Matt Biolos and the 10 things every surfer should
know about their pleasure craft…
Everyone rides …Lost surfboards for good
reason. The sturdy, hairy man who makes ’em (Matt
Biolos) has a connection with the average surfer (and so the
boards…forgive) but he can also cross the aisle to
the complex world of the professional surfer.
Who else you going to turn to when you want to simplify the
game?
1. Boards with a straight rocker paddle faster.
And, paddling is 50 per cent of the game. If you can’t catch waves,
you can’t surf. Even if you’re surfing two-foot windblown peaks
with three friends, you still have to compete to get waves. And,
you thought it was all about thickness, right? It’s not; it’s how
the bottom moves across the water. However…
2. Volume is your friend. You can have a really
thick board, but if you put a vee bottom, it rides neutral, whereas
a medium-thickness board with concave can ride flat like a
plank.
3.Tail shapes don’t matter as much as you
think. If the width going into the tail is the same, a
square, a squash, a diamond or a swallow is going to behave in a
similar way. Round tails and pintails decrease the rail line, so
they’re going to hold a little better and shorten a turn
radius.
4. I don’t buy into the whole back-foot/front-foot
surfer thing. We’re all surfing from the back foot. You’re
either a weak back-foot surfer or a strong back-foot surfer. You
push hard or you don’t. You’re either Taylor Knox or a flicky
little kid.
5. Look at the outline of your board. Straight
lines go fast. Curved lines turn. Simple.
6. The straighter the rocker, the further back you need
to stand and boards with a continual rocker have a bigger sweet
spot. However, and this is a big however, a drivier board
will be more forgiving in picking up speed, just less forgiving
when you need to turn.
7. Match the curve of the board to the curve of the
wave. This is for the average surfer. Everything goes out
the window for pros – they can do anything. I travel with a curvy
board and a flat board: curvy boards for the Gold Coast and for
Sydney shorebreaks. Flatter boards for mushy points or blown out
crumblers. On a planky board, it ain’t gonna work when you need to
jump to your feet and bottom turn in one quick move. And, when you
do get up, all you’re going to do is parallel floaters.
8. There’s a magic number and it’s called your cubic
volume. It’s up to us shapers to educate people, and it’s
information available, right now, on our shaping machines. Let me
explain. One of my team riders, Shea Lopez, was teasing me about
how big my boards are. We were down at Lowers, two fat cocktails in
hand, and he grabbed my board and said, “Have a fucking look at
this boat!” And, I said: “Well, I’m fat, I’m 40, but you know what,
fucker? I bet my volume-to-weight ratio is not far from your’s. I’m
30 per cent heavier and have maybe 30 per cent more volume. The
difference is, I’m a desk jockey and you’re a professional
athlete.” If we know our cubic volumes, all the other dimensions
can be left to the shaper. Instead of saying, I ride 6’1”s x 18
5/8” x 2 5/16”, you’d say, I’m a 42, make me a small-wave craft.
This does require a degree of trust in your shaper. Which leads me
to…
9. There are two types of shapers you can
trust. One is the local shaper who knows the conditions
and who probably knows how you surf. That’s a certain kind of
trust. Then there’s the trust you have for an international shaper.
You trust Al Merrick because he consistently makes great boards for
great surfers and for the global market. If you live in Santa
Barbara, where Al lives, you get local and international knowledge.
If you live on the Gold Coast, you get both: Darren Handley and
Jason Stevenson. If you live in Sydney, you get both: James Cheal
(Chilli). If you live in San Clemente, you get Timmy Patterson and
me. But, if you live in, say, Adelaide, you might have to balance
the tradeoff between local and global knowledge.
10. Balance in a surfboard is everything and
shapers walk a tightrope every time they build you a custom board.
If you want a board with a lot of rocker, your shaper has to build
everything around it to balance it out. If one element is extreme,
the rest of the board has to act as a counterbalance to neutralize
the extreme. Greg Webber was a genius on the wire. Everything is
balance.
