A high-ish performance surfboard for the working
man…
I am a husky, wrinkled old-timer with a harem of
surfboards. Stubbornly intermediate is my level and most
days I leave the surf emitting ughs of disgust at my
performance.
Do you know the feels?
You’re…almost…there.
In the right conditions, on the right board, you’ll hit a lip,
throw fins, maybe there’s an end-section foam climb to almost
revert in there or an on-the-face reverse that takes four seconds
and a frenzy of duck-paddling to ride out of.
On a bad day, you’re getting hung up in the lip, driving too far
out on the face, avoiding sections and traversing set waves with
your feet unable to get anywhere near the levers.
So I’m always looking for boards that forgive but don’t shut the
door when you hit a little form.
Four years ago, I bought a custom Lost Puddle Jumper, right when
they first came out (the harem, as we can all appreciate, is never
quite complete). It was five-six, still with all its insane width,
twenty-one inches…insane… but thinned out to hell,
two-and-a-quarter inches in the middle, two-and-an-eighth on the
rail.
For all the limitations of its width, it was a revelation of
sorts.
Y’see, the general rule of the quasi-fish, hybrid, fun board
(more ughs) is you squash the length down, stretch it out
the middle and give it the rocker of an ironing board.
Anyone can ride ’em.
They’re stable to paddle and they don’t have to be surfed in the
pocket. You can traverse an entire wave five yards from where the
action is and make deep-water sections with nothing but a smug look
on your face.
But piloting an easy-to-drive SUV down a freeway ain’t ever
going compete with the satisfaction of pushing a Formula One around
a difficult track.
The Puddle Jumper was different. It had the fat outline but it
was married to performance rocker and bottom curve. The shaper,
Californian Matt Biolos, had wanted to create what he called a
“return to surfing” board after a knee injury had him landlocked
for three months.
“I needed width as well as floatation,” says Biolos, “But I
still wanted to turn.”
An easy-to-ride board that got its stable platform from the wide
outline.
Like all boards, if you take something, in this case stability
through width, you gotta lose something. Which meant the thing will
give a little of that hi-fi feel but on the stable platform of the
(again, ugh, ugh, ugh) fun board.
In a technical sense, “the centreline ( stringer ) rocker is
pretty flat, we just fooled the curve by creating a hyper extended
rail rocker, which counters the low, flat, over all rocker and
allows much tighter arcs, when rolling over onto the rail,” says
Biolos. “When simply trimming or pumping , it feels like a typical,
down-the-line, fish or Simmons-esque plank. But on a rail, it
really comes to life.”
A year after I got that thinned-out custom, I was in Bali with
Biolos and we got into the CAD program AkuShaper. I wanted a
pulled-in version of the Puddle Jumper. Less nose, less tail and I
wanted to lose a few pounds off the girth (board and owner).
“That was the early adjustments leading to the Puddle Jumper
High Performance,” says Biolos. “Reduce the nose area in the
forward third and pull in the tail block in the last few
inches.”
Lately, I’ve been on a PJ-HP and the diff between the original
and the HP is marked. It ain’t gonna baby you quite so much but it
ain’t gonna buck you off either. For the stubbornly intermediate
surfer who might go backwards even ten surfs or land one air in
every twenty, and who is missing a few too many sections on the
original, it’s a pleasing improvement.
“The entry is flat enough that all but the most rudimentary of
surfers can still get it up and going immediately, although it’s
much quicker. The pulled-in nose reduces swing weight and
gives the feeling of a set back wide point,” says Biolos. “Combined
with the pulled-in tail block, it creates the hip effect between
and under the rear foot. This allows aggressive small-wave wraps
while still maintaining drive, without any shuffling of the
feet.”
I’m 175, five-eleven (six-one in heels) and the five-seven, all
thirty-one litres of it, treated me pretty good. I blew a fin box
(board came with those damn fragile FCS II things) soon after it
landed but it’ll be, upon repair, the board I loose in everything
up to four feet.
To be transparent, I wanted this thing when it came out and
promised this review in exchange for the free board.
If you’re better than intermediate, you’ll dig the speed but may
find the limitations of the width and rocker in anything other than
two-foot waves frustrating.
For me, and for you, I’m guessing, it’s a peach.
Buy, examine, the PJ-HP
here.
