this has been floating around the web for a day or two and figured some will get stoked here if they haven’t seen it.
besides all of it, highlights include burch racing barrels on the “lord board” piece of foam and how hynd seems like he has no tendons or ligaments. he’s so rubbery and flowy!
if you can’t sit through the whole 45 minutes, scrub over to 28-minutes for the last segment
thanks very much !
hynd also had tom carroll with him , as well as the richard tognetti guy from the abc orchestra in that north west footage.
as well as on ‘kelp island’ , in another dvd …
I have a couple of friends who fixate on trivial details of surfboard design. I like to point them towards the Ryan Burch ‘slab’ video.
This video with Derek Hynd is the best yet. There is literally TONS of innate skill in those 2 guys! Super entertaining to watch.
it said , in ‘a deeper shade of blue’ , that it took derek a year of riding finless boards at j-bay and other breaks , to get the hang of it. The stuff he does NOW is pretty incredible , in my books !
… he always HAS been a free thinker though …
thats great - I almost missed this because I thought it was the old footage I’ve seen so many times, but so cool to see a left this time, and new footage, those guys are awesome! Finless looks fun, but difficult.
**Excellent. **
Guys have been standing on Morey boogie boards pretty much since they first showed up. The Lord board is just a slightly larger version. Although it’s an interesting change to finned boards, riding a finned board in those waves would have been quite a bit of fun and the control you would have would let you do a lot more.
Kinda like watching guys paddling in to giant waves. The tow guys finally found a way to really surf those giant waves and they have to sit on the beach watching perfect giant waves go unridden and many waves only get the end section ridden due to the limitations of paddling into a wave.
Every type of water craft has it’s benefits and limitations. The oldest living surfers once rode finless boards, but they moved to finned boards for a good reason.
i think that’s why they’re so fun to watch. burch on the foam square, hynd rough sanding some weird channel/fin thing out the back of his truck and they both shred. their experimental nature and the celebration of failures that go with the experimentation really inspire me.
some people geek out on the details of craftsmanship of a perfect pinline on a traditional shape and that’s awesome and just as tough to master as finless surfing. i just get stoked to see someone go 200mph spinning down the line on a foam square.
I dunno. They looked like they were having quite a bit of fun as it was. And while a finned board could have done different things, I’m not sure it could have done more.
Truer, fins were added for a reason, but that doesn’t cancel out the validity of the finless experience or of exploring finless designs.
I think it’s a myth that progress is defined by a timeline, I think it can move in numerous or even infinite directions at any given time.
I tend to agree with shark country, but nonetheless it’s a fun vid. It was good they showed some of the awkward moments and wipeouts caused by lack of fins - sort of a “full disclosure” thing.
I did myself a finless about 25 years ago with a “Lord-type” outline. There’s pics of it on here somewhere. It was a blast to mess around with but I got tired of blowing perfectly good waves.
The guy on the mat went faster than anybody, so my vote for finless would be some kind of prone vehicle. I started surfing on mats when I was about 5 yrs old and will probably end up on one if I live long enough to lose the ability to stand up. Or just bodysurf.
Mats, paipos, boogies are all a lot of fun to ride. I have mats, and boogies, and I rode paipos way back when. Have you ever surfed with a row boat, canoe, a plastic garbage bag filled with air? I have, and it’s all a lot of fun. Mats are a great travelling companion, and it doesn’t take much wave size to be in overhead surf. The heavy duty plastic garbage bag is cool too. You can swim out with it empty then grab a bag full of air and catch a wave, then let the air out and do it over again. Just twist the end and hang on long enough to ride the wave.
I don’t believe finless surfboards are taking surfing forward, more like sideways. Look at Tom Wegener, he took a sideways track to learn all he could about finless boards and then went back to a finned shortboard. That’s where it all makes sense, when you take lessons learned from the past technologies and move forward.
For many of us, this side track using old designs and ideas are about personally seeing the benefits ot shortcomings of ideas from the past because we weren’t around back then, or we forgot. Mix that with the fact that what works or doesn’t work for one person may be totally different, and we really have to try things for ourselves to say yes or no to what makes a really good board. Heck, my brother and are about 180 degrees apart in what we think is a good board, but every now and then we’ll agree on that one board that we both like.
I think that’s why I love Swaylocks, I can learn about things that others are doing so very far away from what happens where I live, and I can learn more than what a magazine or press release will have in it.
This video proves once again that good surfers on great waves can ride any old piece of crap. Really jealous of the waves in this video. Clearly I live in the wrong part of this planet.
That makes sense…if they are riding the same “old designs” of the past. But if they’re experimenting with new and original designs, then good on them for contributing to a progression of understanding, and wrestling with possibilities that haven’t been explored. And if they discover something that works for them, on a personal level, or takes them to a new level, then their own personal progress has benefitted. There’s nothing new under the sun, so of course its always easy to dismiss something different as “old news”.
“any old piece of crap”?
Heavy duty plastic garbage bag? How heavy duty? Gotta see some video of this…or maybe we’ll make one. Sounds like a total blast!