A quick tale of my history in fins.

I’ve recently found one of my earliest boards, one of the first 100 I shaped. The board is a Klemm Bell. I had to have a good think about that board... it was shaped in 74 after I got back home from Hawaii off a Reno 7 3... so the fin was a Reno... not Donny Alcroft as I originally thought!

From that trip to Hawaii I brought back some Barry Kanaiaupuni boards - in fact two - a 7’6 and an 8’3” which Wayne (Lynch) loved, and three Reno Abeliira’s I’d fallen in love with - 8’6”, 7’10” and 7’2”. We noted the fins - single of course, and worked the Reno’s (maybe a Brewer style) and the BK’s into a mashup. This became the fin in the busted Tinkler tail board - one of the best boards I ever rode. It was incredible, the best bottom turns I’ve ever done at Bells, but I kept breaking them. At the end of the wave I was going so fast they couldn't handle the Torque and torsion. The tail couldn’t take my turns and broke as I was coming off the bottom one day. But the fin was insane. That really powered up combination of the two fin templates I’d brought back from Hawaii.

So we started to use variations of these on both small boards and guns.

Now, all these years later, with so much interest in the resurrection of single fin riding, we have tested the old fins in new designs and still the same performance......these same templates have been translated into my two plus one boards, and singles, when I use them. And they’ve also been influential in the development of my twin templates, as seen in the yellow late seventies/early eighties twin, and my later new collaboration wide bottom/wide tip fin with Naked Viking.

That wide bottom, wide tip theme has been part of my fins since way back - mostly as I’m a chunky monkey, but they do translate, with a little tweaking, to lighter surfers too…

Image: Tom Servais

The fins on the Tom Curren Cutback board are based on a set of fins that were originally in the board, my template, but they were a bit too much for TC. So he came in one day after a surf, still in his wetsuit, and sanded the fins down on the spot - to this.

That template to this day has formed the basis of my range of thruster and quad fins out of Naked Viking - in a 4.8 and 4.5 - in state of the art G10 material - and perfect foils. I’ve used combinations of that fin template , with flat foils, and 70/30 foils from Shortboards to GonadGuns/Tow boards, all with incredible success. There is nowhere to hide performance on tow boards as we test the fins at double the speed of paddle surfing...my years of F1 testing with RCJ!

Of course the old fossil has a lot of new stuff on the way, and a couple of ideas I will roll out in the next 6 mths as I get back on the road O/S , with the most comprehensive new fresh designs and fins that go with the RV series! I’m now off to Noosa for a week of logging and shaping, and of course, I’m always thinking and learning.

See you soon.