Art on a Wall

If Lalo can stick to walls like that, I'm in for a mighty nice treat! Check PCProgress for more photos and LALO blog for later coverage. Next gen hulling is my cup o tea. Stay tuned....

FIN

Picked up a 9.5 Liddle flex by Fibreglass Fin Co. down at Shelter Surf Shop in Long Beach. I've been looking for a dark red flex fin for Lalo and I was delighted when the young lady at Shelter said they had one. She was quite knowledgeable too and knew the difference between Siline and Volan fins. Great shop, great boards in there. Never saw a Stamps hull before.
The fin was a wide base so I had to do some foiling to get it where I wanted it. After a few collisions with low tide rock monsters and the subsequent re-foiling, The red fin will be a perfect 8.75 in no time! The key to foiling a fin is paying attention to the layer lines as you sand, obviously I need a little more practice and better tooling to get my lines straight. Greg Griffin is a maestro at this...

Lalo of Sutho

The day began early as I headed North to meet with Ryan Lovelace in Santa Barbara. I arrived at 8AM and stopped at a local cafe called Red's.

The breakfast burritos are delicious there and the Chai latte washed it all down nicely. Ryan showed up as I was finishing and we talked about his past few epic days of SB surf heaven and that there might be some more left later that day.
I followed him a short ways to his new shop to pick up a blank that Lalo would soon be. There was a beautiful Timberline quad fish there as well as another Timberline board he was building for some guy named Wingnut. Down a gravel path we drove with the foam embryo to his top secret shaping complex in a boat yard. It couldn't be any more fitting. I like this vibe. We spent some time talking about the design for Lalo, going over size and contour placement on the AKU program. After a lengthy discussion about water flow on plane and on rail, in turns and trim, he started cutting the outline and mowing the foam to reveal my Lalo. One great thing was that he would stop to go over the design points with me because every curve and contour had a purpose, and the feeling of total immersion was present. I liken it to jamming with other musicians; the composition was delightful and moving.



I relished the dust on my body and the feel of a freshly shaped board as my hands ran along the rails, deck and belly. Ryan was blowing dusty snot rockets out of his nose. It was finished, and no curve or contour was left unchecked. He even put some extra tricks in there that I was very happy with. Of course I cannot wait to see Lalo in her new red dress.

Bite Cam Test 1

I built a little contraption to hold a Pentax W60 with my teeth in hope of gaining some mobility. From the looks of it, I need to make some adjustments, get a wide angle lens or tilt my head waaaaay up. New style perhaps?


Bite Cam Blip from Vyusher La Kali on Vimeo.

Ponderings

Planing. Hybrids. Natural progression. Evolution. Long ago, in our own surfing history we rode logs with their own refined attributes to surf the wave a certain way. Surfing was in a somewhat pure state as that was the way anyone would conceive to surf a wave. There were no purists to really speak of who battled the industry and mainstream we now face and feed off of (in some capacity). No purists until change came in the form of shorter boards, plane shapes, fins and contours. It seems to me that one of the last purist bastions lies in the hull community. It seems to me that people are recognizing this in the surf community. Some poke lightly at huller's OCD qualities but this does speak volumes of what I'm talking about. Has the time come to take another step? Is it already here? Has it been happening this whole time? A period of time must pass before new things arise. A reason for this is the required understanding of the current environment. While this time period passes, it seems things are dormant but actually things are gaining momentum. I can see this 'purist effect'; one that holds on to the old and provides a base from which to launch from. For instance, other 'communities' have made considerable advances in application. Much in the way competitive auto racing serves the consumer sector to use market automobiles in a more efficient and pleasing way, surfing has done the same with big wave surfing; it's generally accepted now that smaller fins work better on larger waves. Before, large fins for large waves was the call. The 'purist effect'. When I began researching hulls, I found that the present design had a length around 7', a pronounced belly forward, bladed 50/50 rails and a large and flexible fin. They require a different approach to surfing than any other board design in existence. However, the world has become very small, or big depending on how you look at it. Surfers are taking hull designs to waves they weren't likened to and surfers are changing the designs to accommodate this. Enter the Sub 7 hull. Perhaps the smaller hull designs didn't take off in the past simply because most surfers were still in a longboard world, no one had ever surfed the wave or conceived surfing the wave as we see it today. When surfers witnessed the footage of George Greenough, the building momentum of understanding was released. Can you see where I'm taking this? I see things coming together. Shorter Tri-plane hulls with modern mixtures of contours enabling the hull design to be taken other places on the wave, again rooted from Greenough's designs. This all an effect of our higher understanding of what actually is going on with the water and the board's interaction with it. Classic hulls will never be robbed of their prestige. That prestige is quite infectious and it's what I believe is responsible for the new steps that are being taken with sub 7 hull designs. Research for yourself, try a paddle fin in your tiny hull, experiment with the possibilities to take you away from the mainstream and find yourself on a frontier; experiencing the true bliss of what all surfer's hearts beat for.