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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Blane Chambers of Paddle Surf Hawaii (Part 2 of 3) |
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By: Stand Up Paddle Surfing Magazine
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Friday, 28 December 2007 |
- Board Design - What Blane Rides - The Winter Stick -
SUPSURFMAG:The photos don't lie. We see your guys getting barrelled at Pipe, etc...Without giving away trade secrets, tell us little about board design? Are you pulling your shapes from schools of longboards, tandems, shortboards, or something else?
BLANE:I started off shaping the boards like bigger longboards. They sucked. I hated the way they surfed so stiff and slow. I evolved into things by surfing my prototypes daily. I have a lot of things in my designs now that are so far away from longboards, shortboards, other shapers SUP boards etc. Maybe a little bits of this and that but mostly a blend of what we know gets good results. Rockers, foils, thickness distribution, outlines are all key elements that need to blend together to make a board work a certain way AND STILL BE A STABLE PADDLER.
Biggest mistake shapers that do not SUP surf themselves make, is they cannot blend the 2 most important things. Stability and surfability. They either get one or the other and sometimes neither. A good SUP board must be a stable, efficient paddler. What good is it if you cannot stand on it? Heck if surfing was the only important factor then I’d be SUP surfing on a 5’-10” shortboard. On the other hand, its no fun to surf a stiff, poor handling design… Nice paddler and great surfer… Our focus is on the best of both worlds. I find it amusing when a shaper who has never done SUP feels the need to give advice on designs.
END PART 2 OF 3
SUPSURFMAG:On a personal note, everyone always wonders what the shaper is riding. What are you riding these days?
BLANE:I ride a variety of boards. I like to test things out all the time. In the last 2 weeks I rode a 12’ downwind board, a 10’-3” pop out, a 10’ production hand glassed glider, a 9’-1” Ripper, a 9’-6” Ripper and a 10’ Gun. We have so many different designs and I’ve ridden all of them. I have hundreds of files and templates for SUP boards. I know how every board feels because of the testing process we do… I like testing them. I have my favorites.
SUPSURFMAG:And if you had to pull one board off the rack to ride all winter, what would it be? Why?
BLANE:This is a tough one to answer. I love so many types of boards but if I had to choose, it would be one of my Ripper models. I’m 175 lbs and those boards work insane. By far the fastest, most rippable designs I ever made. You can ride them in tiny waves to. I don’t even know how big they would work up to. Bigger than I would go out for sure. They’re so fast. You can pump them in the barrel and do such clean snaps. Mellow waves, hollow waves, whatever. They even nose ride pretty decent. These boards are versatile and every time I ride one I have at least one wave where I think wow, I’ve never done that before.
END PART 2 OF 3
www.paddlesurfhawaii.com
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