The ionic design by San Clemente's Commie-hating soccer-mom lookalike Matt Biolos, the 5'5" round nose fish!
I loved the Lost fish with its aggression and its warmth and its volatility when I first tasted its meat in 1999.
Matt Biolos’ board, the round-nose-fish, was different from the prevailing wisdom of the time, even among the early fishes. The 5’5″, as ridden by Chris Ward and Cory Lopez, turned a generation on to the idea that a performance board could be kinda kooky looking, a pointed nose but with a forward wide point and all wrapped up with a regular pulled-in 14″ tail (and radically thin at 2 1/16″). It’s a combination that, even now, some shapers don’t get, sending devils out on those thick and straight-railed cruise ships with 20″ tails.
“Before the RNF, I was that shaper guy who paints rad stuff and makes surf party vids,” Matt Biolos told me. “It afforded me the opportunity to get good surfers on my boards without them really needing to risk using them in contests. It bought me time as a designer to learn to get better. It made it possible for me to travel the world as a shaper. Once the design hit, I was immediately getting calls from around the world to come shape. Europe, South Africa, Australia, it all happened after the RNF.”
Of course, once you ride one you can never get off ‘em such is the addiction of easy speed, glide, turning, its ability to masquerade a lifetime of bad habits while developing new ones that’ll keep you off regular boards forever.
In episode four of Lost’s six-part video series that documents the controversial design, once described as an “evil clown that kills children” watch Kolohe Andino, Michael Rodrigues, Coco Ho, Kirra Pink and Luke Davis along with the CT tour’s late bloomer Yago Dora “carving, twisting, slipping sliding, spinning, driving, gouging and gliding-around sunny summer time California.”