I’ve had 4 surfs on my new 5′ 10″ twin fin hydrofoil from tomosurfboards.com and I’m already pretty happy and can’t wait to get out on it again. I must admit the first surf I had on it left me scratching my head, thinking what have I got myself into! A little converse with Tomo via email and I had an adjusted approach to the board, which made a huge difference.
The difference between the board I was surfing and the new stick was massive; the old board, I had really dialled in, I didn’t have to think about what I was doing, or where I was positioned on the board. I could go where I wanted to and do what I wanted on a wave. If it didn’t quite come off as expected, I could adjust mid motion, most of the time carrying on down the line with limited interruption to proceedings.
The new twinnie had other ideas and I think exposed flaws, and a lot of wasted energy in my surfing. Maybe they are things you need to do on a thruster to make it boogie? I couldn’t say for sure, one thing I know is I wasn’t as smooth with my energy application as I’d like to believe.
I’m almost learning to surf again, still feeling my way with the board and finding out what it does best. It is a far more refined and finely tuned machine at the very least, so I do expect a greater level of difficulty to match it’s higher performance potential. Getting your feet in the right position, most importantly your back foot, seems fairly critical and something that Tomo pointed out when I was a bit lost. Try to ride it with your back foot in front of the fins, and welcome to weird town, drifty, slidey, strange. Get it (your back foot) in the right place and bang, away you go, hence the tail pad.
I’ve surfed it in varying conditions from 1 foot slop to 3 foot clean offshore down the line waves. I’ve not found any holes in it’s potential yet. I have had good rides on one foot waves, the board gets up and plains fairly easily when there is any shape to the wave, and copes fairly well with flat spots in questionable conditions. I’ll be a better judge of “small garbage wave” performance in the longer term, but at this stage it is looking like a one board quiver. Biggest wave surfed to date would be around 4 foot (back) so head high at least, and it seem to hold in harder off the bottom the faster and more powerful the wave.
It paddles and catches waves easily (for a short board). On first getting my hands on the board this was an area of concern, as it presents as a fairly small board, with very refined rails and no great volume of foam anywhere obvious within it’s construction. The flat rocker and large planning area helps in 2 ways; the rocker doesn’t push much water whilst paddling, being so flat, and the large planning area, mainly due to the wide tail and slightly fishy nose, provides the foam volume to float me.
It’s fast! I’ve made sections of waves that I am sure I wouldn’t have on my previous board, generating a lot of speed and quickly, with little input beyond fine trimming. A strange but delightful feeling coming off a thruster that requires decent physical input to reach terminal speed.
The board carves beautiful drawn out turns; as specified by Tomo, put it on rail with some speed and it’s a joy, and not that hard to achieve. This was another point of concern ticking away in the back of my mind; all the theory in the world and examples of pro surfers pulling nice turns is of little help if you run out of ability before hitting the mark. Not so, an absolute joy to pull a nice drawn out cutback on. So much that I’ve found myself floundering back in the pocket, looking for speed in post cutback euphoria. I need to work on that last 10% of the cutback as getting back into the section has been a little tricky but a small adjustment should get me there.
Very much looking forward and not back at this stage.