Injuries suck. Long periods spent out of the water for someone who makes surfboards everyday of their lives is a real special type of torture. After half a dozen months or so, it starts to build to the point where you are so hyper focussed on what you are going to ride once you enter the water again, that it almost becomes meditational. The thinking, the analysing, the wanting, the needing, knowing the feeling you want on a wave when you finally do feel that rush of water beneath the feet again. You know the one, the wave has just started to pick you up and push you forward, you are just about to spring to your feet, there’s that certain point where you are weightless, a sort of zero gravity experience. That’s the part I miss the most, that’s the part that I think everybody gets hooked on when they finally catch their first ever waves and become hooked on surfing. That’s what I am looking forward to.

I recently read a fantastic article in The Surfers Journal penned by Ethan Stewart, that really resonated with my current headspace. 

“In the end, how it looks matters little compared to the feel of the ocean underneath you, the lift of a wave, and the quanta of trim. Make no mistake, the reason you first fell in love with surfing is, without exception, the reason why you still love it today. The trick, as they say, is coming to terms with this truth and eventually letting go of everything else. Manage to pull this off, and you will realise quickly that surfing remains just as rapturous and cathartic as ever. Perhaps even more so.”

We had been fielding requests from customers wanting 8 foot Nuevo’s with wider nose and tail widths, the ones we had been previously making had quite a pulled in nose and tail, as that was the original idea for the board at longer lengths, made to be surfed in better waves. But, of course people have started entering the realm of riding 8 footers again lately, something which tends to come around every half decade or so. I love 8 footers, it’s been my somewhat go-to length of board ever since I was a grom. Paddle like a longboard, turn like a much shorter board, especially when you’re 6’2″ and 85kgs.

So, my mind wandered immediately to wanting to update the Nuevo’s for the 8 foot and possibly longer lengths, wider nose and tail areas, obviously a slight increase in rocker with the majority of this change coming for the entry. In my mind, this type of board would serve me well with stability, good paddle speed, and being agile enough off the tail not to have to push too hard through turns and further aggravate my injury.

Hutcho is always pumped to delve further into designs, listening to my feedback and what I think could be changed to further extract a touch more juice from the orange, so to speak. He loves building on past designs and is constantly trying to tidy up planshapes, rail rocker lines, and the general flow of any design we do. There will quite often be multiple attempts at certain things before we become content with where it sits, although quite often perfection is achieved on the very first attempt, that’s how good our communicating and shaping relationship is and has always been. Must be something to do with both being Sagittarius LOL.

We are both very happy with where this first iteration sits, albeit realising that it’s probably geared again towards better waves and a more intense, involvement style of surfing. I had decided to make this first one a pure quad fin, as that’s all I had been riding over the past few years, already knowing it would work fantastically as a single fin or with side bites. It’s good to get a feel for something with a completely different fin setup sometimes and work backwards to a more simplified approach, or maybe that’s just me being a sicko and wanting to be challenged immediately.

Keeping the same bottom shape as all original Nuevo’s have, rolled entry blending into a Vee bottom out the tail, with concaves sitting either side of the Vee to help achieve lift as soon as you’re up and riding. These things will help with familiarity of most of our modern mid-length designs, so you can change between boards easily, and not have to spend a couple of sessions finding your bearings again. There are quite a few other things at play here as well but that’s the beauty of your shaper having spent 60 years working on his skills, he/she should have formed a certain style of shaping over that time and even designs that are completely different from one another should be able to be switched between and ridden with minimal effort. Surfing is actually supposed to be simple, I’ll never forget Uncle Donald telling me this when I was 19 years old. He said that your board should be working with you, not against you, and help get you to places on a wave that you want to go. I feel like a lot of people forget this and trying to make things way too hard for themselves. Maybe they don’t realise it’s even happening, but I can guarantee once you get on a board shaped by a Jedi level shaper, you will appreciate just how good they are at what they do.