I inhereited a “mini-longboard” last year ( 6’6 with a real wide nose, squash tail with a thruster set up) that I thought looked kinda fun and it has sort of evolved into my daily driver. I can catch just about anything and although the performance of it is slightly less than optimal in terms of respsonsiveness overall I like it very much.
So… I am out the other day at my local reef on a low tide and its wedging up head high and I am hucking myself over the ledge pretty late feeling pretty proud I have stuck every drop and this seasoned local i know says to me. You are droping in with more that half of your back foot hanging off the inside rail of the board and says something about how wide the nose of my board is…
I noticed i was doing it on every late drop from that point on.
I normally would not care but since I had just ordered a very simalar custom board I am wondering if there is something I should adjust in the outline so I can stay more centered on my back foot before he starts mowing away at the foam.
I’m no expert, but there are lots of talented and helpful posters here. But we have no picture of the board, no description of the fins or the bottom or the rails, no pictures or video of you dropping in, of the waves at your local spot, or even any mention if its backside or frontside, so its kinda hard to say what’s going on exactly. Like Reverb says, the shaper has the board in front of him, we don’t.
Sounds like your buddy was trying to point out a connection between your stance and the width of your board’s nose. But hey, it seems to work for you so that’s good, you say you were sticking the drops and that’s not always easy. At any rate, rather than trying to tweak your favorite shape to affect your stance, I would recommend you try surfing a variety of different sizes and shapes (Craigslist is your friend).
This will allow you to find design elements that work well for your circumstances, and also give you a better awareness of how best to surf different shapes. You may find V in the tail helps you lay the board on rail at takeoff without hanging your foot off the edge, or maybe a thinner rail, or different tail or fin configuration. And eventually you’ll end up with a quiver of different shapes and preferences for different conditions.
Here’s a very poor lit garage and terrible cell phone camera pic of the board. The glare was terrible on the belly of the board so at least on this one you can kinda see the outline.
I am confident my shaper will nail it as he has on all my other boards but I guess what I was looking for and unaware was the idea of the Vee that you and Barry both mentioned. I just read up on that a bit and i think that this board was probably not designed with the idea of needing a lot of hold in fast waves. I guess my foot was some sub concious way of stabilizing myself but i was tripping out cause I have never done that before to my knowledge.
and yes craigslist is my friend as you can see from a few of my gems in the background .
