RB shaped me this hi-performance Baby Noserider recently, and I’ve finally had a chance to get some time on it. This board rocks! It’s 6’11" x 20" x 3"… round nose, and modern thruster tail with extreme rocker and super boxy rails. Dick shaped this from a Walker blank that he flipped around so the “nose” of the blank became the tail of my board.
If you’ve read some of my previous posts, you may know that I like a lot of tail rocker. This takes that to the extreme. This board is really squirrelly and doesn’t want to track in straight lines much. When it comes to turning though… holy crap! So far, I’ve only had this out on shoulder-high mushburgers, but when the waves get a bit juicier, I know I’ll be carving 360s regularly again.
Dick says he made a board like this for a kid at Al Mo. When Aipa saw the board, he said “what’s that?”… the kid said “you’ll see”… then he paddled out and did figure 8s all the way to the beach.
Hey Balsa… I’m not sure what blank it was exactly because the whole thing happened so fast. Dick just grabbed a blank off a rack of Walkers and started hacking away. I think it started out at around 8’??? The first thing he did was chop a chunk off each end… then he just went to town. He said he was making it short and thick… like me;-) Aside from the heavy-duty tail rocker, the rest is pretty flat. It almost looks like you took an eight-foot big-boy thruster, broke the nose off, sanded it round, then re-glassed it.
It’s not the prettiest board I’ve ever seen, but I love the way it rides. This is my new “go to” board.
Here’s the rack it came from… in fact it was in the rack when this photo was taken:
