Death threats in Hawaii over the Future Primitive 13 footer

We have heard from two reliable sources on the North Shore of Oahu that the reason why the 13 foot Hawaii Challenge board was kept hidden and out of Garrett McNamara's hands for three months was that the custodian of the board Mr Bill Ward of Haleiwa had received threats that he would be murdered if he let the board out to be surfed.

The saga continues as the board is now with friends elsewhere in Hawaii, and is having the new fin installed.




Here's a question from a reader:

'supersizedsurfer': I don't get it? A million boards a year flown over by all sorts of poeple and they wanna kill over an Olo board? Why is this?

It's a board in a million. ... . in fact it's a board in a hundred million !

She ( the board ) was getting a lot of attention, prior to the surf industry intervention there was a queue of North Shore surfers lining up to ride the board and Garrett McNamara was dialling in to ride her at 2nd reef pipeline, we had surf photographers, magazines and video guys all amped up to cover it, and it was all all over the NS that it is a really good board, which it is.

It's not an olo board in the strict sense of the word, it's a longboard gun, and in our opinion will have a good chance of winning the Eddie Aikau memorial big wave competition.

It isn't the first time that this sort of thing has happened, look at the fuss over one skinny aussie ( Wayne Bartholomew ) back in the 70's. . . and look at what they did to Tom Blake.. .. it's pretty much the way the mafia over there operate whenever something or someone great arrives from outside Hawaii, I have a fair idea of who is paying to get the dirty work done too.

Some people ruthlessly attack any threat to their total supremacy and control, and make no mistake these boards do threaten the surf industry stranglehold for several reasons: 1) The boards break long accepted design rules upon which the mana of the surf industry is based. 2) They come from New Zealand 3) They come from someone who has refused to join their cartel and is very critical of it. 4) The boards are so much better than any of their longboards that it strikes fear and despair into their hearts when confronted by them in the water

A one word explanation is JEALOUSY.

The wonderful tunnel fin: a celebration

Behold the incredible tunnel fin !

At olosurfer we have been designing, building, and surfing tunnel fins with great success since 1997.
The tunnel above has leading edge channels which create drag reducing beneficial vortices. . . there's a lot of work in those leading edge channels



Tunnel fins have the lowest drag of all possible fin shapes, and our tunnel fin equipped boards have reached speeds up to 37 mph on waves of around head high.


The inline tunnel with centrally mounted planar fin is a tried and true setup which has enormous drive and holding power, as well as being one of the the fastest systems we have tested so far.





The 'Squidfish' with a ten inch pure tunnel

Tunnels must be designed as a whole with the surfboard, only certain kinds of board can be used successfully



Here's a ten inch tunnel with stainless steel FCS tabs made for a customer in Australia






And some pictures of tunnel finned boards being ridden:

Balsa Future Primitive 12 footer

Here's the original 12 foot hollow balsa Future Primitive 12 footer speeding through the inside section on a day when the carpark was packed with dozens of surfers while only two of us enjoyed a long session of excellent but very fast waves:

Annular wing tunnel fin flow

These pictures show flow through a half pipe tunnel with a conspicuous lack of tip turbulence.

Image from http://esotec.org/hbird/index.html

Parko's 10 point ride

I call BS on it because he fell off.

Anyone who falls off should not get 10/10, in fact there's a case for saying that falling off means a failed ride where the rider has to rely on a kook cord, so should get 0/10.

The whole deal has become a frantic frenetic monotony of desperate arse waggling. . . remove the money and the leashes and it would fade away pretty quickly. . . it's so ugly to watch it's just a bogus insincere culture forced into existence by mass marketeers. . a ghastly form of prostitution really, and rigged to boot.

The surfers themselves are like robotic lost souls stamped from the same mould, trained never to pause because pausing means losing points.. . . pro surfing is like some kind of spurious graceless self mutilation or headbanging.

We don't dig it at all, it doesn't appeal.

We prefer to remain as still and calm as possible and have our surroundings move around us, rather than flinging ourselves around. The paddle out is hard work ( unless using a jetski like the pros do ) and it is nice to enjoy the gilde back in as a reward without any financially imposed necessity to perform like some kind of tortured drug addicted caged monkey.

http://www.surf.co.nz/surftv/index.asp?newsletterId=7147

Cultural Thought of the Morning ( CTM )

To the fashionable, accepted and respected mass culture members the avant garde is always irrelevant .

Of course these days the bogus mass culture machine produces kitsch imitation avante garde styles in an attempt to own everything including it's own antithesis.

Paipo of the day

An airmail paipo !



coconut oil:

Theorising the surfing avant garde

" Avant-garde represents a pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm.

The term was originally used to describe the foremost part of an army advancing into battle (also called the vanguard) and now applied to any group, particularly of artists, that considers itself innovative and ahead of the majority

Avant -garde creators have historically existed in a state of mutual antagonism towards both the public and tradition.

As pioneers, avant-gardes have shunned popularity, seeing those who are popular as producing complacent or compromised work. This is also why avant-gardists have abhorred fashion, judging it to deal in stereotypes, falsehoods and insincere sentiments. Their iconoclasm has witnessed avant-gardes taking positions against current trends

Taken together, these traits mean that avant-gardes are often estranged from society. This has taken several forms, as some creators were socially alienated. It has been common for avant-gardes to declare their opposition to the bourgeoisie in particular. Their antagonism towards accepted values and approaches has also meant that historically their audience has tended to be the intelligentsia.

Where Greenberg used the German word kitsch to describe the antithesis of avant-garde culture, members of the Frankfurt School coined the term mass culture to indicate that this bogus surfing culture is constantly being manufactured by a newly emerged surf culture industry

They also pointed out that the rise of this industry meant that artistic excellence was displaced by sales figures as a measure of worth: a wave riding tool , for example, was judged meritorious solely on whether it was a best-seller, just as music succumbed to ratings charts and the blunt commercial logic of the Gold disc.

In this way the autonomous artistic merit so dear to the vanguardist was abandoned and sales increasingly became the measure, and justification, of everything. Consumer surf culture now ruled.. . .. . . except at Olosurfer, headquarters of Monarchy of the Surfing Phillistines "

With thanks to wikipedia

The myth of the venturi effect

The nonsense is being posted thick and fast out there on the surfing forum waves.

Today we have some supposedly well respected and masterful surfboard shapers on Swaylocks design forum peddling the myth of the VENTURI effect and how it supposedly speeds the surfboard up by accelerating water between the fins . Here's the thread



The venturi fin effect as a means of surfboard thrust is a long dead concept which has been shown to be incorrect countless times, but it's still out in some kind of living dead zombie form due to the existence of certain old unreprogrammable cranium filler out there.

The news is once again: The venturi effect doesn't work with surfboard fins , as constricting the water flow slows it down, or to be more exact it accelerates it in the direction the surfboard is moving in instead of leaving it behind as undisturbed as possible this causes an increase in drag and slows the board down.

The Swaylocks gumbies who are currently mumbling on about venturi effect on one of Bill Thraikill's double fin setups are not even talking about it in the context of an enclosed flow, which makes it even more riduculous ! They are thinking that two fins parked side by side will 'accelerate' water flow through the constricted slot between the fins and speed the board up. Get the GPS units out you big talkers it might teach you something if you actually measure speed.

Nonsensical surfing terms which cause our BS meter to Redline ( continued )

Something I forgot to mention is how the excess toe in tended to hang people up on the intial steep drop in, they'd drop in looking like they were towing a bucket and just not go fast enough to get down the face, we don't see much of that now though the boards seem much faster on the drop.

We certainly know there's no 'suction zone' now, I think they broke a few BS meters with that one.

Next we could discuss about the latest BS surfing term ( following on from the BS noun 'parabolic'. . . a sadly mutated nonsense term based on a geometrical adjective ). . . . . . . which is the empty noise known as ( drum roll . .. )

. . . .. . DYNAMIC ( BS meter reading 10/10)


Anyway here's the old 'Resolute Salmon' 11-8 with a camera housing.

' Pure Surfing '

It's just being there.

It's just riding the wave.

The shark does not think "I'm being a classic stylish shark with high performance and a poetic inner being" . . . it just does, and is.

Everything else is spurious.

It's called pure surfing.

Surfboard design workshop: Tail rail convergence and how it influences nose presentation angle

We often read surfboard design articles which state that wide nosed surfboards, particularly those with low nose rocker, are prone to nose diving and/or having the nose rail 'catch '

What we don't hear about is that this is not due to nose shape but to tail shape. It is the shape of the tail which determines how the nose is presented to the water. . . and the problem is that parallel railed wide tailed boards drive the nose of the board in during turns.

The cure is to narrow the surfboard tail, thus increasing rail convergence.

Pulling the tail in means that when the board is rolled on to the rail even slightly ( which also gets easier to do with a narrower tail ) the nose is lifted out of the water. . . it actually works even better if the nose goes wider.

Here's a balsa 9'1" with an extremely pulled in tail. . . no nosediving at all even though it has only an inch of rocker:




Once you get the idea it's really obvious but it's a bit hard to explain, I'll try to do it with a diagram:



The rail convergence lifts the nose partly because it rotates the board on the axis of the rail rather than the central axis, and partly because it drives the nose forward and upwards.

With a pintailed board or any board with a drawn in tail, the rider can always avoid the nose digging in by starting a turn. . . . this lifts the nose. The rider of the wide tailed board does not have this luxury. . . attempting to turn only makes the problem worse by digging the nose rail in. Two added bonuses of the narrow tail are 1) that these nose lifting turns are made easier to initiate with a narrow tail due to lower rail to rail resistance, and 2) that the turns can be done in steep parts of the wave because the narrow tail holds in to the wave better.


Once again we have a surfing problem which is cured entirely by avoiding the ice cream stick parallel railed wide tailed noseriding longboard shape. . . it really is the root of many surfboard evils.

Welcome to surfing hard times #1

Hearing stories of limp wristed surf industry guys topping themselves due to lack of sales reminded my of the time honoured tradition of hanging tough.

Well we did it tougher than any of you, and your worst stories are a 5 star hotel holiday compared with ours !

I recall living on a flood prone riverfront boatramp carpark in an illegal immobile bus for 8 months with a family of ten including three dogs, using a hole in the ground for a toilet and a bath with a fire under it for washing ourselves and clothes, being flooded out at night 3 times during big storms, and having a child born in the bus by candlelight on a night when we were flooded out . . . but surfing nearly every day and getting some of the best waves of our lives.

That was a good year!


Here's the Kaituna river boatramp camp on a nice summer's day, in winter when the river flooded, cars would be washed away from this tidal area :





.The title of this post is stolen by way of a tribute to wooden boat builder Dean Stephens

Concave 'spoon' decks in surfboards

There's a lot of talk lately about surfboards with 'S' decks, step decks, concave decks and other deck shapes.

Concave decks come in two varieties: Fore and aft concave and athwartships concave. Some surfboards are concave in both axes, for example the late model Greenough spoons.


The main advantage of a concave deck is that for a given surfboard volume, it makes the board thinner in the riding area, this lowers the centre of gravity and the centre of effort of the surfboard and rider, and keeps the surfer's feet closer to the bottom area, which improves handling and control.



Decks which are concaved in the fore and aft direction make the board tend towards a parallel profile, this also increases the flexibility of the board:



By using a parallel profile we get the maximum possible fore and aft concave:

Here the plank lines reveal the concave:


.

13 footer Hawaii Challenge update

Well the board has been with a 'repair guy ' on Oahu for over three weeks waiting for the fin installation, in total that is now 7 weeks it has taken for a one hour fin installation job to not get done, in spite of frequent promises from the voluntary caretaker of the board, including messages saying that the fin was installed and that it was all teed up for Garrett to ride the board with 20 minutes notice on the next swell, and then the next one, and the next one. .. .. for example that Garrett was going to ride the board the 'day before' at pipeline but there was a boogie board contest on. . .. in fact all the time Garrett or the caretaker didn't even have the board and it had no fin.

More BS and misinformation, undoubtedly conducted from 'on high', and always signed 'With Aloha' . . . yeah right.

I worked hard out to make the new fin and send it to Hawaii, had it there 5 days after the first one was lost via express courier, 7 weeks later it still isn't installed, and it's only a one hour job !

We have pulled the pin on the whole deal, as I don't like being lied to.

Our experience has been that the board tour is all good and the board is well liked with regular surfers . . . . until the board gets anywhere near surf industry people, then it turns to sh*t. .. same deal in NZ.