Come celebrate the 20th anniversary of the ultimate shredder classic!
Where do the years hide? I hardly have a conception of what happened yesterday, consider myself ageless and probably immortal and yet, inexplicably, time doesn’t stand still.
Can you believe it’s been twenty years since the release of 5’5″ x 19 1/4″ and the subsequent arrival of the wide-forward-point-pulled-in-tail quasi fish? When Andy and Wardo and Cory Lopez more than proved the value of such a thing?
I got my first version in 1999 when I lived in France and it was a very happy accident.
A friend had told me about the fine day-time discos just across the border in Spain and suggested we roll a visit to Pukas surfboards into a drink and a dance or perhaps even two.
At Pukas, I saw an odd looking thing from the American company Lost. It had a Drew Brophy Pipeline spray on its deck and was different to anything I’d seen before: wide up front, very seventies matched with a tight little swallow. I rode it with three fins but couldn’t get it even one note above bass. A better surfer suggested it’d hit falsetto if I switched to two big side fins. I did and I was jubilant. I mean, wow. It blew my life out.
I still have that board.
This year, as a sort of anniversary gift (to us and his company’s bottom line) Biolos has updated the second version of the Round Nose Fish, and released the Round Nose Fish Redux. It mixes a lot of the mid-nineties version with the updated RNF released ten years later. The rocker, bottom contours and forward outline come from the original. The tail ain’t as tight as the original but ain’t as wide as the second version.
Do they still work? Yeah, I think so, and not just ’cause Biolos just threw a RND Redux ad at me.
Here’s a fresh batch of Ian Crane waves on it a week ago. You tell me. Fun or no?
And here’s Biolos and his biz partner Mike Reola talking into What Youth’s tape recorder.