Come watch Torren Martyn sneak off for furtive encounters.
Riding blunt-nosed, wide-tailed, twin-keeled surfboards is hardly a novelty, at least anymore.
What began as a kneeboard by San Diego shaper Steve Lis in 1967 was rebirthed in the nineties via Matt Biolos’ five-five round-nose-fish and Tommy Peterson’s Fireball Fish and refashioned over the last ten years into the pretty straight-railed, gloss-coated twins you see anywhere there’s a point or weak runners.
Now, the thing with these sorta boards is they give the beginner a palpable sense of ability where there is none. For the intermediate surfer they create a stance problem where the rider gradually moves forward to overcome the looseness of the wide tail and fin. Both levels are ruined on their backhand.
The good surfer, however, a performer like Torren Martyn from Byron Bay on Australia’s north coast, is able to manipulate the surfboard to perform even when it should, in theory, spin out.
In this four-minute short we see the six-foot-two Martyn riding a Simon Jones-shaped surfboard that is almost a full-foot shorter – and easily negotiating backside tubes.
“If you’ve got a big ol’ fin and a nice rail line on the side of the face, it’s going to work, right? You can push them pretty hard,” Torren told Surfer.
