Random possibly flawed findings/thoughts in GLIDE, SPEED, and FREEDOM for turns/wave makeage

Its just personal theory that explains to me how my second spoon had an increase in drive even though it is lighter than my first (because in addition to being lighter it is waaay less buoyant), and how a mat gets even faster when you run less and less air, and its extremely light anyway.

its also kind of a comparison to the current acceptance that in surfboards:

lighter is quicker and more responsive, while heavier has more glide and top end but is slow to accelerate/deccelerate

This is true but seems to have come from the status quo of surfing buoyant boards standup.

With a neutrally buoyant craft it’s a strange compromise; you can make it extremely light with good feel (and good response WHEN UP TO SPEED) but with no float it is relatively heavy to the water and seems to have limitless potential in speed from fall line downdrives. Of course the painful compromise then exists of no leg leverage torque and difficulty/impossibilty of vertical lineage.

The thought/theory seems to a bit more deeply explore not only the relationship between you and your board, but your board and the wave as well

It also has a lot to do with styles of surfing as well - lighter standup boards require more manipulation/gyration to generate speed (mostly off of a fin cluster) (skateboard tic-tacs, efficient vertical potential pivots) while heavier glass jobs work better to generate drawn out arc speed off of the rail (a la twins with no toe or single fins) through FALL LINE surfing or a pre-meditated timing and hesitation at the high line before dropping to use that heavier weight for speed gain through gravity down drives down the face.

If you watch the best surfers (Greenough, Curren, Slater) they understand the synthesis of using the highline (the wave) and their own torque (through the board) to achieve speed for freedom in turns/wave makeage.

Of course the BEST surfers such as Curren or Greenough are able to do this with what appears as minimum driver input gyration for the most grace/glass love while surfing, whilst speeding air surf punk rockers are able to pump like maniacs fast yes but look like crazed apes ignorant of hesitation, patience and the smooth highline rail engagement mostly charged up and motivated to perform tricks for the masses to applaud/gawk at as in a circus freakshow, resulting in a corrupt and spiritually detrimental excess reward of money sex and drugs the 3 being easily interchangable.

A simpler explanation/thought would be you would have to glass the hell out of a standard buoyant board (making it 80 pounds?!? I dunno!) to get it to sit in the water while still the same as a 6.5 lb spoon…but try to maneuver/direct a 80 lb board as opposed to a 6.5 lb one…

By the way f anyone who seeks/accepts an excess of money or fame through surfing/surfcraft as the former are unfulfilling and damaging to us all, whilst the pure form of the latter are fulfilling and healing to us all.

Love,

How would you surf alone

sheesh! you should have been surfing in the seventies with us. You would have fit right in! I hear you talking…

I love surfing alone, fall line or torque turn.

Quote:

whilst speeding air surf punk rockers are able to pump like maniacs fast yes but look like crazed apes ignorant of hesitation, patience and the smooth highline rail engagement mostly charged up and motivated to perform tricks for the masses to applaud/gawk at as in a circus freakshow, resulting in a corrupt and spiritually detrimental excess reward of money sex and drugs the 3 being easily interchangable.

that made me laugh

I callem WAVEHUMPERS

sought of like a dog that humps peoples legs eh

lol

Paul

Howzit?!? The most pure solution, I believe, is to shape whatever sort of surfcraft, to fit the wave. Aloha…RH

Ahm, yeah… you’re on to something, or several things here, which have a lot in common with my own observations. Let me tinker with just a few:

Weight and buoyancy vs float and such…

While accelleration and such have something to do with the weight of a board, I think it’s more complicated than that. A heavier board-rider combination is gonna have more intertia, true, but what overtakes that is just what powers the board. Gravity. The slope of the wave and gravity are gonna be what makes it go, so weight kinda drops out of the equation.

Something else to consider, and this has an important spinoff for all surf vehicles; you’ll note I said the weight of the board-rider combination. It’s not just the board, 'cos that accelleration is accelleration of board and rider. The inertia of both ( and gravity’s effect on both) come into play, not justthe weight of the board alone. Consider 170 lbs of me and 7 lbs of board. 177 lbs. Double the weight of the board, the weight of the board-rider unit goes up to 184 lbs - a change of around 4% . I’ll come back to this…

Buoyancy - me, I think a little is nice. After all, if your board sinks, that is something of a problem. But enough buoyancy so the board ( or mat, or what have you ) floats itself and returns to the surface in a reasonable amount of time, that’s all you need. Your takeoffs may well be pushed into the steepest part of the wave every time ( though there’s ways around that ) but I don’t consider that a detriment…just the opposite.

But flexibility…that’s important. Consider that a vehicle that can conform to the shape of the wave will have much, much less drag than one that doesn’t. It’ll accellerate better, turn better, be faster, 'cos it’s got less drag ( and the same power available).

Glide - lets define that as the ability to maintain speed on the flat or nearly flat part of the wave, where you couldn’t take off for instance. Weight is gonna have something to do with it, yes, momentum comes into play, but I think the flexibility is more of a detriment here unless it’s properly tuned. Also important is the area of the planing surface - all wave riding vehicles are planing hulls - the more weight per unit area, the faster it has to go to plane on the surface of the water. A large, relatively stiff planing surface ( given that it’s a reasonably flat surface) is gonna glide better than a smaller surface, even one that is identical but scaled down, given identical weights of board-rider combination.

And on that note, I gotta get to work, but I’ll be back

doc…