all of which have implications for the design discussion which I thought was what started this thread.
I used to ride bodyboards alot before I took up surfing. When I used to ride prone, I found that the best way to get “grip” on a wave was to set my fins onto the wave’s face. and I was pretty sure that my fins were holding me in place because when I took my fins off the wave i could do a 360 spin.
But when the blackball’s out on Newport beach, I use my body board as a surfboard and I stand up on it. I can say that the bodyboard on standup is definitely looser. to the point that I slip out doing bottom turns or just that it doesn’t turn as tight as a I would think a “finned” body board would. maybe its the wide shape of the body board, i dunno. I’ve seen guys get barreled standing up on their bodyboards so i think the rails hold up to a certain degree. I have channels on my body board if that helps. But I think the rails do give some “grip”.
Sorry, that pic could be a guy using fins on the bottom of his boogie board.
Get a Bodyboard mag and look at the DKnee guys. They all drag an inside fin! Period!
Plus, that last pic is not even a wave, it’s water rushing up a sand bank, like those artificial waves they have in Sweden and Japan, and boards for that don’t have fin, but work in their enviorment.
Just look at pics of boogie boarders in action, and you will see how truly wrong you are.
Just a general question, oh evil twin; if you were wrong, would you admit it?
To take a slightly different tack…did you see Sprout? One of the guys in India pulled the fins off a standard 6’ something thruster and grabbed a few hollow point waves (yeah they were shoulder high and not quite OB hollow). I was flat ass amazed at the high line he held, bottom turns, cutbacks and even an-off-the-lip with no slide or slip. Dale has some photos showing some Indo dude with a hat riding a square piece of plywood in a perfect trim through a nice hollow little section…no fin draggin there. I recall back at Seal Beach in the 50’s, the hottest guys at the beach were riding plywood paipos (no fins) with their arms and legs pulled out of the water in a victory arch, skimming down the line on these dredgy death walls. It can be done Lee…'cause I’ve done it.
P.S. I think a few thousand Hawaiians have done it too but most of them have been dead for a few hundred years.
But almost NO modern boogie boarder tries to ride with fins and legs dry all the time!
Airs are possible, but I can’t do them.
In theory, we should all easily surf like Kelly Slater, but NONE of us do.
If you were honest, you’d know that you’d have to search thru over 100 pics of body boarders dragging legs and fins to find ONE pic of pure rail hold.
And yes, I have ridden ElPaipos, thin ply, 40" long, narrow nose and wider wedge tail, and I ride them using my fins and legs to set direction, then lift them clear, or lighten pressure, to get top trim speed.
That doesn’t mean I ride it totally without dragging legs and fins.
The fact some surfer can ride a surfboard without fins proves nothing, except that he is extremely talented.
YOU try riding your surfboard without fins. It’ IMpossible for us mere mortals.
Your points are well taken. Maybe more than 100 pics. The kids want to see airs, inverts, grinding cutties with spray - notice a theme here - all things that slow you down - there are not many pics of people in perfect trim I’m sure, how boring to look at, but how joyous to do.
Look here, a 52 inch, skegless, surfboard. No, I couldn’t ride it either. But people do. Those rails work, they do not side-slip when there is no external “rudder” - they may not be better, but they work, and that is the interesting part.
Obviously you guys have not been to Sandy Beach on Oahu. Pretty much the center of all stand up bodyboarding, guys getting barreled, doing 720’s even off the tops and cutbacks, no fins. Tom Morrey makes these new boards that are soft foam over hard core which have similar rails to body boards. I would love to try one of the fishes but not enough to justify buying one
And what about rail thickness? Can thick “diamond” rails like on boogie boards be better for penetrating water than thick (rounded) boxy rails ? And thus an advantage for that sort of angled rail would be to keep thickness near the rail without the drawbacks of “traditionnal” rounded rails that would bounce off the face of the wave?
Skeletor, I used to live in Inverness, sorta close to PtReyes, and tried to hit as many local spots as I could, including the big left off PiercePt Road.
So the new guys at Sandy’s don’t need swim fins on their boards?
You know drop knee guys all drag their inside fin, kneel up on the outside leg.
I’d like to see the Sandy’s guys ride a big flat faced wave without fins dragging, standing up with no board fin!
If any of us ever paddle out to the surf with a skimboard, managed to somehow catch a wave, then stand up to ride it, we’d spin out trying to make some direction.
We’d spin out on the bottom turn, or at least slide sideways and loose drive and speed.
It might work when blasting out in 3" of water and ripping 180 wrap arounds, but not when you actually ride the wave from outside.
I’ve seen some freestyle motocrossers to back flips, but that doesn’t mean backflips on motocross bikes is standard fare.
I just used skimboarding as an example. My point was that you can surf a board without fins and you don’t automatically spin out. You can control it including doing a bottom turn, off the lips, and cutbacks. Check these movies if you don’t believe:
It might work when blasting out in 3" of water and ripping 180 wrap arounds, but not when you actually ride the wave from outside
So you’re saying that you don’t think that a 180 wrap is impressive board control? And are you saying that because you got on the wave from the sand, instead of from outside, that’s why it suddenly works?..Come on! It doesn’t matter how you got on the wave.
There is a lot more going on with board control than just the fins. The outline shape helps with directional control and the rails can act like fins. Thinner rails do help.
The best test is to take out your fins and just try it. But you can’t just surf it like it has fins in it or you will spin out. You have to use more of the rail.
This thread isnt abbout “diamond rails”! Its about LeeDD admitting he’s wrong! My grandpa used to say “Even tthe smmartest man on earth is dumb as a bag of hammers sometimes!”